It's got a beat and I can dance to it

February 7, 2023 3:04 AM

What's the origin of the phrase "It's got a beat and I can dance to it"? A pretentious ex said it just like this in 1992. Googling finds an old American Bandstand episode that includes adjectives like "nice" and "great". I'm curious about the sentence without adjectives. The Terry Pratchett book Soul Music references it but it was published in 1994.

This is a phrase that I use occasionally as one of my under-my-breath inside jokes. I'm wondering if anyone else would know it.

posted by bendy to Media & Arts (12 answers total)

Best answer: Hairspray (the original John Waters film, 1988) "Mama, "Shake A Tailfeather" is a wild song. It's got a good beat and I can dance to it."

Or, if your pretentious ex is British, they may be referencing a sketch from The Mary Whitehouse Experience, which started airing in 1991 and was obsessively watched by students. The sketch (by Punt and Dennis) was about your embarrassing Dad watching Top of the Pops and saying "Hey, what's this? It's got a good beat, I can dance to this!" (Hugh Dennis doing the most embarrassing Dad dance ever, which was a sight to behold, believe me)

I can't find a video of the original sketch, but Dennis does appear briefly in the same character at the end of this Robert Smith parody, so you may behold the Dad dancing.
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:52 AM on February 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

From this link:

"It's got a good beat and you can dance to it" continues to be a running joke decades after the demise of Bandstand's famous "rate-a-record" feature, in which Clark would ask a boy and girl to grade up-and-coming hits on a scale of 35 to 98. Sure enough, this segment's young lady says of the first record, "I thought the tambourine came out real good, and you can dance to it. It has a nice beat to it." But you may bust a gut as the Bandstand dancers attempt, in vain, to get a boogie going to Frankie Laine's Western-themed "Rango."
posted by underclocked at 4:00 AM on February 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

I'm too young to remember these types of shows but to me this is absolutely a joke about American Bandstand, Top of the Pops, and similar shows in the 60s (like the fictional local show in Hairspray) where teens would say incredibly anodyne things about the pop songs of the day.
posted by mskyle at 4:24 AM on February 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

See also the Sparks song "Music That You Can Dance To" from 1985.

"Music that you can dance to
Every single beat where it ought to be
Lip smacking good, good music
That and that alone is enough for me"
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:57 AM on February 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: An early instance with no adjective from The Saturday Review, March 29th 1969:

And as severe a reflection of the absurdity of itself as it is, Ruben & The Jets is a collection of good tunes. It has a beat and you can dance to it.

archive.org also has The History of American Bandstand: It's Got A Great Beat And You Can Dance To It!! by Michael Shore and Dick Clark.
posted by offog at 5:22 AM on February 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Set in 1959, but released in 1989, Dead Poets Society features Robin Williams' Brit Lit teacher critiquing Byron (?) with something like "I like Byron. I give him a 42, but I can't dance to it." and I think everybody in the theater at the time "got" that as a non-anachronistic gag about the Bandstand-style rankings mentioned above.

I think finding a particular expression of that sentiment with specific adjectives (or no adjectives) will be like navigating a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
posted by adekllny at 6:25 AM on February 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

This phrase makes me think of "Rock and Roll Music", first released by Chuck Berry in September of 1957. The song has been covered a million times, and the central lyric is "It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it". Any other mention of the phrase seems like an iteration of that lyric.
posted by effluvia at 7:14 AM on February 7, 2023

For reference, here is the 1967 episode of Bandstand featuring the audience dancing to “Rango”
posted by rongorongo at 7:27 AM on February 7, 2023

Here's a variant I am partial to!
posted by Don_K at 7:36 AM on February 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Clark would ask a boy and girl to grade up-and-coming hits on a scale of 35 to 98

That being the old Fahrenheit scale of musical goodness. Thank god we managed to switch to metric in at least one area.
posted by Naberius at 1:03 PM on February 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you all for sending me down a YT rabbithole! I'd bet money that it was the article about Ruben & The Jets.
posted by bendy at 6:26 PM on February 7, 2023

Best answer: Sorry, all of you are wrong. Marty McFly coined this phrase in 1885 at the Hill Valley Festival. Evidence: here.
posted by Snowishberlin at 7:52 AM on February 8, 2023 [2 favorites]