Now I Know You're Mine

Madonna’s Into the Groove is a delightfully recursive bit of poetry and music.

Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free, she says. The dance seems to become a trance of sorts, where higher-order thinking goes out the window and our basest instincts are left behind. Getting into the groove lets you experience this state yourself, but you have to let your inhibition go.

Madonna steadily whips up her own groove for you to get into, opening the door for you to let the music set you free.

Music has a funny way of taking control of people under the right circumstances. Most of the time, we allow this to happen for the sheer joy of it—giving up control means floating with the music and with a collective consciousness around, like dancing in a mosh pit or finding yourself tapping along with your foot.

The Dancing Plague of 1518—just one year after Luther had published his 95 Theses—had some elements of a mosh pit that never ended. People danced for days on end, potentially because of psychological illness or psychotropic drugs—nobody is really sure. When they started their manic dancing, there wasn’t any music playing in the streets—just eerie silence and moshing bodies.

In order to make things less creepy, the local government made things way worse by adding music. This not only kept the dance party going, but it encouraged others to jump in and join the pit.

Musical hypnosis? Not really, but some of the folks were willing participants, while others were incapacitated by drugs, maybe. All of them were encouraged to stay in the groove.

This idea of a trance-like state that arises from music goes back a long, long way. Consider military marching, where someone provides a steady drum beat that the marchers can follow. If this seems tedious to the powers that be, a tune is added in, and before you know it, you have a marching band.

Music makes the body want to move. I had my own marching band in every restaurant where I ever worked, and it was usually a CD/tape player combo unit that could blast music throughout the kitchen. One place constantly played crappy pop music from a few years earlier, and there were many near-rebellions in the kitchen over the 19th time hearing Wonderwall this week.

This idea of body movement and music has been embraced by religious groups all throughout history, too. It makes sense, right? There’s something primal when music plays, seemingly unrelated to the material world all around us. You can see the most vivid modern examples in Pentecostal snake-handlers and in Sufi whirling ceremonies—both of which rely heavily on a repetitive beat, and in someone losing themselves to the groove.

Are you getting into the groove today? If so, please note whether you cede any control to the music that’s playing, and let me know in the comments.