Dance With Me (T.S.O.L. Album) - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

Lyrically, Dance with Me diverged from the radical leftist political themes of the band's debut EP in favor of horror film- and gothic-inspired topics. Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore: A Tribal History, writes that "T.S.O.L. were always a step ahead of the audience. Their self-titled EP with 'Abolish Government' was lauded for its political conviction. By 1981, was smearing makeup on his face to affront the surf punks, and people called it 'goth'." According to Grisham, the band had been moving in a horror-inspired direction prior to the T.S.O.L. EP, and already had some of the Dance with Me material in their repertoire before recording the EP but withheld it for later use:

People talk about how T.S.O.L. changed so much from the first EP to Dance with Me,from political punk to gothic punk. But we had all those songs before we did the first EP. If you look on the first EP cover, my hair's sticking straight up, I'm wearing some Frankenstein suit, and I've got black makeup all over my eyes. We knew Posh Boy was gonna burn us, but we wanted to put out a record. So it was like, 'Let's give him these, and we'll save the good stuff for later.' During Dance with Me, we were labeled gothic/horror...whatever. Yeah, we dug up some graves but we dug up graves even before the first record. All that crap, like breaking into mortuaries, we'd done that before. Look at the first T.S.O.L. record, it thanks the church PA: we'd been busting into churches and desecrating the altars. We'd steal the PA and spraypaint the altars.

Photographer Edward Colver, who contributed photos for the album's insert, remarked "Back then, we called it death rock. It wasn't called goth yet. T.S.O.L., Christian Death, 45 Grave, and even Social Distortion started that whole mess. They all wore lots of pancake makeup and pissed off a lot of the punk rockers in the process."