Whether or not the song “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)” happens to be playing, my son often walks around apartment (and everywhere else) blissfully performing his version of the blockbuster single’s now iconic dance moves. Especially the whip part. Surely you’re familiar? It’s a little bit of a forward arm extension, with a cool twist of the hand, and some swivel in the hips. This is important to know to fully enjoy these two incidents.
Incident # 1
We’re New Yorkers and apartment-dwellers and our common living area, naturally, is our living room, where at night, my daughter (age 15 nearing 16) often likes to study, provided she doesn’t need total concentration or have to talk out loud to herself (for Spanish). So she has an impressive tolerance for ambient noise or motion, except one thing. Yup, her brother’s dance moves.
There he goes whipping and nae-nae-ing his way to the bathroom, and she gets completely bent out of shape.
Elena: “Adam, will you stop that?!”
Adam, quick to anger: “What’s wrong with it?!”
Elena: “It’s stupid. Why are you always doing that?!”
Adam: “Why not?!”
There certainly are times when goes out of his way to annoy her, but I want to live in a world where people feel free to dance around if the spirit moves them. So I overruled her objections, and put the onus on her to “lighten up or study in another room.”
Incident # 2
Perhaps my response also has something to do with me harboring more affection for “Watch Me” than I may have realized. My wife and I went to a 60th birthday party on Saturday night. It was a costume party where people where encouraged to dress in the fashion of one of the decades covering the life of the birthday boy, from the 60s till now. My wife and I went as hippies with an Eastern Zen vibe—I thought of us as yin and yang. But here’s the thing: The live band played a terrific mix of pop and rock from our youth—and every time I danced, one of my instinctive go-to moves was the whip. It was like I couldn’t escape my present, not even with help of the Rolling Stones.
Maybe I should take Elena’s side next time.
