Sex and Dance and ProgRock '

I've always had an underlying love for soul music, I can remember at the age of about ten hearing Roadrunner by Junior Walker and the All-stars, or I Heard it Through the Grapevine by Marvin Gaye and thinking they were the best thing I'd ever heard. Terms like black music are even worse than pigeonholes like jazz. Your culture is the thing not your skin pigmentation. Continuing with the cultural theme, here is an observation from my teenage years which suggests that musical tastes were once linked to the old 11 plus exam. I passed, but my sister didn't so I had a direct comparison at first hand. Those of us who were supposedly more intelligent (huh!) looked for something musically sophisticated and lyrically meaningful, or so we thought. Actually we were probably being pretentious fools most of the time, or am I too harsh? Those who fell the wrong side of the 11 plus benchmark seemed to go for soul music or chart stuff, in theory the heart rather than the head, something more organic, something you could dance to.

I remember my sister (pictured with me circa early 1976) being very sneering about grammar school rock, and telling me about boys at her school who would go to all nighters at Wigan Casino. I don't think many people at her school wrote the titles of Yes songs on the cover of their exercise books. If they had they would probably have met some unpleasant fate, usually in the toilets. Now grammar schools are a thing of the past I wonder if the demarcation is quite so clear. Of course it may be nothing to do with so called intelligence and more to do with sex. How often do things end up at groin level? My two areas of comparison were a boys' grammar school and a mixed secondary school. Would we have bothered so much about 9/8 time signatures and extended organ solos if there had been lots of girls around? Maybe not, it's an interesting thought.

Up until the early 80s dance music usually had a song attached to it, but since the advent of the extended mix, rave culture and techno I've found the music less attractive. It seems to have little soul and is often endlessly mechanical. I wouldn't put it on to listen at home, whereas any amount of say Motown from the 60s is perfectly acceptable on either turntable or dancefloor.