Ice-skating is my #1 exercise activity. I don’t play hockey, and I’m not a figure skater—I just do freestyle on hockey-skates. (Not the free-style tricks, though.) Back when we lived in Newport News some rink-kid taught me how to skate backwards (the key tip was: “you swivel your heels the same way you do when you swing a baseball bat”) and I just got totally hooked. Now we’re in Utah, and thank God for American federalism and localism, Provo kept its rink open through most the Covid-times—we were back on the ice by May of 2020! In most places elsewhere lockdowns closed so many rinks for so long that many ice-skaters adopted roller or in-line skating to keep in shape.
When your body is in regularized movement, you hear music differently than at other times. And different kinds of those movements naturally elicit different rhythmic cravings—a lot of the songs I list below have shuffle-like rhythms which fit with the swaying pattern skating throws your body into. A number of them, when I’m playing them at home or on a drive, don’t feel as special as when I’m on the ice, and several of them wouldn’t be my preferred songs at a party or on regular dance floor, where my tastes run more in the direction of bluesy roots-music, swing, etc.
1) “Skating,” Vince Guaraldi
It feels obligatory to mention this one, as it points back to a whole number of classical pieces, and a select number of jazz-counterpoints, that fit the movements of elegant figure-skating, and those of any free-style inspired by it. Play it alongside that delightful scene in The Bishop’s Wife (a film discussed by Titus here), cue it up for the figure-skating competitions. And play it for me sometimes too, but…usually, when at the rink, I’m wanting a different kind of groove…
2) “Everybody Dance,” Chic
I’m often wanting soul, funk, and disco. Classic 70s disco not only has the funk-drive, and the string-section drama, but it often has a kind of smoothness that fits the gliding steps you need. I have lots of rockabilly, swing, and bluesy music on my device, and some of it works pretty well, but whenever I skate, I find I keep gravitating to stuff like this. From the soundtrack to Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco, or any number of Chic collections.
3) “Ba Ba Boom,” The Jamaicans
People get read-dy, it’s time to rock-steady. It’s Ba-ba-boom-time, this year. A call into one of the happiest groves I know.
Even before I got skating regularly, rocksteady was a favorite style-genre. I love the (perhaps-mythical) story of its origins—they say it emerged out of ska, a very fast-paced music, because the summer of ’65 was such a scorcher in Jamaica that the dancers needed something slower to move to. And wow can it get slow, but in a way that still keeps you movin’, and as it turns out, in a way perfectly suited to ice-skating. This is also where the Jamaican obsession with the electric bass, which wound up influencing so much of popular music, got going. Rocksteady’s a bit like reggae—which was developing out of it by ‘67, but is usually slower, more echoey, closer to certain American soul sounds, and mercifully free of the ganja-vibes that make some reggae tiresome.
4) “High Fashion Dub,” Studio One Dub (produced by Sylvan Morris and Coxsone Dodd)
But sometimes, you want the extra-oomph and greater rhythmic complexity that the best reggae can give you, and it’s often tastiest when its producer-transmuted into the genre called dub. This is simply the most-infectious track of an amazing collection put together by the Soul-Jazz label.
5) “Stayin’ Alive,” Bee Gees
On the floor and the rink, it always sucks you in. “Night Fever” is probably the more solid of their top disco hits, but I have a soft-spot one for this one, as it was the first pop-song that knocked me out as a kid.
6) “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson, featuring Bruno Mars
Half the time on the rink, I’m listening not to my own selections, but to what the sound-system is playing. Outside of the (hard-to-take) Christmas-music season, they’re usually playing the standard ultra-produced disco-ey pop hits of our times. Some of it gets awful—I’m sure some dude somewhere has strangled his girlfriend after having heard “Shake It Off” for the umpteenth time, or has shot himself after having been subjected once again to “Radioactive.” There’s a few exceptions, though, where you fully get why they’re hits, and better understand why they are, by being on the ice when you hear them: examples for me include Big Mucci’s “Biker’s Shuffle,” Justin Timberlake’s “Suit and Tie,” Lorde’s “Royals,” Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop,” and this number. It certainly has been way overplayed, but the bottom line is: it works, every stinkin’ time!
7) “Ride with Me,” Aaron Frazer
Lest this list get too charitable to the mainstream, let me mention the outstanding hipster/revivalist soul/funk release of 2021, the debut album by Aaron Frazer. Frazer got famous for being the falsetto-man with Durand Jones & The Indications—they also had a release in 2021, a less-stellar but nonetheless very solid classic-disco LP, Private Space, on which Frazer is also prominently featured. Anyhow, Introducing is perhaps the best soul-revival record out there, bringing out all the strengths of Dan Auerbach’s amazing studio crew at Easy-Eye; if you like the types of dance-music I’m featuring in this list, you’d be a fool not to dig into Frazer.
