The Twist

September 1960 & January 1962

Ah, "The Twist" – the biggest dance craze of all time, and the one that arguably had the most lasting impact. Who could forget it? It's so ridiculously simple that it's amazing nobody had thought of it before.

As you probably could have guessed, Chubby Checker didn't invent the Twist – in fact, he wasn't even the first one to have a hit single with the song. That would be Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, whose version is curiously unavailable on Youtube. And people have dated the dance back much farther, back through plantation dances and even farther back to Africa. But what matters is that it exploded into popular culture in 1960, and you could say it never really went away.

After all, the concept of rhythmically "twisting" your hips back and forth, well – isn't that the basic idea behind dancing in nightclubs today? Is it a stretch to say that the Twist permanently changed the way people dance? Moving one's hips seems such a fundamental part of dancing (at least in the popular idiom) that it's hard to believe there was a time when it wasn't done. Look back on dancing footage from before the 60s – people don't swivel their hips unless it's a burlesque show or something. And so I can imagine how it must have felt for this to suddenly become socially acceptable. Liberating, I suppose. This song came along at just the right time – people were ready for it. Any earlier and it might have been dismissed as grotesque. Not that the parents didn't find it objectionable, or at least some of them. Apparently, it was controversial at the time for being overtly sexual. And well, I guess it is. Isn't that the point?

And yes, those are two different dates up there in the title of this post. "The Twist" is, in fact, the only song ever to do this – reach #1 on two separate chart runs. Not to mention the numerous Twist-themed songs Chubby Checker churned out in the following few years – "Let's Twist Again," "Twistin' U.S.A.," "Slow Twistin'," and "Twist It Up" were all charting singles. Even as late as 1964, the Beatles nearly topped the chart with their cover of the Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout." That's four years later – an eternity!

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