According to the local television newscast, the “freaky deeky” is back, and it’s banned in Howard County schools.
Well thank heavens somebody’s thinking straight. Some things are just not appropriate at school functions, as the Houston lass who tried to walk into her high-school prom last spring looking like a scandalous hoochie — wearing a thigh-high miniskirt with an exposed midriff — found out when she was ejected.
Of course, if you’ve been listening to the news or reading the newspapers, you didn’t read or hear the term “freaky deeky.” You DID hear the term “freak dancing,” which is the latest craze teens have adopted to a.) shock, mortify and embarrass their parents and b.) to convince themselves they’ve invented something new.
They haven’t. When it comes to “freak dancing,” their parents have been there, done that. “Freak dancing” is the same as the “freaky deeky,” which came to us — perhaps not surprisingly — as a result of the disco era. You’d expect the disco era to produce something as vulgar and useless as the “freaky deeky,” and it did. One of the things I like about rap music is that it helped kill disco. I owe rap and rappers a debt I can never repay them.
Ironically, now teens are “freak dancing” to rap, and, I suppose, other music genres. I could easily find fault with the youngsters, but if I had to listen to rapper L’il Wayne’s “Lollipop” I might be “freak dancing” myself.
Or slashing my wrists.
If you want to know what L’il Wayne (really, isn’t it about time rappers stop putting “l’il” and “young” in front of their names?) sings in “Lollipop,” you’ll just have to Google it. I don’t think Examiner editors would print it even if I were inclined to write it, which I’m not.
I CAN give a brief description of what “freak dancing” and the “freaky deeky” involve: The rubbing and gyrating of male and female pelvic parts in a simulation of the sex act. Now before you start dismissing me as some middle-aged, uptight, sexually repressed prude, let me say I’m all for sex. I just think of it as a private thing. My advice to teens who want to freak dance is the same as what I gave to people who did the freaky deeky back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s: GET A ROOM, PEOPLE.
During my teen years there was no need for either freak dancing or the freaky deeky. We had something that allowed guys to have close, intimate contact with the gals without the gross vulgarity associated with the freaky deeky and freak dancing.
Anyone remember the “slow drag”?
No, not on a cigarette, you silly sillies! The dance. Remember the parties when someone would play a song with a fast, upbeat tempo and we did dances like the Jerk and the Mashed Potatoes?
Then somebody would put on a slow song by the Temptations, the Intruders — who actually had a song with the lyrics “I’d like to get close to the one I love for a slow drag” — or Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Then the guys would lead the gals out on the floor, put their arms around the lasses, hold them close and start doing that slow drag.
Why did the art of slow-dragging die out? Because, for the most part, the music industry just doesn’t produce romantic slow songs like Smokey’s “The Tracks of My Tears” anymore. Instead, they give us distinctly unromantic songs like “Lollipop” with L’il Wayne warbling about his. …
Well, never mind. You get the point. Slow dragging provided all the intimacy of freak dancing and the freaky deeky, and, depending on who your partner was, could get downright as sexual as both.
But you would have had to look REALLY close to notice that.
When I was in the Catholic Youth Organization of St. Pius V church we had a priest named Father Razza — I hope he forgives me, wherever he is, for not remembering his first name — who actually banned slow dragging at CYO dances.
I can only imagine what he would have thought of freak dancing and the freaky deeky.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