8) “There’s Nothing Left to Say,” The Incredibles
Northern Soul, as ably discussed in Simon Reynold’s Retromania, was after Dixieland Jazz and the 50s/60s folk-movement, popular music’s first openly revivalist scene and style, and unlike them, one developed entirely by dj curation of older records. It is a function of a number of late-60s-to-early-70s clubs in Northern England, such as Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, simply not being taken with the 60s white rock boom, and a bit meh toward the new funk sounds coming out of black America. So on one hand, they just stuck with the classic Motown-dominated soul sound of the mid-60s, but on the other hand, as their djs scoured the stacks for overlooked discs that fit this style, but which would nonetheless be new to their club-patrons, they began selecting for soul songs that were more on the faster side. In a sense, they isolated one stylistic aspect or possibility of the soul genre, and just ran with it, such that it became labelled Northern Soul. This was also due, I’d guess, to their patrons developing certain of their own (impressive!) set of dance patterns that favored quicker beats.
There’s an enjoyable movie about the genre and its working-class origins, and one of the better collections of the Northern Soul sound is The Northern Soul Story, Vol 1: The Twisted Wheel. It contains a number of songs that’ll knock you out on first hearing, such as Major Lance’s “It’s the Beat,” Sandi Sheldon’s, “You’re Going to Make Me Love You,” and Moses & Joshua Dillard’s “My Elusive Dreams,” but it also has this, a song that, for me, at least, took about ten spins before it clicked--but which ever since has had an iron hold every time I play it, and especially when on the ice.
9) Il Carbonaro, “High Noon”
Colemine records is one the major labels today for artists doing soul, funk, and Caribbean-influenced music in a revival-esque mode. (For more on this movement, see my list of favorite millennial-gen groups.) They label this band’s style “Spaghetti-Western-dub-funk!” Sounds about right, and there’s many more rich sounds of classic soul, disco, funk-jazz, and mixed-genre being done by contemporary groups on this Colemine Singles collection.
10) “El Pussycat Ska,” Roland Alphonso
Some of you will know the 1980s version by ska-revival group Bad Manners with more up-to-date production values, but as I have that one on my device too, I’m telling you, the old lo-fi original has a certain something about it that can’t be topped. Meeooww!
11) “Decimal Currency,” The Blenders
A prominent use of the kind of organ sounds one associates with the old skating rinks in a killer rock-steady (or early-reggae?) instrumental. In terms of sheer skate-ability, probably my very favorite here.
12) “Bounce, Rock, Skate,” Vaughan Mason & Crew
But listen—maybe my list is too likely to lead you into ice-skating, because a couple of years ago, after I saw this 1980s-era video, and some of the amazing ones from the present Skate-Lyfe yt channel, I thought, “Maybe I took the wrong path—maybe roller-skating would have been the better way to go!” For there can be no doubt that, in terms of a free-style that has more of the dance in it, the roller-skaters are superior, and especially the ones coming out of the now-60-or-so-year-old tradition of Afro-American skating. There is a network of rinks, many of them black-owned, across American that cater to those who have kept this tradition alive, which seems to have had a big resurgence over the last five-years (“Skate out of Quarantine” was a slogan adopted). This video shows its previous apex of strength, during and just after the disco era, but it never went away, and is being newly appreciated. With the encouragement of better camera-techniques, some amazing new moves and tricks are being tried, and the overall magic of the scene is being documented. So I’ll cheat with number 12 here, and give you a second video, from the rink which is in some ways the headquarters, the Cascade in Atlanta. One of the positive things going on in 20s America.
SkateLyfeTV has much more of similar quality and addictiveness. (Second-best is this one from Houston, due to the fine B-Dash remix of an old Stylistics tune.) Now I could have also embedded impressive videos that highlight various ice-skate freestyler moves and tricks, but trust me, overall they essentially look primitive compared to those who have mastered one of the Afro-American roller-skate styles (there are signficant regional distinctives). Much of that difference is no-doubt due to technical limitations that come with blades as opposed to wheels, but of course it also has to do with the age-old strength of Afro-American dance culture.
Sports that have significant fluid-movement aspects have great mental health benefits. Skiing, skating, skateboarding, snowboarding, and biking (particularly downhill mountain biking). And several others. Even motorcycle and side by side trail riding. Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about it a bit but there are many lay people that discuss this on social media, even if they can’t articulate any science behind it. Ties into EDMR therapy. Physical activity, combined with horizontal eye movement. Very beneficial for the brain and body.
great stuff, thanks. you probably know this https://menahanstreetband.bandcamp.com/album/the-exciting-sounds-of-menahan-street-band