3/?

m. gookin
on
cupid, “the cupid shuffle”

(march danceness, 00s edition)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a cruel (though fun) tournament! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round. We wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read. The Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? There is no voting this year, but the tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above).

We hope these great essays will again earn your love.

Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

Altruistic and Self-Serving: m Gookin on Cupid’s “The Cupid Shuffle”

“I’ve been thinking about your walk-out recently,” I told Mei Ratz last August, just before the start of the school year. As a junior in high school, Mei organized a schoolwide walk-out. My parents were outraged by what they saw as the local newspaper’s—my current employer—overly dismissive coverage of a serious issue. Mei says that the support of teachers who told students they wouldn’t be teaching anything during that class period is really what made it successful. 
Whoever deserves the credit, Mei’s courage and community organizing paid off. The next year, when I was a freshman, Mei was still there, captain of the girls swim team; the principal she had been protesting was gone.
My local school board has been making headlines around the state recently, forcing a dedicated educator out of the school district, penalizing a student for completing an assigned class project, trying to redefine “book banning” so it doesn’t include removing books from library shelves. They’ve also instituted a draconian drug testing policy for all student athletes, likely aimed at the Native American kids on the teams. My day job is to stick to the facts, so I usually can’t make these kinds of sweeping opinion-based claims—but here, I can say what I feel. Now kick, kids; we’re due for another walk-out. 

According to the Guiness Book of World Records website, in 2007 “Cupid Shuffle” set the record for the world’s longest line dance, with over 17,000 people dancing in the streets of Atlanta. For a few glorious years, the Cupid Shuffle was the biggest line dance of all time—not figuratively, but numerically, statistically. It’s since been outpaced, but you put it on at any wedding or birthday and you’ll see people out dancing; the Cupid Shuffle has staying power like few other dance songs besides the King of Kings, the Macarena. 
There’s something about a line dance—dancing individually but as a group, watching your neighbor but never touching—that makes it hard to escape. The prescribed hop and stomp to the beat grab even those who don’t know how to dance. No thoughts, head empty, now walk it by yourself.
Wikipedia would disagree with this assessment, but I believe that line dances were probably invented before fire or cooking or any of the things evolutionary scientists say “make us human”. 

*

When I was in high school, the coolest place I knew to go to was El Toro, a crusty old honky-tonk eternally decorated for Christmas. One night a week, they’d pull a partition out, tell the folks at the bar they couldn’t take their drinks onto the dance floor, and let the high school kids come dance. 
I didn’t know much about country swing; my mom tried to teach me the waltz when I was 10 or 11, but had despaired of her efforts about two minutes in. In grade school music class they taught us a few basic moves, so I wasn’t totally adrift, but my first night at El Toro was mostly spent learning how to not make my dance partner fall on their face. But more than country swing, more than two-step, honky-tonk bars love line dances, and when “Cupid Shuffle” came on I knew exactly what to do. 
El Toro, in a town of 400 half an hour away from my childhood home, was bustling on those nights, hot with the sweat of what seemed to be countless dancing bodies. A friend of mine met the man she married right out of high school one night on that dance floor, and I remember hearing rumors of parking lot fist fights Monday mornings at school. It closed not long after I graduated.
Even though I’ve pulled all kinds of death-defying stunts since, and no one ever actually told me I couldn’t or shouldn’t go there, El Toro remains, in my mind, the most daring adventure I’ve ever attempted.

I can't really say if there actually was a line dancing craze in the mid-2000s or if it just felt that way to me. Dance crazes have existed as long as there has been dancing; things fall in and out of favor as something new excites people just as the old becomes dated. 
Dance in the 2000s wasn’t like dance is now, or like dance was 20 years before, either. Jumping, gyrating, dropping as low to the ground as you could manage while staying upright and on your feet—occasionally you’d see someone start breakdancing, and a circle of seagulls hungry for either awe or embarrassment would form around them on the dance floor. 2000s dance was club dancing; aside from the spectator sport of breakdance, it was small, confined, a deliberate combination of sex and space-saving restraint. It was, also, quite frequently fairly boring.
The fundamental appeal of a line dance—or any other called dance—is that it is virtually indistinguishable from the Hokey Pokey. In a previous March Xness, an essay made the case that modern notions of sexiness derive from blue jeans; I think the appeal of a song everyone moves to in joyful coordinated repetition is the opposite. The Macarena's lyrics are about sex and betrayal, but that doesn't make our enjoyment of its dance any less childlike. 

*

My second pick for this tournament was Bowling For Soup’s “A Really Cool Dance Song”, which wasn’t on the longlist but makes its own case for inclusion in its very title. When I was in college, my roommate and I would often each sit on our own beds, facing each other with our backs against the walls, working on our respective projects and listening to my Pandora. I can’t work in silence, and she said that she liked to listen to music while working, too. I don’t remember what year or which dorm, but I remember one time that “A Really Cool Dance Song” came on.
“This is really good,” she said, surprised.
I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “It’s a joke,” I told her, oblivious to the offense forming on her face. “It’s making fun of this kind of music.” 
I lived—and worked and studied—with the same roommate for most of my college career. We parted ways on bad terms, in part due to my own inability to navigate when to use what words.
It’s funny to think that if someone had had the foresight to snatch up “Cupid Shuffle” before me, I could now be reminiscing about the ups and downs of college rather than high school. Both were tough times for me; my high school life was rigidly structured, while college was freeing but dangerous. I always had too many projects and not enough time, or too much time and not enough projects. 
The Cupid Shuffle isn’t a joke, but it isn’t serious, either. Like a lot of music of that era—post-pop-punk enough for politics to no longer be cool, still pre-hipster—it’s fundamentally about a physical pleasure. Dancing is fun, it says, come on, I’ll show you. 

