“Remember the jingles used to go” – Just Dance 3

In my Just Dance 2 post, I talked about the impact of different external forces on pop music: TikTok, ringtones, the popularisation of the music video. There is a rather obvious link to draw out further on the last one. When Just Dance came out, we were right in the middle of another surge in the importance of music videos to match that of the advent of MTV in the ‘80s, thanks to YouTube becoming its new equivalent. Just Dance the game is named, after all, after a song by Lady Gaga, whose elaborate visuals helped her take over the moment. The first game came out the same week in November 2009 as her all-timer video to “Bad Romance”. Which at one point features a Wii controller!

By Just Dance 3 we were less than a year away from Psy’s “Gangnam Style”, the peak of that music video era, which added comedy but more importantly outdid even “Bad Romance” for scale and spectacle. A few years later the era ended less because no one could top that, than because it wasn’t worth trying as YouTube lost its place to Spotify. During that half-decade or so, though, YouTube’s pre-eminence as a way of listening to new music didn’t just affect music videos themselves. There was a thriving line in placeholders for songs too new to have a video, audio adapted for a visual format.

Chief among these placeholders was the “lyrics video”, simple animations added to words on a screen. Some went on to an impressive life of their own. The lyrics video for 2014’s “Bad” by David Guetta & Showtek ft. Vassy, a low-fi zombie comic thing, has 1.1 billion views. Mostly they got discarded once a proper video came along, but fulfilled a purpose and sometimes had some interesting ideas of iconography, like Katy Perry’s “Roar” rendered as a Whatsapp chat with emoji overkill.

Lyrics on a screen with basic animation and, if you’re lucky, some inventive imagery is, of course, also the modus operandi of Just Dance. Just Dance 3 is again pretty much the same game with some new songs, so it’s interesting to see what it does with them. It gives Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” a mirror at the back and some magazine text, Jessie J’s Price Tag some shiny reflective barcodes, Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” a drive-in movie setting. They’re all rather static, and all set up with the usual simple dance moves.

Sometimes it more obviously gestures towards existing imagery, like giving Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For” an Alice in Wonderland/Harajuku mash-up in front of clockwork. Girls Aloud’s cover of “Jump” gets a bedroom dancing set-up, with a nod of sorts to Love Actually, though falling feathers take it in a different direction. The star-jumping energy of the game’s routine to that one made it my favourite. As ever, enjoying the song already is a pretty big requisite. Like the lyrics video, the game facilitates an experience with the song with minimal creation or expense, and with the right song it’s a winning strategy to just not get in the way.

By Just Dance 3, Ubisoft had a new rival in the pop music dance game space. The previous year, Guitar Hero makers Harmonix released Dance Central, made for Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller. Alongside introducing some more complex game modes, Dance Central placed a focus on accuracy and trickier dance moves. My partner, who is a considerably better and more coordinated dancer than me, much preferred that one. Its own initial yearly release schedule meant that Dance Central 2 came out here ten days after Just Dance 3.

Bringing some innovation and quality into the space didn’t turn out to be a route to success. At a time when new Xbox 360 games were generally well ahead of new Wii ones, Dance Central 2 entered the chart at #29. Just Dance 3 was multiplatform and had its own Kinect version, but the Wii one continued to dominate sales. It became the last ever UK #1 with the Wii as its lead format. In its vanquishing of its opposition there are points about getting there first, about established brand recognition, and about what different audiences had been primed for. Perhaps there’s also once again something about how Just Dance places experience and enjoyment of pop music above any commitment to the technical details of dancing.

Thirteen years later YouTube is still around, just like music channels and radio stations are. New music videos, and lyrics videos, continue to come out. Ubisoft are still releasing new editions of Just Dance. One made it into Nintendo’s regular Direct game showcase just this month. New releases add songs which are new to Just Dance, and also often new themselves. The game stays static, and outsources its evolution to pop music, which continues to serve it well.