“does anyone want to signal they are frivolous?”

Yes. All the time. Those who are incontestably high in any social order will put great effort into frivolity as a form of counter-signaling.

Drunken frat-boy jocks, Old Etonians & Harrovians, starlets, the most successful sales guy who also gets the loudest at the corporate party, the real aristocracy, you name it. Comedy is a separate category; that’s a classical institution requiring its own analysis.

“As I too often fall on the wrong side of serious-silly norms”

Ponder instead that one is perhaps merely resting at the first of Schopenhauer’s 3 stages of truth. I sometimes now wonder if all those comic-book/anime/Star Trek loving nerds might also perhaps be counter-signaling against their massively obvious and otherwise intimidating overclock.

Music’s function, like humor, is entertainment. It’s primarily fun. But given that happiness (or satisfaction?) is the ultimate goal in life, music is very serious. My career focuses on artistic matters. I grew up thinking that doctors were more important than artists, that artists were unnecessary novelties. But without actually enjoying life, there is no purpose to being alive. Which reminds me of my favorite Catholic church song, “We are many parts… but we are all one body… and the gifts we have… we are given to share…” Is that song fun or serious?

This was true of the middle classes, who once sought recognition through a ritualized classical music, as it was of the jazzhound:

“The young modernists who were heirs of the 1940s were also heirs of the pride that jazzmen had been taking in their expanded [musical] capabilities. . .By the 1950s, however, the concept of jazz as an object-in-itself, a non-functional music in the sense that it was no longer designed for dancing or background listening [while dining], had attracted a sizable new audience. . .The listeners, or most of them, accepted the new music on the players’ terms (emphasis added) and went to Birdland as if it were Town Hall.

Older musicians. . .are often made nervous by the seeming passivity and stern concentration of the new serious audience. Anita O’Day, who is temperamentally of the jazz-as-entertainment tradition, speaks for the pre-modernists when she says ‘I feel more comfortable when the audience is balling it up a little. . .’ Several of the modernists agree with her but expect silence and sustained attention from an audience.

A large part of the contemporary jazz audience, however, is more likely to be serious in its mien than in its comprehension of the music. Much of the audience, as has been true of every jazz generation so far, is more compulsive about seeming ‘hip’ to the newest innovations than in understanding the content of those innovations. These are youngsters who find in jazz a surface corollary to their own safely transitory ‘rebellion’ of adolescence. . .

As a result, the jazzman . . .has become even more self-conscious about his work.” – Nat Hentoff, The Jazz Life, 1978

And now this tendency has perhaps passed to a certain segment of the indie set, who use “seriousness” and non-dancing to demand respect & question authority – no need to even “raise your hand.”

They have oodles of indie cred, yet they realize that music is supposed to be fun. And their fans have picked up on this notion. At Hold Steady shows, people sing along and dance and get every bit as rowdy as fans at, say, a Grateful Dead show. You can have all of this fun and still maintain your oh-so-important-serious/ironic indie cred.

They are an important band, I hope.

So, any suggestions for Robin where he might find a music-dance-fun ingroup to his taste?

Well, Jaxx, DC’s premier German Death Metal nightclub, is conveniently close to George Mason, at the corner of Rolling Road & Old Keene Mill.

You can of course also go to a contra-dance. Fun-loving, gregarious folks line-dancing all around!

So, any suggestions for Robin where he might find a music-dance-fun ingroup to his taste?

Beethoven campaigned against the aristocratic practice of talking during concerts. If people started talking, he would stop playing.