Tales of a Gen X Swinger - the revival, and popularity, of swing music

Reason, July, 2001 by Jesse Walker

A music critic's juvenile cultural politics

If adolescence is the discovery that every tradition, every habit, every quirk of your upbringing is arbitrary, absurd, and quite possibly dispensable, then adulthood is the recognition that the same is true of every alternative you've tried since adolescence. There may be a time, early in your life, when it feels right to adopt wholesale the likes and dislikes of a narrow cultural movement. But it's hard-for some of us, anyway-to let some dogma about what you "should" like stand in the way of your actual tastes. And so, eventually, you move on-perhaps to another semi-cult, and perhaps, eventually, to a more mature eclecticism: the kind that isn't so uptight about arbitrariness, absurdity, and dispensability.

In this way, the swing revival of the '90s--like the roughly simultaneous revivals of rockabilly, traditional country-western, and martini-flavored lounge musicemerged from the world of punk. If you're suspicious of the mass media and devoted to do-it-yourself culture, there are few better ways to express this than to ignore the officially designated alternatives to the mainstream and instead fashion your own subculture out of whatever pop detritus you can lay your hands on. If you like Benny Goodman, then dammit, you listen to Benny Goodman, even if you also like Husker Du. The affection comes first; the category comes second.

Today, of course, the swing revival (which actually owes more to jump blues, a '40s genre that emerged in part from swing) includes thousands of people with no interest at all in punk rock or the punk subculture. People listen or dance to the music for hundreds of not-always-consist tent reasons, just as other people-sometimes the same people-have hundreds of reasons for listening to rap, listening to bluegrass, or playing football. To explain a subculture, one must do more than trace its genealogy.

But it's worth noting that the conservative critic Mark Gauvreau Judge, author of If It Ain't Got That Swing: The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture, gets the genealogy of neo-swing wrong, and that he does so precisely because he's trying to reduce a complex phenomenon to a simple explanation. The swing revival, he tells us, began on April 21, 1998, with a Gap ad filled with young men and women dancing the Lindy Hop. He then allows that, "In a way, the swing tsunami wasn't completely unexpected," citing the 1996 film Swingers as a precursor. (In fact, the swing content in Swingers was close to zero, even if it did depict in passing some swing dancing-which, Judge tells us, "was enjoying a small underground rebirth in Los Angeles at the time.") And "there were a few people who had been swinging before Swingers"including, as it happens, Mark Gauvreau Judge, who took up the pastime in the D.C. area in 1995 (if you believe this book) or 1993 (if you believe a piece he wrote for Jitterbuzz.com).

Why the different years? I suspect it's because, when he wrote the Jitterbuzz piece, Judge's most recent book was his memoir of youthful alcoholism, Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk. It thus made narrative sense to make his first dance a step on his ascent to sobriety. ("When I arrived for the dance, I was terrified. For the past ten years alcohol had been my crutch in social situations.") But in the new version of the story, Judge is making a political argument, not offering a personal confession. It's therefore more convenient to have the dance take place "not long after I discovered Christopher Lasch," the social critic who prompted Judge's disillusionment with the left.

Either way, the "small underground rebirth" of swing obviously predated both the Gap ad and Swingers, and it clearly cast its net far beyond L.A. I can assure Judge that it was also present in Seattle in the mid-'90s, and anecdotal evidence--i.e., the testimony of far-flung friends-reveals that it existed in several other cities as well. The Gap ad brought the swing scene to the attention of the mass media, and the subsequent press attention (and the ad itself) helped spread it. But the revival was both underway and widespread long before Entertainment Weekly took notice of it, and it continues now, even though its moment in the media eye seems to have passed.

Why make a big deal about Judge's distorted chronology? Because Judge is not merely celebrating swing for its own sake; he's trying to make a larger point about the state of society. America, he complains, has been losing its "third places"-sociologist Ray Oldenburg's term for pubs, barber shops, and other spots outside both home and work where members of the community can informally gather. In the original swing age, Judge notes, such places were common; in particular, they dominated the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C., a once-thriving black district that was gradually eviscerated (and is now, though Judge doesn't mention it, enjoying something of a comeback). Today's swing clubs, he argues, mark the return of such places. Before they came along, it looked like "suburban kids would be trapped in a world without community, fun, adventure, romance. Stuck in a placeless place, they would be left to soak up the sewage coming through cable, on records, and in video games." The Gap ad rescued us: "There would have been no hope at all if a cultural counterrevolution hadn't taken place in April 1998."