Getting away a bit from the usual focus on what's gone wrong with the song tradition...

The last new kind of dance I can remember becoming a mass phenomenon in my lifetime was the Twist, sometime in the early 1960s. And even that was maybe just a variant of jive. There have been new moves within existing popular dance styles - moonwalk, pogo - but not a whole new genre of dance you might need a class to get down right.

Meanwhile in the folkdance scene (SCD, contra, Latin, bellydance, whatever) we have a lot of new dances created by combining existing steps and moves, which are great fun for small circles of hobbyists, but nothing that has a prayer of catching on in the wider culture. Whatever merits something like "Shiftin Bobbins" has, nobody's going to be doing it to a DJ mix in a club.

Fast backward a few decades and you had whole new dances being created every few years, carrying their specific kinds of music along with them on a wave of popularity that could often be an international phenomenon. Waltzes and polkas were probably the biggest ever, but there were still new ones up till WW2.

Maybe Latin American dance has managed to generate new ideas more than the First World's Euro/Afro mainstream, but even with that what's caught on in the culture as a whole in the last 25 years?

Can dance still be a motive force for the development of a melodic tradition that goes in a new direction?