"Every day brings up a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance." -Oprah Winfrey
The exponential rise in dance crazes and associated dance music made it possible for record companies to continue to make and sell recordings featuring new or original dance forms. Media outlets such as 'American Bandstand' frequently advertised the releases, in turn causing numerous fresh dance sensations to emerge. As a result, dance crazes rapidly swept across the entire pop music industry - even British Bands such as The Beatles ('Twist and Shout') and the Swinging Blue Jeans ('Hippy Hippy Shake') across the Atlantic adopted the method of incorporating unique dance steps to each of their songs (Hoffman). In addition, schools and cities created their own dances in association with a song and were recognized as such. For example, London was known for 'The Creep', New York for 'The Kangaroo', and Harvard University for 'The Penguin'. As the globalization of 'The Twist' continued, different countries around the world made variations of 'The Twist', such as 'The Italian Twist', the 'American Twist', and the 'French Twist' ("Dance Crazes"). The proliferation of dance crazes only escalated, showing no signs of slowing down.
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Clark was constantly on the search for new dance trends to satisfy his immense business-expansion ambitions. For example, he popularized 'The Twist' by convincing the local Philadelphia group 'Cameo/Parkway' to create their own version of the associated song, a Hank Ballard single with the same name. With lead singer Chubby Checker, the single climbed to the top of music charts. This inspired other musicians to design variations of this song, and similar twist singles became bestsellers later on as well. The simplicity of this dance appealed to both adolescents and adults. Crazed crowds performing the dance to the matching song were photographed in the Peppermint Lounge by the late 1961's. Hence, the band 'Cameo/Parkway' directly contributed to the start of the upcoming dance craze movement (Hoffman).
However, dance development was greatly impeded by the British Invasion and numerous American Renaissance trends that ensued (e.g. soul, folk rock, and other West Coast Styles). In the mid 1960's dance music was completely burned down and wiped out by the wildfire, and only its roots remained unharmed, nestled safely in the rich soil of clubs underground. This was mainly due to inciting discotheques, who from then on continued to nourish the surviving remnants of dance so that it could thrive once again. And it did. In less than a decade, dance crazes regrew as a new type of plant: disco (Hoffman).
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