# "Safety Dance", Men Without Hats
I was a big fan of this band in the 80's. I read a lot on them and saw an interview with the band. If memory serves, this was a time of the birth of thrashing where people began to dance into each other which cause quite a bit of injury. Men Without Hats designed this song with a particular beat that was exactly opposed to the beat needed for the dangerous dance, hence...Safety Dance.
# "Safety Dance", Men Without Hats
The song is about disliking skinheads, who often weren't allowed into clubs (unless they wore hats, hence, Men Without Hats) because of their rowdy and vicious behaviour, including slam dancing (which to new wave/club kids wasn't dancing at all--which was the intention, but that's another story). The line "'cos your friends don't dance, and if they don't dance, then they're no friends of mine" is referring to the skinhead friends of some girl the new-wave-type protagonist of the song is trying to pick up. He wants her to go to a different club with him to dance and get to know her better, put down the pretensions and just have fun, and he's taking a strong stand on how skinheads ruin a club's good time. "Safety Dance" is actually supposed to mean "safe to dance"--a soundalike, like Blondie's "Isle of You", geddit? No threat of getting pummelled on the dance floor if you just take off to another club where the skinheads aren't. I guess you have to have actually been pummelled on a dance floor by some skinheads many, many moons ago to "get" this song.
# "Safety Dance", Men Without Hats
Theorize all you want, the Montreal-based band has said time and again the song is about nuclear war. VH1 Pop-Up videos confirmed this as well. Specifically, the song mocks the theory that nuclear weapons make us safer because of "mutually assured destruction."
# "Safety Dance", Men Without Hats
This song was written during the early 80�s. It was the gay communities still rising worries of aids coming to words in this song. This song had the point, that if You feared aids, You feared life. And . .that if You loved life, You would still act the way as all gays did ! .. The text is very strong in these lines . "We can dance if we want to, We�we got all Your life and mine,As long as we abuse it never going to lose it, Everything will work out right" No doubt about the strong meaning of this song. And plese do not judge the writers of the song, they lived and breathed in the environment of gay people, they were just trying to make a statement, and a powerfull movement in the gay publicity .. Unfortunately .. Nobody took Men Without Hats seriously .. One may wonder why ?
# "Safety Dance", Men without Hats
This is only a guess, but I think this song is a metaphor for safe sex. Even the band's name appears to refer to sex without condoms.
The writer/performer, Ivan Doroschuk, has explained that "The Safety Dance" is a protest against bouncers stopping dancers pogoing to 1980s New Wave music in clubs when Disco was dying and New Wave was up and coming. New Wave dancing, especially pogoing, was different from Disco dancing, because it was done individually instead of with partners and involved holding the torso rigid and thrashing about. To uninformed bystanders this could look dangerous, especially if pogoers accidentally bounced into one another (the more deliberately violent evolution of pogoing is slam dancing). The bouncers didn't like pogoing so they would tell pogoers to stop or be kicked out of the club. Thus, the song is a protest and a call for freedom of expression. It has been claimed that the meaning of the song can be found in similarities between "Safety Dance" and "Safe to dance". Other lyrics in the song include references to the way pogoing looked to bouncers, especially "And you can act real rude and totally removed/And I can act like an imbecile".
Doroschuk denies two common myths about the song. First, it is not a call for safe sex. Doroschuk says that is reading too much into the lyrics. Second, it is not an anti-nuclear protest despite the nuclear imagery at the end of the video. Doroschuk says that he considers Men Without Hats "a punk band with one hit song" and that as such they were "anti- everything".
RemadE
Global Moderator
Comments
I was a big fan of this band in the 80's. I read a lot on them and saw an interview with the band. If memory serves, this was a time of the birth of thrashing where people began to dance into each other which cause quite a bit of injury. Men Without Hats designed this song with a particular beat that was exactly opposed to the beat needed for the dangerous dance, hence...Safety Dance.
# "Safety Dance", Men Without Hats
The song is about disliking skinheads, who often weren't allowed into clubs (unless they wore hats, hence, Men Without Hats) because of their rowdy and vicious behaviour, including slam dancing (which to new wave/club kids wasn't dancing at all--which was the intention, but that's another story). The line "'cos your friends don't dance, and if they don't dance, then they're no friends of mine" is referring to the skinhead friends of some girl the new-wave-type protagonist of the song is trying to pick up. He wants her to go to a different club with him to dance and get to know her better, put down the pretensions and just have fun, and he's taking a strong stand on how skinheads ruin a club's good time. "Safety Dance" is actually supposed to mean "safe to dance"--a soundalike, like Blondie's "Isle of You", geddit? No threat of getting pummelled on the dance floor if you just take off to another club where the skinheads aren't. I guess you have to have actually been pummelled on a dance floor by some skinheads many, many moons ago to "get" this song.
# "Safety Dance", Men Without Hats
Theorize all you want, the Montreal-based band has said time and again the song is about nuclear war. VH1 Pop-Up videos confirmed this as well. Specifically, the song mocks the theory that nuclear weapons make us safer because of "mutually assured destruction."
# "Safety Dance", Men Without Hats
This song was written during the early 80�s. It was the gay communities still rising worries of aids coming to words in this song. This song had the point, that if You feared aids, You feared life. And . .that if You loved life, You would still act the way as all gays did ! .. The text is very strong in these lines . "We can dance if we want to, We�we got all Your life and mine,As long as we abuse it never going to lose it, Everything will work out right" No doubt about the strong meaning of this song. And plese do not judge the writers of the song, they lived and breathed in the environment of gay people, they were just trying to make a statement, and a powerfull movement in the gay publicity .. Unfortunately .. Nobody took Men Without Hats seriously .. One may wonder why ?
# "Safety Dance", Men without Hats
This is only a guess, but I think this song is a metaphor for safe sex. Even the band's name appears to refer to sex without condoms.
http://www.inthe80s.com/whatya.shtml
I still dunno wtf the song is about. At the end it almost sounds like he's saying "it's a safe defense." Odd.
The writer/performer, Ivan Doroschuk, has explained that "The Safety Dance" is a protest against bouncers stopping dancers pogoing to 1980s New Wave music in clubs when Disco was dying and New Wave was up and coming. New Wave dancing, especially pogoing, was different from Disco dancing, because it was done individually instead of with partners and involved holding the torso rigid and thrashing about. To uninformed bystanders this could look dangerous, especially if pogoers accidentally bounced into one another (the more deliberately violent evolution of pogoing is slam dancing). The bouncers didn't like pogoing so they would tell pogoers to stop or be kicked out of the club. Thus, the song is a protest and a call for freedom of expression. It has been claimed that the meaning of the song can be found in similarities between "Safety Dance" and "Safe to dance". Other lyrics in the song include references to the way pogoing looked to bouncers, especially "And you can act real rude and totally removed/And I can act like an imbecile".
Doroschuk denies two common myths about the song. First, it is not a call for safe sex. Doroschuk says that is reading too much into the lyrics. Second, it is not an anti-nuclear protest despite the nuclear imagery at the end of the video. Doroschuk says that he considers Men Without Hats "a punk band with one hit song" and that as such they were "anti- everything".