So it has come to this – mankind’s endless quest to discover what lies beyond the bottom of the barrel has given us ‘twerking’. Never again will we be forced to ‘flash mob’, go ‘planking’ or perform the Harlem Shake because now we have something even stupider to do. Yes, it seems the fickle finger of fate is both pointed skywards and surrounded by two other fingers on either side as the letters ‘I’ and ‘Q’ are officially removed from the alphabet, pending a review.
So it has come to this – mankind’s endless quest to discover what lies beyond the bottom of the barrel has given us ‘twerking’. Never again will we be forced to ‘flash mob’, go ‘planking’ or perform the Harlem Shake because now we have something even stupider to do. Yes, it seems the fickle finger of fate is both pointed skywards and surrounded by two other fingers on either side as the letters ‘I’ and ‘Q’ are officially removed from the alphabet, pending a review.
Where did it all go wrong? I’ve nothing against dancing. Indeed, I’m one of the few people I know who owns a copy of ‘Footloose’ on both VHS and Betamax. If that doesn’t sound convincing, you should know that I frequently wear leg warmers to work on days other than casual Friday and take the notion of cutting the rug so seriously that I never go anywhere without scissors. But despite my passion for dancing, I cannot abide the appalling social phenomenon that is to ‘twerk.’
That said, at least the name is apt. One thing I love about dancing is that the moves are often appropriately named. ‘The Twist’ is exactly as it sounds. So too ‘the Jerk’. Sure, things start to get a little hazy around ‘the Bus Stop’ and the less said about ‘the Mashed Potato’ the better, but no system is infallible. However, for all the controversy it attracts, we can at least say that ‘twerking’ is the perfect name, because anyone doing it looks like a complete and utter twerk.
Apparently, twerking has taken social media by storm. By ‘storm’ I don’t mean a few drops of rain and a puff of breeze but, rather, the kind of deluge that destroys umbrellas and ruins your guttering. Many people have been quick to point the big foam finger in the direction of Miley Cyrus, but those people are simply twerks-come-lately who don’t understand the complex history of twerking. To grasp this most heinous of phenomena, it’s necessary to go right back to the beginning.
For those unfamiliar with this particular dance style, let me come right out and say it’s a long way from the foxtrot. It is, however, probably the biggest dance phenomenon we’ve seen since Peter Andre’s Funky Junky swept across Melbourne’s South Eastern suburbs in 1993. To ‘twerk’ involves a dancer moving his or her hips in a vigorous motion in order to cause their buttocks to wobble like a plate of day-old jelly. Granted, right now it looks somewhat shocking, but in fifty years time, couples will be twerking at their weddings.
The earliest recorded twerk was in June 1776, when noted polymath Benjamin Franklin first performed the controversial dance during a break from drafting the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson was heard to remark at the time, ‘Some things, once seen, can never be unseen.’ Indeed, a fear that Ben Franklin might have a couple of sherries and twerk some more helped ensure the Declaration remained a relatively concise document.
Naturally enough, the practice had spread to Europe by the early nineteenth century. Mostly it was act performed in the dingiest and most squalid of public houses, where liquor ran freely and buttocks shook into the small hours. For that reason, it remained something of an underground movement until in 1838 it threatened to break in to the broader public consciousness. The original draft of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens had the eponymous hero’s request for ‘more’ greeted with a severe outbreak of twerking by Mr. Bumble. Thankfully, the scene was excised from the novel and the dance remained largely unknown.
Sadly, not everyone showed as much restraint as Charles Dickens. Steadily, twerking garnered public acceptance until, last century, it officially entered the mainstream. In 1951, Melbourne’s first Moomba Festival contained a twerking competition until it was replaced by the Birdman Rally in 1965. It was also the official exhibition sport at the Helsinki Olympic Games in 1952 (with Liechtenstein beating out traditional rivals, Freedonia for the gold medal) and used by Henry Kissinger to clear the room during a particularly testy negotiation with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972. After that particularly fraught exchange, things went kind of quiet on the twerking front. Until now.
Life’s a funny old thing. It’s strange to watch a young woman – whose father inflicted ‘boot scooting’ on the world courtesy of the crime against music and spelling that was ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ – embrace twerking so fulsomely. Mostly it’s a shame to see anyone who can actually dance choose to dance like that. More disturbing still is the sight of a prime ministerial aspirant (regardless of how deeply misplaced that aspiration might be) decide that the best way to connect with ‘the kids’ is to sacrifice any notion of dignity and ‘twerk’. Granted, the act occurred on radio, which was probably the perfect medium. Still, if Thomas Jefferson was still with us he would, doubtless, shake his head in despair and most definitely not his buttocks. I hate to say it, but I almost miss planking. It seems intellectual by comparison. Come back Harlem Shake, all is forgiven.