Slamming the cha cha.
A thing that always feels a little funny to me, in retrospect, is that I started raiding my grandmother's record collection as a counterpoint to the prevalent music of my youth, which I haaaated hated hated like fire in my earholes. I mean, I hated the banal, stupid stuff, like The Eagles, Foreigner, hair-and-spandex heavy metal, leatherman-and-skulls heavy metal, Journey, Tull, and so on and on, but it was easy to just wince when I was trapped in a space with that stuff and close my eyes and let Bach's English Suite #2 drown it out in my head.
What I really couldn't stand was the "alternatives," by which I mean the idiotic shouty lurching tunelessness of the kind of punk rock beloved of rebel-definitely-without-a-cause suburbanites and the hideous boy-energy that came with that ceaselessly conformist nihilistic genre of music supposedly rooted in rebellion. If the revolution meant that mess shrieking in my headphones like a drill press, sign me up with the bad guys, please. I already had a longstanding issue with boy-energy, and hated the interrupting, overtalking, smartest-guy-in-the-room vibe of the kind of sneering dudes who had their lives changed by Ayn Rand, the moralizing (and wrong) Lord Of The Flies, all those denizens of Tolkien, Hunter Thompson's blather, Bukowski's drunkenness as a calling, and it's never a woman writing, unless you want to allow Ayn Rand as somehow in that club, but man, punk rock was just the music of hard-ass joylessness for folks who'd seemingly never experienced a transcendent moment of awe or wonder, at least in my local sphere of such things.
It didn't help that when I finally was old enough to frequent the occasional punk club, the experience was the opposite of community for me and more just loud, jostly, and slammy in a way I disliked and my super punk sort-of-girlfriend was abusive and gross (and amusingly, she sort of forced me to date her even though I didn't wanna, and these days, she's a dreary expatriate MAGA-type trans-hating shitbag, so maybe that put the nail in my interest in hardcore or whatever the hell they were calling it then).
I gravitated instead to the stuff I could shake a tailfeather to, whether it was the synthetic glitter of disco, gay dance music, sunshine pop, or other stuff, but boy oh boy did Les Baxter and Martin Denny light my wick. It helped that my Baltimore grandmother was a mistress of the cha cha, the tango, the mambo, the samba, and the sweet sweet bossa nova, and she'd leave the den in her basement lounge, decorated gloriously in enough leopard faux fur that I'm still shocked she never accidentally ignited the place with an ill-cast ember from a Kool 100, with a cha cha in her heart and a skip in her gitalong.
I filled up my teen Walkman with as much midcentury tiki bar music as I did with angsty British synth pop and sweet sweet Kosmische music straight outta Cologne, and the funny thing was that I think back then that I always felt like I was enjoying it ironically…but I wasn't.
It was my jam, and still is.
It's funny these days, teaching art classes for seniors as a side hustle, that I bring in my big speaker and score the classes with bossa nova and other glints of a past world that I only found through recordings in an era that had long since decided that just enjoying something because it was gorgeous and made you feel good, possibly while bopping around a room with a lilting step, was the height of the unhip, and my 60-70-80-year-old students are often bemused that I love old fashioned music so much (I think their era is more Beatles and seventies stuff now, since that's more in line with their own wild years).
But it's my jam, utterly without irony, and if you see me dancing around my house in my skivvies with a dust mop in hand, you can be certain it's not to "Back In Black," some gawdawful retrospective pity party from The Smiths, or the janky anti-anti-antiness of the Dead Kennedys.
I'm punk as fuck in my core, but in cats-eye glasses, fake pearls, and rayon, baby.
What's on the hi-fi, dear hearts? I feel a groove coming on.
© 2026 Joe Belknap Wall
