The New Pornographers - All for Swinging You Around

Remember that guy, Jonah Lehrer? He was a social science writer who wrote a bunch of books and articles people dug and then it turned out he plagiarized himself in some of those articles (and then made some other quotes up)? I bring it up because I’m about to plagiarize myself, re-purposing something I wrote more than two decades ago. Listening to The New Pornographers’ “All for Swinging You Around” makes me want to dance. More specifically, it makes me want to dance like Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles. I mean, just look at him go:

I bring that scene up because we’re celebrating a friend’s birthday this weekend, and to plagiarize the Eagles — all she wants to do is dance. Who knows how it will go, but put enough vodka sodas in me and I’m bound to bounce and flail and spin about like Mr. Hall in the Shermer High School gym. At the risk of creating a tautology, “All for Swinging You Around” is well, swingin’. I mean that in the 1940s USO sense where you could easily imagine soldiers about to ship off, adorned in their service dress uniforms, dancing with their “best gals” to this song (apologies to anyone who lived in that era, I’m kinda grasping at straws with this descriptor). The bap-bap-dunh-bap drum, the organ in the background and the imperial vocals of the indie god Neko Case swirl together in a delightfully delirious concoction that compels you into motion. Anthony Michael’s moves would actually map nicely in some kind of “Hall for Swinging You Around” mashup a la that Breakfast Club set to “Lisztomania.”

The last time I made this exact Anthony Michael Hall comparison was in 2003. Throughout the early aughts, I would burn mixed CDs for people and send them out as holiday cards, and I remember feeling proud of that AMH comparison. (It was a simpler time.) But since then “All for Swinging You Around” has certainly aged better than Sixteen Candles (although, truth be told, Jake’s look remains iconic). The song’s incredibly sweet, which, isn’t too surprising given that most of the band is Canadian. Hopefully my moves on the dancefloor this weekend will be just as sweet.

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