*

When “Cupid Shuffle” was released in 2007, I was 14, fresh off spending a month backpacking with a group of total strangers in the Wyoming backcountry. My freshman and sophomore years of high school are something of a blur, but I think it probably took a year or two for the song to reach us, the way things always did then.
Central Wyoming is about as far from the “Cupid Shuffle” music video as possible; the video, which features a TV news crew documenting an enormous line dance that’s sweeping a city, makes the case for the Cupid Shuffle as the next big dance craze. It wouldn’t take much for a dance craze to take over my hometown, big enough by Wyoming standards but small pretty much anywhere else – although, given our reputation for strongly divided opinions, maybe it would take a lot after all. 
When my name came up in the Xness lottery I didn’t even have to think about what songs defined dancing in that era for me: “Cupid Shuffle”, “Low”, maybe one or two others. I was in junior high and high school in the 2000s; these are the songs that I associate with everything from homecoming to prom, and nostalgia is a powerful thing. Whether I liked these songs at the time or not is inconsequential in the face of remembering how I strung lights around the high school cafeteria, balanced on a step ladder, in preparation for junior prom.

He's not a rapper, the titular Cupid tells us a few lines into the “Cupid Shuffle”, and this probably isn't zydeco. So what is "Cupid Shuffle"? A line dance, certainly, and it could probably be safely called hip hop. The only real clues Cupid provides for what he thinks the song is are that it's new, it's for people of all ages, and he's from the "dirty South". 
A preacher's son from Louisiana, Cupid supposedly got his stage name from a performance of 112's “Cupid” that showed off his vocal talents. If you listen to almost any other song he’s recorded, you can hear why someone might give him a nickname that celebrates him as a virtuoso—but in 2012 he failed to make it past auditions for The Voice when he sang "Cupid Shuffle". It isn't a vehicle for incredible artistry, but an accessible call out onto the dance floor. 
Does it matter what "Cupid Shuffle" is, or whether it's technically impressive? Cupid is a fantastic singer, but his biggest hit doesn't require or make use of his level of talent. The true genius of the song doesn’t lie in an individual performance.
A good song never dies, Saint Motel instructs us, it just reminds you of where you were. By that measure, for me at least “Cupid Shuffle” is either one of the best or one of the worst songs; each sliding step a firmly present now, each kick a hundred overlapping memories. 

*

With one or two exceptions, my mom’s family and I don’t really get along. Not in the sense that we don’t like each other, but in the sense that we don’t know each other. They all grew up together in the endless cornfields of Minnesota, and I spent my childhood a thousand miles away in the steep-sided foothills of the Rockies; they liked to party and race around on motorcycles and play baseball in the field behind my grandparents’ house, while I was an inside kid whose definition of “inside” included the remote Western backcountry, passionate about reading books and whitewater rafting and not talking to people I didn’t know.
Even so, at my cousin’s wedding a few summers ago when “Cupid Shuffle” came on I found myself in a line with a cousin to either side, aunts and uncles in front of and behind me, all of us kicking our feet in imperfect synchronization. And that’s what a line dance gives you that no other dance can, I think: instant community, just-add-water connection, gasping laughter shared with a cousin you’ve never known how to talk to. Just let the music come from your soul, so all of your people can stay out on the floor. 

There is a freedom in structure, and a structure to rebellion. Anger may be motivating, but I’ve found that in the long term, rage is less productive than connection.
The thing I know about victory from high school swimming is that it isn’t about who goes the fastest. It doesn’t matter if your team has the greatest swimmer in the state, it matters if you have the 20 swimmers who are hot on their heels, racking up second and third place victories. Winning isn’t about one person being the best, it’s about everyone being that little bit better.
“Fourteen,” Mei Ratz corrected. “You need 14 mediocre swimmers to win; I worked it out.” 
Maybe the smart move—the competitive move—would have been to talk to Cupid himself about this essay, get the weight of his 8,000 twitter followers behind us. But this essay isn’t about Cupid, not really; it’s about high school, and line dancing, and togetherness without uniformity. I sat down and talked to Mei. 
Mei’s told the school board how she feels about their choices. The issues at hand have changed, but Mei’s still the same leader she was on the eve of the debut of the “Cupid Shuffle”: empathetic, adamant, thorough. Someone who makes change by reaching out. She didn’t know that she was community organizing when she led the walk-out, she explained, she just did it because she cared. 
“You can’t qualify community by likeness, that’s exclusion,” she told me. “It has to be organic, because people want to come together, like a line dance; it can’t have such rigid rules that you fail immediately.” The beauty of a line dance, we agreed, is that everyone moves together, extending each other the grace of taking it just seriously enough for it to be sincere and not awkward or embarrassing—but still with room for people to move differently or miss a few steps. Dancing isn’t comfortable; it’s energetic, it’s work. But that’s part of what makes it fun. 
“Maybe that’s where we learn community, is in dance,” Mei said. “Community should be joyful. When we’re scared, it’s hard to line dance.” 

M Gookin grew up in the winningest swim town (that didn’t care about swimming at all) in Wyoming. She took ballet and jazz dance classes throughout her childhood, on which she blames her struggles with being spontaneous on the dance floor. She now writes for a living, and spends her time playing Dungeons and Dragons or trivia.