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Upswing
National Review, Oct 12, 1998 by Eric Felten
Rock 'n' roll can never die? Think again-here comes swing.
It seems that every development of national consequence these days involves The Gap. There was, of course, Monica's navy blue dress, about which the less said the better. And then there was the Jump, Jive, and Wail television ad-a commercial for The Gap in which a gaggle of twenty-somethings in khakis and T-shirts jitterbug themselves silly. Monica's Gap dress certified that Bill Clinton is a satyric liar; the Gap ad certified that swing dancing is an honest-to-goodness craze.
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The "khakis swing" ad was just one of a slew of commercials for The Gap featuring various musical genres. There was the spot with khaki-clad hip-hop kids break-dancing; there were the suburban youth inline-skating to a Seventies groove. But compared with the swing ad, the rock and funk spots were tired and pointless. All it takes is a few bars of Louis Prima jumping, jiving, and wailing to demonstrate that, at the end of the century, the dominant musical paradigm is exhausted.
Rock is exhausted; funk rock is exhausted; folk rock is exhausted; glam rock is exhausted; hippie rock is exhausted; punk rock is exhausted; soft rock is exhausted; hard rock is exhausted; angst rock is exhausted; pop rock is exhausted; country rock is exhausted; alternative rock is exhausted. This has been a dread but inescapable realization for the music industry, whose stock in trade is novelty. For decades the biz has been repackaging three-chords-and-a-backbeat, always presenting it as what's new. But even Rolling Stones grow moss in time. An industry-wide deterioration in record sales is the result.
That's why record-company execs go to bed at night praying that swing dancing is more than a fad. "Oh, please, oh please," they beg, "let it be a trend." Neo-swing is the first new musical phenomenon in years to stir up the Billboard charts. Other than Harry Connick Jr. and the execrable Kenny G, no jazz act in decades has made it to the Billboard Top 200. By contrast, in the last month alone four different swing bands have been lodged in the Top 50. Still, no one knows whether, five years from now, NBC will be broadcasting the "Swing Music Awards," or whether Squirrel Nut Zippers will be playing some suburban fern bar with those two Macarena guys.
Jazz musicians-pessimistic bunch that they are-are betting that the swing craze is only a fad. And who can blame them? After half a century in the record-sales wilderness, a music resembling jazz finally breaks onto the pop charts, and where are the jazz musicians? They're left standing on the sidelines, broke and bitter, while aging rockabilly stars and reformed punk-rockers make millions hacking their way through jump-blues tunes. The jazz sophisticates could try to compete; instead they choose to hole up like so many eschatologists in the desert, awaiting the second coming of Eric Dolphy.
Because the clothes hark back to the 1940s and the music tends toward the early 1950s, the neo-swing craze has been mistaken for a conservative movement. There are a few rudimentary strains of conservatism in the mix; the lead singer of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, after spending the late Eighties and early Nineties thrashing around in punk bands, eventually tired of the nihilism inherent in the noise. But though you can take the boys out of the punk scene, you can't completely take the punk out of the boys. Consider the other "Daddy" band-the Cherry Poppin' Daddies. The name alone speaks volumes about the neo-swing sensibility, a wolfish mindset that shares more with the punk band Sex Pistols than with, say, Tommy Dorsey (who, though a real-life tough-guy, presented himself as the "Sentimental Gentleman of Swing").
The punk sensibility is the reason why neo-swing music isn't exactly conservative, but it is also the reason why neo-swing just might transcend fad status and develop into a full-fledged pop genre. For years teenagers have been flailing about in search of a way to shock and outrage their boomer parents. All in vain. The specter of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll throws boomers, not into a tizzy, but into treacly flights of reminiscence. And though it's a nice try, tattoos and nipple rings haven't worked much better. But a Rat Pack aesthetic does the trick: what could be more alien to the Birkenstock-and-granola geezers than booze and broads? The music also has the danger adolescents so crave: for pure youthful self-destructiveness, flying elbows in the mosh pit pale in comparison with the chance of breaking your neck doing Lindy Hop acrobatics.
EVEN though the new crowd of swingers have one eye on Frank, Sammy, and Deano, the shtick is decidedly post-modern. For many in the neo-swing crowd, the Swing Era is a grab bag of tropes-musical, linguistic, sartorial, and social-to be employed for ironic affect. Cab Calloway wrote the hep-cat dictionary; the neo-swingers just crib from it, and always with a wink and a nod. That taste for camp could well limit the success of swing, because irony is as tired as rock itself. The sooner the new swingers get over it, the better their chances.
