Dennis
----------
That's where the divide is, dancing. (But, I got in a meditation mode here after Dwayne's post so, this got longer and longer...)
I was always a crappy dancer, but I loved it anyway, hence a little more than polite drinking so I didn't care how stupid I looked. As I remember Motown took some really smooth styled moves. Rock had gone stupid, or maybe I was getting too old. For some really tough to learn dancing, try Salsa.
For more serious listening, I was into jazz and had been for awhile. It was like reading books or something. You certainly couldn't dance to bebop, but you wanted to move---somehow especially to Monk. Following Miles was like a meditation. Straight it was great. Stoned it got into the mystical. And Coltrane of course, something like an impossible narrative take you places you never knew even existed. Then there was Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart (late when he started getting darker).
Basically I changed my mind in general about art. I have my own tastes, but I don't consider them theoretically important.
There are a couple of things to do. Switch to art history teacher mode. First, pick an art and try making it. It doesn't matter what. You get a much better insight into the arts if you've tried one. The other suggestion is look around for an art from another country or culture or time---something really different and look into it, or try and figure it out or enjoy it and try to imagine the people who made it, or just try to imitate it, copy it as close as you can get.
These little fun, hopefully enjoyable experiences get you way deep into theory, anthropology, and philosophy---or that's what they did for me. What are people doing when they made these things? The artifact isn't so easy to analyze when you get passed place and time.
(Just going down thread. This topic went places, fun places.):
``...boy, you sure can tell which o' them lboers has any rhythm to speak of. shag
``Hmm, a phrase that cries out for, you know, interrogation.'' Doug
So, on my theory plane, rhythm isn't so much a signature for soul, but of an art practice-enjoyment, mode-of-understanding. And I am aware that thinking like this, seems waay off the charts, unless you keep the metaphors tied close to poetry of somesort. But then there's rhythm and then there is anti-rhythm. Bebop had anti-rhythm sense to it, done on purpose to murder all that swing mellowness. There's whole dimensions to rhythm... I think you have to study jazz or a certain kind of jazz to get into that anti-rhythm territory. Well maybe not. You can find that opposition in some really cool dance moves.
Or if you prefer, there's poetry, say Elizabeth Bishop, dead-pan, ice cold, and great. A couple of weeks ago a friend brought over a recording on some fancy digital thing. It had two versions of The Art of Losing Things. The first was a draft, the second was the finished and published version. I liked the draft version because it wondered around looking for itself like an improvisation looking inside the rhythm or inside the melody line trying to find the change over place. Really cool. How exactly do you get from the trivial to the metaphysical? Rhythm is one way.
Say what jive?
CG