There Were Chaps, Who Did Taps. . .

It's easy to despair for the kids these days, with their text messaging and their Miley Cyruses and their light-up sneakers, but I am here to tell you that I have found a redeeming aspect to today's youth culture: This generation, if given a chance, could be the ones to save modern dance.

No seriously. There's the ballroom cheese of "Dancing With the Stars," the highly technical criticism on "So You Think You Can Dance" and now, on MTV, that bastion of trash-culture, the over-named and ludicrously padded-for-time "Randy Jackson Presents America's Best Dance Crew" feeding the kids complicated choreography with a tasty hip-hop coating.

My personal favorite team is the highly-skilled if poorly spelled "JabbaWokkeeZ" (Lewis Carroll: The original gangsta? Discuss.) who I think could give any NEA-funded, body-painted arm-wavers a run for their money:



Admit it: change the music to something plonking and tuneless and dress those guys in pink body-stockings and the highbrow-artsy people would be going nuts for them.

And then there's "BreakSk8" who, um, breakdance on rollerskates:



Okay, that's not art. But damn if it isn't fun.