Croney’s voice is party-confident, complemented by backing chants that glow with spacey reverb. The music is upbeat but unhurried loose, layered percussion kept in check by tight-strummed rhythm guitar, and charmed by friendly brass and reeds. In 1962, limbo star Roz Croney released an album titled How Low Can You Go? The session band drafted in to back her was led by jazz musician Sun Ra, with four members of his Arkestra – Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Ronnie Boykins and Pat Patrick. Captives were chained to the slave cutters in cramped, airless decks in which they could not stand upright. Recordings of Edward Kamau Brathwaite reading his 1973 poem Caliban capture the poet staining a gentle calypso-style melody with violence: ‘Limbo / limbo like me / stick is the whip / and the dark deck is slavery.’ These were vessels designed like battery farms for packing bodies and maximizing profits. A dance of death and survival, limbo is said to have emerged during the Middle Passage on slave-ships transporting their tragic cargo from Africa to the Americas. Limbo, traditionally performed to calypso – a music of encoded satire and social commentary – originated as a funeral dance at wakes in Trinidad and Tobago during the mid-1800s. Later, Edwards was credited with creating the ‘flaming limbo’ in which the dance bar is set on fire. She and her dance troupe were recruited in 1957 to perform in the Robert Mitchum and Rita Hayworth drama Fire Down Below. The greatest limbo dancer of all time was said to be Julia Edwards, ‘The First Lady of Limbo’. Dancers bend backwards at the waist and knees, shuttling forward under an horizontal bar, which is gradually lowered with each round, eliminating those who can’t make it underneath without hitting the stick, falling backwards or using their arms to stay balanced. ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack go under limbo stick.’ You know the moves. At the height of the craze, between 1960 and ’63, Bo Diddley, Duane Eddy, Duke Ellington, and James Brown all recorded limbo songs but it was rock’n’roller Chubby Checker who hit gold with Limbo Rock in ’62. Songs by Frankie Anderson, Lord Melody, Denzil Laing and the Wrigglers, Mighty Wrangler, Lord Tickler and the Jamaican Calypsonians, The Trinidad Serenaders. You might not think it, listening to the spry sounds that made the limbo dance a global craze in the early 1960s. It’s also one of the most famous and saddest dances in the world.
For Karl it was a near-death experience on the ocean. If you visit Vermont it’s hopped-up pop in a bottle. It’s a way to describe modernist fantasies of cool affect.
Limbo is a videogame, pulp fiction, a self-aggrandizing surrealist’s literary fantasy. It scales from the minor anxious withdrawal brought about by a broken smartphone device to serious time spent between jobs, and the months, years, letting a past relationship fade so that another can take colour. It’s that feeling in the dentist’s waiting room when you don’t know if your destiny lays up Satan’s root canal or ends with a bright white smile. Limbo is the lobby next to the hereafter’s elevator banks. Image: Limbo Dancer attempting a lowered pole by Mariegriffiths at English Wikipedia
0 kommentar(er)
