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was spent practicing dance moves. The 1960s made famous the type of dance where you don't touch your partner. Touching only came in the "slow dance" or the cha cha. But the girls looked really cool doing the frug, the watusi, the monkey, all the latest dance moves, but mostly just the way they moved. It showed that they had practiced and learned how to get into the music. It gave us a feeling that this music was ours, and we had something to call our own. This was important when you figure that we were surrounded by the outside world of adults, who seemed to operate by their own set of rules and procedures that we didn't know yet. In our cliques, and later in the gym on the dance floor, we had something to call our own. This something was generated by popular music.

Another aspect of the cliques was that the girls, working together, figured out the words to the songs. It was something new for words to be sung more as an instrument than speech. The great ballad singers of the 1950s, like Nat King Cole, pronounced all of their words clearly and distinctly. Rock music made it hard to pick out some of the words. This was done on purpose, I would think. By working in our cliques and sharing we could grasp that elusive butterfly. For example someone might think that Creedence Clearwater Revival sang that we shouldn't go out tonight because there was a "bathroom on the right." But really it was because "there's a bad moon on the rise."

The boys had interest in bands too. They weren't gaga over the looks of the cute musicians. But they wanted to know how the songs would affect their lives on the streets. We could say things like this band was better than that one because they played their own instruments and wrote their own songs.

Popular music has changed today. Technology has made being a fan more a matter of loneliness. You don't need a group to learn the words to the songs and the dance moves. A computer device will pick out a song for you from any one of 400 attributes. You can download the song. You can get the words printed out for you. So there is no need for fan groups. When there is no need for something, the behavior that leads to it often dwindles. We can learn dance moves from TV and videos. There is no need for an underground youth movement to have their own space going because they practice how to move together. We are plugged into technology instead.

Another aspect changed what popular music means to us. Organizing in small groups, with a way of life

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