MUSIC-USA: Swing Era is Back

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 6 1998 (IPS) - Years after the Lambada fizzled and died, and the Macarena dropped out of sight, young Americans have returned to the past for the latest hip dance number – the 1940s- era Lindy Hop.

Once regarded as antique, swing music and dancing is back with a vengeance, with swing clubs opening across the United States. Crowds flocked to this summer’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Swing’, a dance exhibition outside New York’s swank Lincoln Centre and dance instructors are reporting massive increases in their class sizes.

Nor has swing music been forgotten either. Brian Setzer, a former member of the rockabilly group Stray Cats, has had a career- reviving hit with is remake of Louis Prima’s vintage song ‘Jump Jive an’ Wail’. Setzer performed the song, with a blasting big band accompanying him, for the annual MTV Music Video Awards in Los Angeles last month, a rare nod to a musical style whose heyday ended some 50 years ago.

Behind Setzer is a wealth of young groups – many of them ska or punk bands in previous incarnations – who have become devoted to the slick style of Frank Sinatra, the manic charm of Louis Prima and Louis Jordan, and the tight band dynamics of the orchestras conducted by Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford.

Unfortunately for novices, many of the bands have almost indistinguishable styles and names, from Big Bad Voodoo Daddy to the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. From the Royal Crown Revue’s obsession with 1950s signifiers like Marlon Brando and pin-up queen Betty Page to the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ imitations of Billie Holliday and Cab Calloway, their shared tastes all occupy a pretty narrow range. The fad, basically, could be classified as All the Things that Stopped Being Cool after 1960.

So what’s happening to the youth of America? Mocked for years for not knowing or caring about relatively recent events, from Vietnam to Watergate, why do they want suddenly to dress and dance like their grandparents and listen to such oldies as Duke Ellington’s ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’?

Some swing-watchers place the credit, or blame, on a jeans commercial. Earlier this year, The Gap tried to lure teenagers to their khaki pants with an energetic ad showing kids dancing the Lindy Hop while Prima sings the opening bars of ‘Jump Jive an’ Wail’. The advertisement, called ‘Khakis Swing’, became so popular that The Gap kept it on the air to respond to viewer demand.

The Gap ad in turn followed the success of a 1996 movie, ‘Swingers’, which showed the misadventures of two young bachelors – played by Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughan – as they frequent swing clubs and try to pick up girls in Las Vegas. The lightweight comedy neatly dusted off some old swing-era cliches, from the friends telling each other, “You’re money, baby,” to dancers jitterbugging to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s music.

In general, youngsters looking for a new cool scene to attach themselves to have been turning back to the glamourous world of the swingers – with a particular emphasis on Sinatra, who died earlier this year, and his ‘Rat Pack’ friends, singers Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin and actors Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford.

In contrast to the harried President Bill Clinton of today, John F. Kennedy added to the Rat Pack’s lustre – and to his own – by becoming chummy with Sinatra as he ran for president in 1960. One recent movie on the Home Box Office channel, ‘The Rat Pack’, went so far as to credit Kennedy’s victory that year over Richard Nixon to Sinatra’s alleged efforts to lobby the Chicago Mafia to support the Democratic candidate.

‘The Rat Pack’ itself is an example of the resurgence of the swingers’ world, which in recent years had been portrayed – with some reason – as sleazy, sexist and more than a little sad. But the movie’s Sinatra (played by Ray Liotta), Davis (Don Cheadle) and Martin (Joe Mantegna) are portrayed as sincere, serious people – rather than the corny show-business caricatures they became.

After Sinatra’s death in May and the success of the Squirrel Nut Zipper’s hit song ‘Hell’ last year, the burst of interest in swing this year was almost inevitable. But some skeptics wonder how long the scene can last – particularly since swing music, best associated by the African American big bands of the post- Depression era, has returned as an essentially all-white fad.

Recent dance fads offer scant hope for longevity. The Lambada, based on a Brazilian dance craze – and, ironically, one which was also featured in a television advertisement for Orangina before it attracted attention worldwide – never really caught on in the United States, despite a few Lambada-based movies.

The Macarena swept the nation two years ago, and even was performed stiffly by Vice President Al Gore and dozens of Democrats at the party’s 1996 presidential convention, but quickly fell out of style (predictably, once Gore started dancing said the critics).

Of course, the Lindy Hop has already stood the test of time, as have Panama hats and Duke Ellington. For a little while at least, the youth of America have a fad where they can dance along with their grandparents – even if their parents feel a bit confused by the whole thing.