One night last July, during the summer off after a rewarding but expensive stint in graduate school, I did the most “coming home” thing I’d done in the past year living at home: I offered to be the chauffeur for my parents’ high school reunion.
It wasn’t a hassle. My parents were thrilled, reminiscing with old friends at their old beachfront tiki bar dance club. The bubbly tropical drinks, lively conversation, and steady stream of Italian-Americans were the kind of vibe that surely let you know you’d arrived at the gateway to the New Jersey shore.
A gentle breeze blew in from the ocean to our right, wrapping around my sister and me. We sat on plastic chairs on the boardwalk, munching on last bites of cotton candy and caramel apples. The sky was getting bluer by the minute. Over the rolling waves and an arcade full of screaming children, we could hear the opening bass line of New Order’s “Blue Monday” coming from inside the tiki bar.
It’s a bit unbearably unoriginal, but I’m often more preoccupied with thinking about other periods of the 20th century than I am right now. Of course, the sense of existential dread fostered by this difficult time makes it nearly impossible to contemplate the present and future on most days ending in “y.” But I’m also deeply fascinated by the cultural and sociopolitical context that defined those decades. When my grandmother passed away that winter, the only good thing was the pile of sepia-toned photos and personal belongings that were unearthed from her storage room. It was like sifting through treasures in Ariel’s underwater cavern. Even the tiniest trinkets were inscribed with perfect, arcane meanings.
My parents were kids in the ’70s and teenagers in the ’80s, but they kept quiet about their high school years, at least when my four siblings and I were little. The main way they told us stories about their time was through music, and a lot of it was classics by first-generation bands like Depeche Mode, The Cars, and The Talking Heads.
Naturally, as the five of us grew older and each of us occasionally found ourselves caught up in waves of depravity, we became more familiar with the lore of our parents’ youth. Recently, when a high-school friend of my parents came to visit us, she took a sip of Pinot Grigio and said to my siblings and me, “You don’t know your parents.”
Before I could recover from her simple but utterly astonishing observation, a tectonic shift occurred and the merriment faded. She was right: at least in the context in which she was speaking, I had no idea who these people really were, even though their lives were clearly intertwined with my own, outside of photographs on an old disposable camera.
How was it so easy to forget that they were people before they were my parents?
This question has been simmering in my mind for the past week, during which I’ve watched dozens of TikTok and Instagram videos of Gen Zers like me asking their Gen X parents, “What would you dance to in the ’80s to this song?” The song in question is Bronski Beat’s debut single, “Small Town Boy,” a synth-pop hit with an unmistakable falsetto scream and memorable lyrics that describe a young gay man who is forced to leave his home after being harassed because of his identity.
These videos, widely shared on social media, are incredibly wholesome: When asked, moms and dads instantly light up, briefly transported to another era, then settle into an all-too-familiar rhythm. The ones I saw range from Jennifer Garner performing a variation of Molly Ringwald’s signature “Breakfast Club” punch-kick combo (surprisingly, instead of her “Thriller” favorite from “The 13-Year-Old Man”) to a dad doing his best moonwalk in skinny jeans and a mom going full disco mode, swaying her arms from side to side.
As I scrolled through film after film last weekend, I smiled inwardly, quietly aware that this trend unintentionally served as a unique reminder of our parents’ personas, not as our protectors, but as people independent of that relationship.
This observation was summed up quite profoundly by one Gen-X Threads user, who posted some thoughts aimed at “younger respondents” beneath a video of a middle-aged mother dancing.
“You won’t ‘go back to normal’ for a few minutes singing or dancing or any other way you normally expressed yourself,” the commenter said. “You may forget or feel responsible, but your mind is still intact with the memories of being able to express yourself freely without worrying about the consequences. You don’t become a different person as you get older.”
“She’s the same girl who first danced to this song in a club over 40 years ago. Older and wiser, sure, but always true to herself.”
On Reddit, one Gen X parent confessed to the thread that not only did they love the video, but they were “secretly hoping their kid would ask them to be in it too.” Seriously hilarious!
Perhaps it’s the power of music — from its pure emotional appeal to its lasting psychological impact — that acts as a common thread between the kids watching and the parents dancing along. According to a Gen Zer like me, who is both addicted to the trend and plagued by a sense of temporal and generational discomfort, the trend is… OneX/Twitter One user described it as “proof that our generation is incredibly uncool.”
“80s Dancing Parents is the new sailor song. I want 100,000 videos of this,” another person tweeted, referencing TikTok’s 2021 obsession with seafarers’ work songs.
Watching videos of dance trends from the 80s has me yearning for something that truly reflects a simpler time – the saying “dance like no one’s watching” really seemed to mean something back then.
Without cell phones, social media, and their many attendant drawbacks, the ’80s seemed like a much freer time, especially when it came to dance. Many of the movements seen in the video are awkward, choppy, and by today’s diluted standards would be described as awkward or nerdy. But it’s undeniably passionate, full of beauty and vitality, and just might inspire Gen Z to bust out some Cabbage Patch or Roger Rabbit the next time they hit the nightclub.
Our parents aren’t preserved in amber. They’ve aged and changed, and that was bound to happen. If our guardians had acted the way they did in their prime, when their frontal lobes hadn’t fully matured and their hormones were at their most active, surely a lot more bad stuff would have happened.
But as a person X/I wrote on Twitter, “The groove stays with you forever.”
It’s true. I’d watched them rock to the beat at countless concerts, pound the drums while behind the wheel, and rock out in the kitchen while making dinner. But when I asked my parents recently what dances they used to do to “Small Town Boy,” they smiled and politely refused to show me. And that’s okay. I didn’t care. Maybe I should save some of my memories just for them, for the people they were before they were my mom and dad.
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