Recently, I’ve been thinking about cultural cycles—what trends and tastes repeat themselves or update themselves after a few years.
Sexy young vampires are a great example: That shudder-worthy new Twilight film, New Moon, opens this week; the first Twilight film came out only months after Alan Ball’s "True Blood" premiered on HBO. But Twilight and "TB" arrive almost exactly 10 years after "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" apeared on network TV, and "Buffy" premiered 10 years after Lost Boys. That’s a rough average of a sexy vampire every 10 years! (Not counting Interview with the Vampire or the Buffy movie.)
And then there are dance fads. Courtesy of Billy Hunt and Gene Osborn, here’s a video of Charlottesville High School students "jerking."
Not to be confused with this or this. The video is for a CHS dance competition to be held during Black History Month.
Amazingly (and yet somehow not surprisingly), Wikipedia has a list of novelty and fad dances—which includes the ’60s dance titled "the jerk." Most are tied to songs ("The Twist") or videos ("Macarena," anyone?) that either embrace or manufacture the trend; Jeff Weiss explained jerking’s origins in LA Weekly.
I’m out of my element writing about the frequency and recurrence of dance fads. (Also, I’ve been thinking about vampires too much recently.) Instead, you tell me: What cultural fads made a splash in Charlottesville? Hammer pants? "The Loco-Motion"? Leave your comments below.
And, for fun, here are a couple more dance fad videos from recent history: