Happy New Year everyone and happy 20th birthday to the Melbourne Shuffle !
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I'm working on the Global Shuffle documentary at the moment. It will be released later this year 2010, check back to MSO for updates.
The documentary will be featuring the very earliest videos of the shuffle done by the original creators of the Melbourne Shuffle.
New shufflers today I'm sure will be surprised at the dozens of shuffle steps they have never heard about, mainly because they are not on youtube.
Most will not be aware that there were actually 3 main genre's of shuffling at the beginning (1990-96),
Only 2 steps have survived in mainstream shuffling, stomping (hardstyle) and shuffling (T step).
But as regular MSO readers will know, there are heaps more and you'll see them done by original shufflers for the first time ever !! on the Global Shuffle 1990:2010 documentary.
There will be limited cinema screenings and an international dvd release. There'll be plenty of Global Shuffle webclips and online extra's, bio's, free music downloads, online competitions and more...
It's taken 2 years of editing and preparation so far. The biggest challenge has been salvaging the original footage. Most of it on 20 year old video tape, which degrades with time, moisture and dust. Then degrades further with each playing and copy.
Just that concept alone will be unknown to most new shufflers who have grown up with digital everything.
In 1990 we were still firmly in the analog era. Digital was 8bit and only available in specialist areas, music, games and private online networks known as bbs - bulletin boards, the same as todays forums.
There was no internet/www, email was like having your own space shuttle and phones were hard wired into your house and used for talking ! text ? WTF?
Most people were still getting to grips with vinyl records being replaced by 'digital' CD's. There were lots of arguments about which format was better. Though everyone agreed they were better than audiotape cassettes. But nothing beat the Sony Walkman for personal mobile sound. It even took another decade from 1990 for Apple to digitise the Walkman into an ipod. That's how far back the shuffle started.
Melbourne in 1990 like the rest of the world was in recession, just as were are today. Times were very tough, the future was scary and nobody seemed to be in control anymore.
Just the year before 1989, Wall Street had crashed, the Berlin Wall had been torn down and we'd watched lone protestors face off with tanks in China.
The 'Cold War' we'd lived with for all our lives was over, because ordinary people decided we'd had enough of that.
We wanted to have some fun now. We were tired of all the pain, the politics, the corruption, the bullshit. We could do what ever we wanted to now. We, just ordinary people, were in control for a change.
So in Melbourne, we danced a new dance. We kept what we liked from the past, added our own stuff and shuffled them around to suit our mood.
There were no rules, no limits. We wanted to explore and find out what else there was to life.
And so began and still goes, the Melbourne Shuffle...
Have a great year everyone
