What the Hell Happened to Shuffling? | US | Translation

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What the Hell Happened to Shuffling? | US | Translation

Shuffling was as provincial as souped up Novas and crippling boredom and as British as chips and curry sauce, and for a while, it was everything.

I like to think that I could have made it big a few years ago. I often find myself daydreaming about sell out arena tours and palatial green rooms. Late at night I rehearse my debut appearance on The Graham Norton Show—Graham and I get on like a house on fire—I go on to win BAFTAS, I go on to host the BAFTAS. How does all this happen? Simple. I'll tell you how it happens.

It happens because in this dream, this fantasy, this illusion I've created inside my head with a level of intricacy that makes the Sistine Chapel look like a ruined and rotten toilet cubicle in a run-down Rotherhithe pub, I become really fucking famous for doing a stand up routine about shuffling. The details of the routine aren't important. The important thing is that my blistering bit about shuffling was so relatable, so universal, so keenly observed that people swapped their "Garlic Bread?" T-shirts for ones that say "You Call That Shuffling? I'll Show You Shuffling!" on the front.

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You remember shuffling don't you? It was all the rage a few years back. People shuffled. They shuffled in nightclubs, in pubs, and in supermarkets too. They shuffled on garage forecourts and on Oxford Street. The only comparable cultural movement in my lifetime was the line-dancing boom that gripped the nation's barns back in the late 90s. And as exhilarating as line dancing was—and presumably still is—it was for the fuddy-duddies out there. Line dancing was what your Aunty Sonia did on Thursday nights, the place she got to rub spurs with the bolero-wearing blokes from down the local without Uncle Brian finding out. It was never a youth phenomenon. Shuffling was. Shufflers—clad in Huaraches, vests, and snapbacks—roamed our precincts, turning library carparks into impromptu dancefloors. Our pavements shook, and for a glorious moment it felt like the UK had really come to life.

Then the shuffling stopped.

Sunglasses sales went down. Aztec print t-shirts were found by the tonne in Traid bins from Perth to Penzance. Hospitals reported a sudden drop in young patients being admitted with osteopathy related conditions. Festival owners were reported to have looked back on their plots of land impressed with how much green, green grass was left at the end of a long weekend.

Red nosed advertising executives up and down the land who just months ago shouted the word "SHUFFLING" over and over again during brainstorming sessions that largely took place in cramped toilet cubicles suddenly stopped hitting YouTube's dancing sensations up for branded content. Mr Muscle, we were to believe, no longer felt like shuffling was brand-appropriate. The creatives at Frosty Jack were after something new. Even Tunnock's scrapped their long-planned shuffler-friendly tea cake range. Allegedly.

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Just as quickly as it'd been born, shuffling had passed away, joining the Cha Cha Slide up there in the weak-ankled sky. The names we thought'd be on our lips for a lifetime—Edward Scissor Hands, shannice_em, MadKezza—disappeared like the last few smokey trails of a tightly rolled joint, and we were left with nothing but memories. And a lot of YouTube videos.

During its brief existence shuffling often found itself the victim of needless and unnecessary derision. Shufflers, so received wisdom went, were idiot teenagers who liked what they thought was deep house but wasn't actually the actual deep house that 'real' deep house fans listened to. They were nothing more than Obey clad ninnies hellbent on seeing who could look the most like a malfunctioning android plonked down in the middle of an Audio Rehab night. They liked big clumpy basslines and lurid leggings. Shuffling was as provincial as souped up Novas and crippling boredom and as British as chips and curry sauce, and for a while, it was everything.

But shuffling couldn't last because shuffling didn't play by club culture's authenticity-addicted rules. Shufflers weren't watching Helena Hauff or Tama sumo, they weren't going to Freerotation or Gottwood, they weren't buying their records at Hardwax or The Thing. They liked Jamie Jones and Eastern Electrics, got their music straight from YouTube, couldn't have cared less about the history we're told is so important, so pivotal, so elementary to getting dance music and club culture.

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For a while, that seemed important, inspiring, borderline revolutionary. But what happened to shuffling, and what happened to the shufflers?

The answer is depressing familiar: they were victims of their own mild success, and the world begrudges and resents nothing more than those who experience the most minor of brushes with fame. Appear on Eggheads and you'll be ostracised by your nearest and dearest. Get your photo in the local paper as the result of a daring cat-rescue and you get frozen out of the group chat. Decide to upload a grainy video of yourself shuffling to a Route 94 song in the hope that you might get a free pair of trainers out of it? You've fucked it. You've utterly fucked it. Why've you fucked it? You've fucked it because you've danced your way above your station.

Somewhere right now, Puffthehouseman—Puff, a bloke who presumably thought his day in the sun'd last a lifetime rather than one music video and this interview—is trying to sit still, fighting the almost irrepressible urge to shuffle because he—even he, Puffthehouseman—knows that to shuffle in final shreds of 2016 is to try and reanimate a corpse nobody wants returned to life. The world forgot about David Zowie, forgot about "House Every Weekend" and forgot about Puff, too. Of course it did.

It forgot about all that because shuffling was silly. Shuffling, at its heart, was nothing more than a knock-about dance craze for teenagers who didn't dream of the pas des basque or end of the pier show, who cared for neither Fred Astaire nor Anton Du Beke. Its innate silliness became, well, simply silly—a weak punchline for a lame gag that we all stopped pretending to laugh at the same time.

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Sure, we knew shuffling couldn't last forever—it was never as popular as pulled pork, after all—but its rapid demise, its almost instantaneous disappearance, was still somehow shocking. Not Trump-as-president shocking, but shocking in the same way that finding out a mate prefers ginger biscuits to chocolate digestives is shocking.

Since shuffling shuffled into the bleak middle distance that is nothingness, it feels like dancing, any kind of dancing, has taken a back step. Seriousness reigns over us, damning each and every clubber to a life spent treading water in the stagnant pool of authenticity: one nation under a fistbump.

The saddest thing about shuffling's untimely death? I'll never get that BAFTA.

Josh is on Twitter