Roxette - Dangerous
Some people tell these stories about growing up with parents who listened to really good, cool music. Like having moms who smoked secret cigarettes while listening to Patti Smith and dads with Velvet Underground records. This didn’t happen to me when I was growing up. My dad listened to Edith Piaf and Mireille Mathieu. And sometimes Madonna. I knew about Bruce Springsteen because my aunt was insane about him and Born in the USA was still crazy popular when I moved to America. But I had no real awareness of music except through movies, the BMG CD catalogue and my grandmother sending me Swedish CDs for birthdays and Christmas. That is how I found out about Roxette, whose Look Sharp! album displayed a remarkable emotional range to my ten year old ears, from the highs of Dressed for Success to agonies of Listen To Your Heart. Being Swedish, I also felt like they were this great secret and they belonged to me and I clung hard to those kind of things because I guess you have to when you’re the stranger in your environment most of the time. I could hear their awful pronunciations of English words and knew where their tongues were getting stuck because mine caught in the same places sometimes.
What I did know about music was that it was a method of social transformation. Because I was ten years old, my thinking was not in terms of activism and consciousness raising and political projects, but about propelling my social mobility at school. As someone born in 1980, the process of social belonging through music and the possibilities of sudden social mobility were kind of my basic understanding of social structures. This understanding came, of course, entirely from 1980s American teen movies such as She’s Out of Control, Some Kind of Wonderful, Pretty In Pink, Can’t Buy Me Love and Pump Up the Volume (although not released in the 80s) which I suspected were completely accurate representations of how the world worked. Many of these movies were really about why such social transformations betray your true self and that shallow embraces are not sustainable or even desirable and what you really want is something you already have, but those conclusions weren’t very exciting and therefore easily overlooked. To me they were not cautionary tales but promises.
I decided that the music class talent show would be the best way to combine my love for Roxette with my desire for popularity. It was the fourth grade and this single explosive moment would launch me. It would be Patrick Dempsey walking into school with Amanda Peterson. It was the obvious choice. I recruited my friend Meredith and we came up with a lip synch/dance routine for Dangerous. We had routines for many songs, both by Roxette and other seminal artists such as Debbie Gibson, Tiffany and Milli Vanilli, but Dangerous was by far the best and because it was a duet it allowed us both full participation. She was Per and I was Marie (I was pretty happy about getting to be Marie). We practiced extensively in front of my closet mirror, wearing spandex leggings and high ponytails, doing the ever popular side-step-together-hand-clap, spotting each other for back walkovers and finishing with the ultimate triumph: simultaneous splits. We set up a video camera on my bed and taped ourselves so we could more accurately envision the final result. This was going to change everything and recover me from the disasters of weird birthday cakes, mismatched clothing and admitting my love for She’s Like the Wind (see previous entry).
Of course that’s not at all what happened. We did our dance at the end of music class and nothing special happened except that when I was standing in line to go outside for recess the jerk who won the chess tournament in which I came in second imitated my dancing and laughed and I turned bright red. That’s how bad it was: kids who won chess tournaments mocked it. For a while I couldn’t even listen to Dangerous without a flood of regret and while I pressed repeat a thousand times for It Must Have Been Love on the Pretty Woman soundtrack, Joyride was a big disappointment. By the time Tourism came out I had moved onto bigger and better things and was much too cool for Roxette. But now, 20 years later, I still kind of love this song and a little bit secretly want the remastered Look Sharp! that was released last September. I also wish it was still a normal thing to invite friends over to make up dance routines in your bedroom.
