Black Kids
"I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You"
Partie Traumatic
Self-released
The first time I heard (not listened to) Black Kids' "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You", was in 2008, the year when I started vagabonding and wandering in this so-called pretentious world called music. I was in junior high school and made my own Top 40, taking references from Prambors' radio website, back when they still provided a healthy amount of good and unsung songs. Until now, I still save the Word file of my Top 40 where Black Kids was still there on my computer. But, it was seven years later, in 2015, when I, for the first time, listened to "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You", and I was instantly hooked.
Black Kids is indeed an interesting case of study. They started out as nobody, an obscure band from Jacksonville, Florida, consisting of singer/guitarist Reggie Youngblood, keyboard-playing backup singers Ali Youngblood, and Dawn Watley, bass player Owen Holmes, and drummer Kevin Snow. They began their own journey in Myspace--that's, young people, an ancient social media where people can share their music--in 2007 by releasing Wizards of Ahhhs EP. And that's when their ball of stardom started rolling.
"I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend" is a fun pop song, heavily imbued with synthesizer and ambiguous verse, "You are the girl that I've been dreaming of/ ever since I was a little girl", even though they defensively state that it's just an inside joke between lead singer Reggie Younglood and his sister, Ali. But, that's not the only thing that makes "I'm Not Gonna Teach" fun. The scintillating covetousness when we see our crush kissing his/her significant other and our inability to act are relatable experience for most of us, and Black Kids wittily analogizes this with a dancing scene where the significant other "got two-left feet and bites my moves", and we are just schadenfreude-ing seeing the significant other's incompetence.
"I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend" may be a one hit wonder, but if being covered by Glee is any indication that a song is popular (bizarrely, "I'm Not Gonna Teach" is more popular in UK than in their native country), then Black Kids leaves us some good legacy.
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