The Lunacy We Played at Early ’90s Middle School Dances

There was apparently one rule for choosing music at middle-school dances between 1989 and 1992: if a song didn’t have an obvious swear word, the adults stopped listening.

That was the entire screening process.

It didn’t matter what the song was actually about. It didn’t matter if the title announced its intentions before the first note. It didn’t matter if the chorus was openly describing sex to a gym full of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. If it was a mainstream radio hit with a good beat and somebody had located the clean version, the school considered its work complete.

I wasn’t one of the cool kids at these dances. I rarely danced, and I probably spent about 75% of the night in the hallway with the other outcasts. We weren’t doing drugs, plotting crimes or exploring the mysteries of the opposite sex.

We were running at the wall. Yes I understand how that reads. We did it.

Repeatedly.

The cool kids were allowed to dance to songs about sex while the rest of us were left unsupervised in a hallway to repeatedly attack the school building.

I wasn’t out there the entire time, and it wasn’t like the music became quieter once you left the gym. You could hear everything. The songs were loud enough to shake the hallway, so we received the same wildly inappropriate soundtrack without having to participate in whatever passed for dancing in 1991.

A certain friend of mine stayed inside the gym doing what I can only remember and describe as jump dancing. There weren’t any recognizable moves involved. He mostly kept leaving the ground somewhere near the beat.

He later became a DJ and still works in music, so maybe he knew something the rest of us didn’t. Perhaps repeatedly achieving brief flight during “O.P.P.” was legitimate professional training.

My own hallway experience was less productive. At one dance, a distant cousin walked up and asked me, “Who’s got the beef?” I answered, “Wendy’s.” He punched me. Then roughly twenty years later, he sang at my grandfather’s funeral, which is a bizarrely long character arc for the asshole from a middle-school dance.

Meanwhile, inside the gym, the adults were approving songs that should’ve required considerably more discussion than my Wendy’s answer.

The Humpty Dance

“The Humpty Dance” by Digital Underground was goofy enough that the adults probably heard the voice, saw the fake nose and decided it was harmless. It was funny, catchy and everywhere, which apparently qualified it as appropriate for middle school.

It also wasn’t subtle. Still played it at my wedding reception!

Humpty Hump spent the song celebrating sexual confidence, questionable decision-making and doing whatever the hell Humpty Hump wanted. The radio played it, everybody knew it and the beat filled the gym. No further investigation was required.

Bell Biv DeVoe’s Double Shot

Bell Biv DeVoe somehow got a double shot at the same dance with both “Do Me!” and “Poison.”

Let’s start with “Do Me!” because the title really should’ve saved everyone some time. There wasn’t a hidden meaning to uncover. Nobody needed to consult the lyric sheet or sit through a media-literacy seminar.

The song was called “Do Me!”

Then came “smack it up, flip it, rub it down, oh no!” which was apparently acceptable guidance for a middle-school dance floor as long as nobody added a swear word. What were we supposed to rub and smack? I found out eventually.

“Poison” was even more insane, and reducing it to “never trust a big butt and a smile” lets everybody involved off far too easily. That line was practically innocent compared with the eventual revelation that the girl had been through the entire crew.

That was playing at a middle-school dance.

Not at a nightclub. Not at somebody’s house while their parents were away. At a school event with adult chaperones standing against the wall pretending they were monitoring the situation.

I Wanna Sex You Up

Then Color Me Badd arrived with “I Wanna Sex You Up,” a song whose hidden meaning remains one of history’s great unsolved mysteries.

Maybe the adults thought the title was metaphorical. Perhaps “sex you up” referred to some new slang like "Sick" and "gnarly". It was the early ’90s. Educational standards were different.

O.P.P.

Naughty by Nature’s “O.P.P.” might’ve been the greatest example of adults hearing a catchy chorus and refusing to ask any follow-up questions.

Everybody could chant along. Everybody should’ve known what the initials meant. But the song even gave adults enough vague language to pretend they didn’t understand what was happening. They understood. They knew.

But it had a great beat, it was on mainstream radio and the clean version didn’t immediately burst into flames when placed near children, so onto the dance playlist it went.

Baby Got Back

Then there was “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot, which arrived in 1992 and treated subtlety like a personal enemy. The song became enormous, which meant schools apparently surrendered immediately. Every adult in the building knew what it was about. There was no coded language, no clever disguise and no possibility that anyone had misunderstood the title, but they played it anyway.

That was the lunacy of early ’90s middle-school dances. The songs didn’t need much profanity because the sexual content was sitting right there in the titles, choruses and verses. The adults weren’t screening meaning. They were screening individual words. If the forbidden words were missing, everything else passed inspection.

The music hasn’t gotten any more appropriate. In a lot of cases, it’s worse. Schools have just gotten better at pretending adults should know what the songs are actually about. Parenting, naturally, remains a separate disaster.

Then I Became the Adult With the Playlist

Years later, I somehow became the adult controlling the music at Mormon church dances and immediately abused that authority in a completely different direction. It was a full 360 back to dances, but a hard 180 in material.

I couldn’t play songs with sex, swearing or violent lyrics, but nobody said the music had to be polite. After the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident, I played Janet Jackson because fuck them. “Feel It Boy,” her song with Beenie Man, got people dancing. I even worked in Rage Against the Machine. Most importantly, I found songs that shook those kids right down to their Mormon undies.

The requests for “The Lady in Red” were absurd. This was 2003 and 2004. These thirteen-year-olds hadn’t even been alive when that song was remotely relevant, but they demanded it like Chris de Burgh had just released the defining anthem of their generation.

I guess it was appropriate, it played at every dance. Except mine. They wanted “The Lady in Red.” I gave them BT’s “Smartbomb.” I had finally become the adult with authority over the dance playlist, and I did my best to change the way they felt about music. It was the least I could do.

They were thirteen years old and demanding “The Lady in Red.” What the fuck was I supposed to do, play it?