The first UK singles chart tracking the most popular music records was in 1952. They replaced sheet music charts, and what rose up was soon different. Once music videos were popularised, the perception and success of some songs was forever linked with their videos. In the 2000s there was a moment when a song’s popularity as a ringtone, and suitability for that purpose, might have a wider impact on it. Some songs just suited them better. Present day charts are heavily influenced by TikTok, and that helps select for certain characteristics, like being short and to the point, in a reinforcing loop.
The Just Dance series was a last hurrah for the Wii as major cultural phenomenon; Just Dance 2 did five weeks at the top of the UK individual formats chart over Christmas and into 2011. It wasn’t popular enough to have the same impact on the world of music, not least because being backwards-looking was one of its big things, although I do know of at least one primary school class who ended a day this week by dancing along to a video of Just Dance 4’s version of “Gangnam Style”. Like anything else applying its own lens to pop music, the series can’t help but say something about the songs, dancing about them in silhouette.
Just Dance 2 registers players’ moves with a little more certainty than the original game, but that remains mostly beyond the point. It’s an excuse to move and listen to its selection rather than any kind of dancing simulation or competition. One slight change is the inclusion of ‘duets’ with different dancers doing different things, which it resolutely avoids linking to any songs which are actually duets. Instead they are used as a way of adding some extra dynamics without having to make actions particularly more complicated, at least except in the fun party sense where confined space might render swapping places with someone complicated in itself.
With some of the most obvious songs with established dance moves already taken in the first game, Just Dance 2 applies a bit more thought to setting scenes to give some less obvious songs interesting tableaux. Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction” gets a futuristic Tron vision in sweeping lunges, which works very well to emphasise the robotic aspect rather than the sexy one. Giving Vampire Weekend’s “A-Punk” some ballet positions for its pre-chorus is basically the same gag the band were already well in on, but it does draw attention to it in a new way. The moves for Rihanna’s “SOS” are less memorable, but the flashing C64 loading sequence colours applied to the dancers in time with the rattlesnake popping from the beginning of “Tainted Love” changes the texture of the sample. It makes that bit into more of an exclamation mark than ever.
Not everything works as well. Going through Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” with finger pointing and bad air guitar adds less than zero insight, defanging its joy even more than taking out the swearing does (like in Burnout Paradise, “hell yeah” is out as well as “motherfucking”). Rendering Supergrass’s “Alright” via bucket-hatted arm-pumping anti-dancing is almost, but not quite, rubbish enough to feel like its own commentary on the song’s shortcomings.
Just Dance 2 feels even lazier when it tries to venture further still. It includes “Katti Kalandal” by Tony Tape and Veilumuth Chitralekha but it is presented under the artist name ‘Bollywood’. The same thing happens to Gert Wilden (‘Charleston’) and LT and Rican (‘Reggaeton’). The associated images and moves are there not to say something about a song but to stand in for an entire genre, tokenism at its most blatant. Well, most blatant if the game didn’t also include Mika’s “Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)” with a larger dancer, succeeding in drawing attention to the uniformly thin appearance of every other person in the game. This is something the series would get a little better at later on. For now, it’s an idea that it doesn’t really know what to do with, alongside some developed much better for their own little pop-adjacent bubble.
Top of the charts for week ending 18 December 2010:
Top of the charts for week ending 25 December 2010:
Top of the charts for week ending 1 January 2011:
Top of the charts for week ending 8 January 2011:
Top of the charts for week ending 15 January 2011:
WCRobinson
Man, this takes me back. When I started writing for a small gaming website, some of the first review codes I got were Just Dance games on the Wii U, haha, and it ended up being a yearly tradition to make myself play them. They’re fun in their own way though!
Of course, it never compares to “I’m Han Solo” in Star Wars Kinect… ! 😉
iain.mew
Yeah I still played some of the later ones too along with the Dance Central series! I will be getting to Star Wars Kinect in the not too distant future!