It was three generations from the time a starman said “Let all the children boogie” before the children finally did.
No one knew how it happened or why, or who put the album in rotation,
But somewhere out in the outlands, at the crossroads of nowhere and everywhere, where the night wind blows in off the desert and the highways stretch out into forever, a radio station with chrome walls and neon signs began to broadcast.
And all the radios and the TVs and the computers and the phones and iPods stopped playing games and video clips and songs from a fallen world and started to sing with heavenly harps and steel-gleaming voices and the thunder of rock & roll.
Gabriel had a trumpet, but who knew Michael had an axe?
And the children remembered what most of them never knew about tuning a transistor radio in the deep part of the night and holding it to their ears so they could hear the songs coming from the distant cities where hope hadn’t run dry.
And the children began to dance.
First came the freaks and the outcasts: the fat girls and the scrawny boys, the ones with the piercings and the colored hair and the shaved heads. The fags and dykes and queers and sluts. The disgraced and the disowned. The beaten and broken. The refugee and the runaway. The shy ones who hid in the corner and the ones who spit in the world’s face and raged.
Of course they heard the music first. They’d been listening for it so hard and so long.
With the freaks came the artists (often one and the same), the strange beautiful creatures, the ones who’d spent their lives dancing and singing the faint echoes of the Song as it played in their souls, living receivers playing out peace and joy and rage and sorrow to the world. Smeared in paint and clay, they came. Wearing masks and make-up, they came. Reciting verses and telling tales, they came. Singing arias and pop songs and rap, they came. Dancing ballet and jigs and twerking and tap, they came. Playing drums and fiddles and guitars and pipes and whistles and synthesizers and buckets and spoons, they came.
Finally came the lucky ones. The quarterbacks and the cheerleading captains. The prom queens and the homecoming kings, the private school students and the Greek system presidents. The ones who got horses or cars for their birthdays, the rich and the beautiful. They came last, as they’d come first their whole lives.
Lucky those lives had been so short. They’d almost lost the Song in the sound of their own good fortune.
They danced in hijab and in miniskirts, they danced in suits and rags.
They ran at each other and roared in each other’s faces, they kissed and groped and tore at each other’s clothes, hate replaced with terrifying love.
They filled the streets, they danced in the deserts, they sweated and stank under the Sun. They howled to the Moon, they splashed in the fountains and they kicked up dust. They raised their faces to Heaven and screamed in love and joy and rage and anguish at the ruined world they had inherited.
The walls fell and all the promises of the apocalypses were kept.
Even as they started to shine like young stars, there were those who tried to stop them dancing – the greedy, the cruel, the powerful – those who wanted no new world to arise because they were important in the old world, and those who wanted no better for their children than they had had themselves.
But the dance couldn’t be stopped. In many kinds of rapture, they rose into the sky and their light shines down on us still.
And some of us who were left behind look up to that light, and we remember what it was to be young, and we take hope from the children where we should have given it, and we begin to hear the faint distant echoes of the Song.
Let the old folks boogie.
Here are the works of art that inspired this poem. First, David Bowie says “Let the Children Boogie”. Interesting how Starman sounds like more than just an alien. Maybe a benevolent Outsider Thing:
Then P!nk shows us what the children dancing might look like: