sound check: it ain't got that swing, part 1

does anyone remember the swing jazz craze of the late nineties? in the midst of a y2k revival, are we skipping swing? what does it mean when a trend doesn't get revived?

Y2K is back, baby. You can’t swing your chrome manicure these days without hitting a pair of baggy jeans and a nonexistent top, and I’m here for it. And just like the first go-round, we’re getting the music to match. Katseye have adopted the aesthetic and the sound as their entire ethos, and they’re nailing it. Nineteen year-old me would have secretly slithered around my dorm room to “Gabriela,” not letting anyone know lest it ruin my indie-cool-in-pop-clothing vibe. (I was cringe. We were all cringe.) And grunge, the hard rock era that predated the slick, packaged pop of Y2K, hardly needs a reintroduction here. It’s so back that toddlers are wearing Nirvana shirts, which probably means it’s over again.

I’m not that surprised that both grunge and Y2K pop have made a comeback, but what interests me even more is the absolutely massive ‘90s pop culture phenomenon that didn’t: the swing jazz revival.

There was a moment in the late ‘90s when swing and big band jazz of the 1930s and ‘40s was not just back, it was everywhere. From about 1994 to 1999, we traded our flannel shirts and Doc Martens for porkpie hats, t-strap heels, and whatever vintage duds we could get our hands on, and, I shit you not, rocked out to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Contemporary bands, mostly out of California, but with some East Coast representation too, decided everything old was new again, and suddenly top 40 radio had horn sections and jump blues rhythms. Swing was just about ubiquitous by the end of the decade - on the radio, in commercials, on the runway, making cameos in movies, providing the storyline for entire movies. But it isn’t having the same kind of nostalgia tour as Y2K excess (or minimalism, if you’re gauging by the size of the tops I wore at the time).

I’m an art historian, so I'm constantly investigating two main questions: why this and why now? In this case, the question becomes, why not this, and why not now? Put another way, in well-worn narrative of the fashion cycle, why do we relegate some trends to the dustbin of history while reviving others? Why isn’t swing coming back?

Neo-swing was a slow burn that emerged from the punk scene (which was why the music of the neo-swing era never made it as high on the pop charts as it did on the modern rock, later called alternative, charts). Hollywood picked up on it quickly. In the early ‘90s, swing dance scenes were a splashy way of adding historical context in several blockbuster movies - Swing Kids (1993), A League of Their Own (1992), Malcolm X (1992), Newsies (1992), to name a few. And in a couple of flicks, it even moved the plot forward. In The Mask (1994), a zoot suit-clad Jim Carrey delivered his signature line, “Ssssssssmokin’!,” in the midst of a cartoonishly exaggerated swing number with Cameron Diaz, choreographed to the brassy “Hey! Pacheco!” by the Royal Crowne Revue, one of L.A.’s hottest swing bands. And while it wasn’t at all a swing dance showcase, the iconic 1995 blockbuster Clueless featured the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, who would have an absolute smash on their hands two years with the ska-pop head-bopper, “The Impression That I Get.” The Bosstones were ska, not swing, but when you’ve got a horn section wearing suits, you’re part of the trend.

The movie pinnacle of swingcore came two years later with Swingers, the 1996 shoestring budget indie turned box office gold that became a kingmaker for Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. As it had in The Mask, swing featured in a pivotal scene for Favreau’s hapless but charming Mike, whose competent swing number with Lorraine (Heather Graham) saw him get his literal and figurative groove back. The setting was the Derby, a neo-swing hot spot in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the vintage-tinged tune was Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s “Go Daddy-o,” the first of a string of hits for the band. Royal Crowne Revue crawled so Big Bad Voodoo Daddy could jump, jive and wail.

In pop music, the Stray Cats' 1981 rockabilly hit, "Stray Cat Strut," was a precursor of the swing fad. Likewise, the popularity of ska in the 1970s and 1980s, with groups like the Specials and Toots and the Maytals bringing it into the mainstream, and then the ska-punk crossover with bands like the Clash, all lead to the swing explosion as well. It is no coincidence that virtually all of the founding members of neo-swing’s core outfits came from the punk scene. The hopped-up, turbo rhythms of ska were easy bedfellows of punk, which took the principles of pop and cranked them up to supersonic speeds. (Think the hyperrhythms of the Ramones’ “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.”) Add horns on the upbeat, and it’s a quick leap from punk to ska. Ska is by no means big band jazz, but but had a vintage vibe and a hot horn section. And the overlap is considerable in terms of both music and fashion. You could wear the same outfit to a swing dance club as you could to a ska show - spats, a porkpie hat, baggy trousers. Good to go.

