You don’t have to dance if you don’t want to (The Faint’s Todd Fink on the politics of dancing)…

Category: Blog,Interviews — Tags: , , , — @ 12:50 pm September 13, 2011

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

I received some lively feedback (mostly on my Facebook page) from yesterday’s blog entry regarding House of Loom and Depressed Buttons, which made me want to share the following from last week’s interview with Todd Fink and Jacob Thiele that didn’t make it into the column due to space constraints.

I asked Todd and Jacob if people need to dance to enjoy Depressed Buttons’ music. Todd provided this rather profound response that cuts at the heart of people’s apprehension to dance in public:

“I just acquired a small couch or loveseat for the studio of my home where I just lie and listen to music. I have an awesome sound system in here with a sub woofer so you can make it sound just like a club. I’ll just lie on that thing and play dance music as loud as I can, louder than playing rock music — you can’t listen to rock music that loud because it just turns into noise.

“So no, you don’t have to move your body at all, but it’s physically cathartic, and it’s a good exercise for your ego to dance, even if you think you’re terrible, because you’re saying, ‘I don’t care. I’m getting to know my body enough to know I don’t care what anybody thinks about how I look.’ That’s a hard place to get to. We’re not conditioned to do that automatically. I’m proud of hippies when they dance — they’ve gotten above worrying about their dance moves. It feels good to connect with the rhythm of sound to the larger movements of your body instead of just the inner workings of your brain. I listen to dance music all the time, but I don’t dance all the time.”

There’s a ton more from this interview — including why it took The Faint so long to write and record songs (and the roll of band democracy), lyric writing and future Faint recording projects, what’s happening with Enamel recording studio, and the difference between Goo and Depressed Buttons. It’s all in this week’s column, which goes online (and in print) Thursday.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

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