Riverdances with wolves
I know this is a bit off topic but this is my blog and I can do what I want. I plan to periodically post some stuff about Irish traditional music in addition to piping updates. After all, bloggers are notoriouosly opinionated and are driven to give said opinions whether anyone wants to hear them or not. Today's opinion is about Riverdance.
Being an Irish musician (that's a musician that plays Irish music, not necessarily a musician from Ireland) and admitting you like Riverdance is a lot like admitting you liked ABBA in the 70's. Perhaps you thought they were good, certainly the girls were hot, but they just weren't cool. It was always a little embarrassing, right? I mean, come on, you know you made out to 'Dancing Queen' and jumped all over the dance floor when they played 'Waterloo' or 'Voulez Vous', or at least you wanted to, but you didn't want to seem like a dork. Dorks liked the Xanadu album from Olivia Newton-John, what did they know?
Same thing with Riverdance. From my experience, it just isn't cool in Irish traditional music circles to admit you like Riverdance. Well, here goes: I like Riverdance. Now, my favorite part (and yours too if you're a piper) was Davy's piping solo, but I also liked just about every dance number they had (except for the Spanish dance, didn't care too much for that). The entire show was pretty powerful and - you gotta admit - did a lot to introduce people to traditional irish music and world music in general.
A lot of what makes it so uncool, I think, is how insufferable Michael Flatley was when the whole thing started out. I never saw anyone so enamoured with himself. My wife and I saw Lord of the Dance live and Feet of Flame (what a goofy name) on DVD and they were pretty good, but the main problem with those shows was they were clearly designed to give us the opportunity to adore him. Riverdance was about more than the dancers and the music and that, I think, is what separates it from the rest of the garbage that came out later. This was reinforced by the fact that Riverdance didn't suffer one bit when Flatley left the show.
Don't feed me to the wolves, but I like Riverdance.
To make things worse, it turns out Flatley is a pretty damn good flute player. I didn't want to admit it, but I just heard his flute album The Original Flute CD and, well, it didn't suck.
Being an Irish musician (that's a musician that plays Irish music, not necessarily a musician from Ireland) and admitting you like Riverdance is a lot like admitting you liked ABBA in the 70's. Perhaps you thought they were good, certainly the girls were hot, but they just weren't cool. It was always a little embarrassing, right? I mean, come on, you know you made out to 'Dancing Queen' and jumped all over the dance floor when they played 'Waterloo' or 'Voulez Vous', or at least you wanted to, but you didn't want to seem like a dork. Dorks liked the Xanadu album from Olivia Newton-John, what did they know?
Same thing with Riverdance. From my experience, it just isn't cool in Irish traditional music circles to admit you like Riverdance. Well, here goes: I like Riverdance. Now, my favorite part (and yours too if you're a piper) was Davy's piping solo, but I also liked just about every dance number they had (except for the Spanish dance, didn't care too much for that). The entire show was pretty powerful and - you gotta admit - did a lot to introduce people to traditional irish music and world music in general.
A lot of what makes it so uncool, I think, is how insufferable Michael Flatley was when the whole thing started out. I never saw anyone so enamoured with himself. My wife and I saw Lord of the Dance live and Feet of Flame (what a goofy name) on DVD and they were pretty good, but the main problem with those shows was they were clearly designed to give us the opportunity to adore him. Riverdance was about more than the dancers and the music and that, I think, is what separates it from the rest of the garbage that came out later. This was reinforced by the fact that Riverdance didn't suffer one bit when Flatley left the show.
Don't feed me to the wolves, but I like Riverdance.
To make things worse, it turns out Flatley is a pretty damn good flute player. I didn't want to admit it, but I just heard his flute album The Original Flute CD and, well, it didn't suck.
posted by Tony Darnell | 11:43 PM
3 Comments:
I don't belive Riverdance to be off topic, it's very on-topic.
Lol, I didn't know Riverdance was uncool. Maybe that was why noone responded to a post I made about how cool _I_ thought it was on a UP-list a while back, Do'h! -- wow is my face red.
I had no idea anyone didn't like Riverdance. I Worship Riverdance, I have for as long as I can remember. I Also adore that scotish highland dancing btw.
Me and a dear friend whom love it also went to see our first Riverdance show(on the first day of the start of the european tour) on my birthday last month. And it just went straight to my heart, the enoumrous power of the dances and the Uilleann brought tears to my eyes more then ones. I can not even imagine someone _not_ loving Riverdance, it's not possible.
But then on the other hand the ppl in that show weren't full of themselfs. I saw a videoclip of that flatley I think it was and yea, I could just see how self-love ozzed from his every step. Totally unattractive, fortunatly the riverdance-image I have in me head has nothing to do with him.
But at the same time that means Spillane isn't really apart of that image either, and from what ppl have told me I'm missing something.
I also don't actually care much for the spanish dance i'm sorry to say. I'm celtic-hearted not latino-hearted :P so that thing did very little for me.
And for the record, Riverdance is cool, Abba is not ;).
I wouldn't say that no one in ITM circles likes Riverdance. But I would say they are loath to admit it.
ABBA's definitely not cool, but like I said, the girls were hot and they were fun to dance to. God, I'm a dork.
Well, Riverdance is not a bad stuff, but I do prefer Irish Music ;-)
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