There were regional variations on the style too, and as an East Coaster, I can attest to this. Before I’d ever heard of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, I was rummaging through my big brother’s album collection when he was home from college, looking for new shit by a local Virginia ska band called Boy-O-Boy. They would shortly change their name to Fighting Gravity and would feature in a seven-page spread in the March 21, 1996 issue of Rolling Stone. As a high schooler and a college student, I caught gigs by a host of east-coast ska and swing bands like the Pietasters, Mephiskapheles, and the Squirrel Nut Zippers in addition to Fighting Gravity. It was an actual scene.

Meanwhile, after their appearance in Swingers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy exploded into the mainstream. Though they didn’t crack the pop charts, “You and Me and the Bottle Makes Three Tonight (Baby)” made a dent in the alternative charts in 1998. The year prior, the Squirrel Nut Zippers had the genre’s first smash hit with “Hell,” a hot little number about burning eternally in the afterlife that was a satisfying combination of New Orleans ragtime and a teensy coda of hardcore screaming. Also in 1998, “Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, another west coast punk-turned-swing outfit, became a surprise smash. The band, recognizing the swing craze when they saw it, threw together a compilation of jazzy tracks in their repertoire to take advantage of the rising tide, and it worked. “Zoot Suit Riot” peaked at number 15 on the alternative charts and managed crossover pop success too, snagging airtime on top-40 radio. Swing was indie and cool, sitting right there on the alternative/modern rock charts with the Foo Fighters, Radiohead and the Beastie Boys.

Lindy hop even made an appearance at my suburban Virginia high school prom in 1997. At one point, we were all gathered around a group of three or four theater kids who were cutting it up to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, clad in porkpie hats and suspenders. I was in college from 1997-2001, and the swing dance class at the university’s rec center was far and away the most popular, selling out every semester. When a trend has made its way from the L.A. club scene into sleepy mountain towns in Virginia, it is definitively a pop culture phenomenon.

And then the Gap used it to sell khakis, the least hipster, least anti-establishment, least underground item of clothing you could possibly choose. And that was the end of it.

Really, the fact is that, if we’re talking about top 40 radio at all, we’re likely looking at a fad at the end of its tenure, when it’s transitioned from hipster-endorsed freshness to stale commercialism. And so it went with swing (and, shortly thereafter, its cousin ska). Swing was as mainstream as you could get, and that meant it couldn’t be the locus of whatever was edgy, fresh, and cool. By then, even ska-influenced pop bands like No Doubt were already ditching the horns on the upbeat for new wave sounds (a history recounted in detail in Ken Partridge’s book, Hell of a Hat.) The craze was over.

And it’s not coming back. Which, to me, is the most fascinating part of it all.

Plenty of people have written about the politics of cultural revivals and the why of it all - why the ‘90s are back, why country is having a moment. But I’m interested in why some trends don’t come back. What’s the politics of rejecting an era? If fashion cycles move in sequence, then we’re due for a revival of the mid-to-late 90s swing craze. But it is just not happening. Is this reiteration of ‘90s and Y2K trends just ditching swing and jazz altogether, even though the timeline says they’re due for their nostalgia tour?

To be clear, I’m not lamenting this, ahem, gap in the Y2K revival. Every new cohort of young people picks the trends they want to revamp. It’s not up to me, and I’m decidedly neutral on whether we see it again or not. But I am curious about the why of it all.

So to figure out why swing just isn’t sticking, I enlisted the help of some friends - a sociologist, a music writer, a jazz historian, and musicians who were on the ground performing the stuff. You can read more about this in part 2, so stay tuned, and subscribe if you haven’t already. And drop a line in the comments! Did you live through the ‘90s neo-swing craze? What’s your swing story?