While a one-hit wonder can technically be about anything, statistically speaking, it’s far less likely to have a one-off Top 10 hit that’s also a protest song. A Top 10 hit that’s a protest song against club bouncers is even rarer. And to the best of our knowledge, only one song qualifies: Men Without Hats’ 1982 hit, “The Safety Dance”, off their studio debut, Rhythm Of Youth.
Even without knowing that “The Safety Dance” came out in the early 1980s, practically everything about the track gives it away. The synthesizer tone, the campiness of the backing vocals, and lead singer Ivan Doroschuk’s speech-like vocal delivery scream 80s. And everyone in 1982 seemed to agree, pushing the track to the Top 10 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere around the world. (They peaked at No. 11 in their native Canada.)
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On the surface, the Men Without Hats track sounds like a feel-good, slightly rebellious ode to dancing“if we want to” and ditching friends who don’t dance because they’re “ain’t no friends of mine.” But fewer people realize that Doroschuk actually wrote the song in protest of a bouncer who kicked him out of a nightclub for doing a dance popular amongst new wave crowds.
“The Safety Dance” Was a Protest Against Restrictive Dancing Rules
Considering “The Safety Dance” would make its way into most nightclubs around the world after its 1982 release, it’s somewhat ironic that Men Without Hats’ Ivan Doroschuk wrote the song after a bouncer kicked him out of one. According to the Edmonton Journal, Doroschuk was pogoing with his friends when the bouncer asked them to leave. Pogoing was a popular dance in the new wave movement that involved jumping up and down, arching your back, and shaking your head. Literally pogo jumping without the pogo stick.
“Pogoing was the first sort of punk dance,” Doroschuk explained in a 2012 interview with Sam Tweedle. “Slam dancing and the mosh pit all kind of grew out of pogoing. I got thrown out of a lot of clubs because of that. So, that’s basically the origin. I was kind of mad that they wouldn’t let me dance if I wanted to, so I took matters in my own hands and wrote an anthem for it.”
Doroshuk told the Edmonton Journal that after he came home one night, the song “just came out.” But while it was easy to write, he didn’t anticipate it being a hit. “I didn’t pick that one out in particular. It wasn’t our first choice off the record. ‘I Got The Message’ was the first single, which, for me, was a lot more catchy, a lot more poppy. But that just goes to show, you never know.”
“I think people can relate to the empowering kind of message of ‘The Safety Dance’,” he continued. “When the song first came out, it was the beginning of rap, and it was one of the only songs that had a spoken thing to it.”
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