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Dance Without You
Skylar Grey
Invinsible
2011

♥: Things that are easy to find in pop music: good hooks, love songs, whiny bitches, change-the-world anthems, club jams, occasional intelligence.

Things that are not easy to find in pop music: strong women, and independence.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me; that's why the pop scene works, after all -- it's a big web of interdependence, on teenagers, on record execs, on convention. Musically, it's hard to write pop and be independent because everyone expects something of you, and original pop is hard to successfully market. Even worse is the thought of lyrically promoting independence, because god forbid your target audience have enough individuality to want a life for themselves. Independence does not a salivating public make.
So how fabulous when a pop song, both lyrically and musically, actually promotes independence!

I've had an eye on Skylar Grey for awhile, and from the press she was getting, I was hoping she'd be another Nicki Minaj (in personality if not music style) to add to my collection of musical admirables. Judging from the 'buzz single', Dance Without You, MY HOPE REMAINS. This is an intelligent and quite original pop song. It's not that I've never heard anything like it before, but it's not something I've heard on mainstream radio. The drum beats are too out of sync, the beatboxing is too weird, the swirling vocals are somehow incongruous. It's kind of hard to dance like a human to it, which is awesome because it goes back to what I talked about in my Atlantic post -- dancing shouldn't be pretty, and Skylar gets it.

Of course, the best part isn't the music but the heartfelt refrain: "I wanna dance without you." UH. "Take your hands off me before I suffocate." Oh, Skylar! Be still my single heart! "I break my neck to be polite / I cannot take your whispering" -- oh, Skylar, I agree. Let's shuck the shackles of a conventional life and dance, alone, however socially inappropriate and however much people may whisper, because honestly, what the fuck do we care? We'll dance to pop music with decidedly unpop-y beats, we'll feel the power of dancing on our own, without standards/convention/someone who somehow, delusionally, "validates" us --------- and hopefully all the little teenyboppers following pop will dance alone, too. Independence is the greatest virtue, after all.