Dancers bend backwards at the waist and knees, shuttling forward under an horizontal bar, which is gradually lowered with each round, eliminating those who can’t make it underneath without hitting the stick, falling backwards or using their arms to stay balanced. ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack go under limbo stick.’ You know the moves. At the height of the craze, between 1960 and ’63, Bo Diddley, Duane Eddy, Duke Ellington, and James Brown all recorded limbo songs but it was rock’n’roller Chubby Checker who hit gold with Limbo Rock in ’62. Songs by Frankie Anderson, Lord Melody, Denzil Laing and the Wrigglers, Mighty Wrangler, Lord Tickler and the Jamaican Calypsonians, The Trinidad Serenaders. You might not think it, listening to the spry sounds that made the limbo dance a global craze in the early 1960s. It’s also one of the most famous and saddest dances in the world.

For Karl it was a near-death experience on the ocean.

If you visit Vermont it’s hopped-up pop in a bottle. It’s a way to describe modernist fantasies of cool affect. Limbo is a videogame, pulp fiction, a self-aggrandizing surrealist’s literary fantasy. It scales from the minor anxious withdrawal brought about by a broken smartphone device to serious time spent between jobs, and the months, years, letting a past relationship fade so that another can take colour. It’s that feeling in the dentist’s waiting room when you don’t know if your destiny lays up Satan’s root canal or ends with a bright white smile. Limbo is the lobby next to the hereafter’s elevator banks. Image: Limbo Dancer attempting a lowered pole by Mariegriffiths at English Wikipedia

Limbo music