Steve's Must Dance Playlist
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| Steve Cobb's "Must Dance" Playlist |
My birthday was last weekend and I started writing a blog post about how lucky I feel to have lived 74 years. At the same time, I realized that my blog has become quite serious in the last 12 months. So here's something less serious, the playlist I made on YouTube to encourage my love of dancing.
I call it the Must Dance playlist because whenever I hear one of these tracks I feel a strong urge to dance. I limited it to 100 items but they span across multiple decades and genres. There's rock-and-roll, prog rock, folk-rock, electronic, blues, soul, funk, reggae, disco, two-tone, punk, and more.
Some of the selections may not strike everyone as dance tracks, but I enjoy dancing to all of these songs, from hippy-dancing (White Bird) to Northern Soul dancing (Four Tops).
There are some limitations to an online dance playlist like this, notably continuity, the transition a DJ provides between tracks to keep folks on the dance floor (and avoid embarrassing silences I got back in the sixties when I recorded Top of the Pops off the BBC with my reel-to-reel tape recorder for the youth club disco). So yes, there's a point in "I Feel Good" where hitting Play on 20th Century Boy feels great, but you can't cpature that in a YouTube playlist (AFAIK).
The older I get the more I realize that dancing is one of the few physical activities I enjoy enough to break the "exercise barrier." What is the exercise barrier? For me, it's a sense of resentment I feel when a doctors says I need to exercise when I am already "exercised" and tired by the activities I perform in the course of my daily life. (I accept that this may sound strange and irrational so I will come back to it in a separate post.)
Anyway, I hope you enjoy exploring the playlist. Let me know what you think the comments. Did I miss any of your "musts"? Did I include any non-starters?
Stephen 'Steve' Cobb
Note: I made this playlist on YouTube where I have a paid subscription which removes the ads. I realize I am lucky to be able to afford this. I am looking for a way to export the list so that it is accessible on a free or less expensive basis.
