Hahaha, hey guys, I just heard a funny joke. Remember the swing revival?
Heh.
That’s it. That’s the joke.
I actually have two albums in the B boxes from this genre, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and the Brian Setzer Orchestra. I’m not sure I have enough to say about swing to do them separately, but I’m gonna give it a shot, because these are really very different albums.
Oh! Another funny thing about swing. According to Wikipedia it was called the “swing revival,” but really they were playing jump blues, a short lived post-war genre popular in African American communities! So the swing revival wasn’t actu- fuck this isn’t funny at all. Its barely even interesting. I think the best comment on the topic of the swing revival was actually made in a Friends episode.
So this couple is discussing the band for their wedding. The guy is adamant that he really wants an act called “The Swing Kings,” because he really loves swing music. She asks, since when do you like swing music? He says something along the lines of “Oh cumon! I’ve always loved swing…even since I saw that Gap commercial.”
My god I am taking social commentary from Friends. No wonder I have no readers.
So the swing revival, as with all things since 1977, emerged from a punk subculture, specifically rockabilly. “Evil Tom,” you say, “Rockabilly is its own genre, with a history stretching back to the era before Rock N Roll!” This is true, but let’s be honest. Until the 80s Rockabilly was the place where untalented country acts pretended to be happy until their got recognition from Nashville and were able to do a duet with someone in rhinestones. Then the Stray Cats came along, and ever since Rockabilly has been the place where Punks go when they realize that they care too much about musical talent to play in a hardcore act. But that’s a whole nuther entry.
So in the late 80s a bunch of Rockabilly bands started bringing jazz elements into their music. One thing led to another and a bunch of bands on the west coast began playing a jazz influenced music that began to draw more and more heavily on post-war big band music. This kind of bubbled away on the west coast, gradually gaining a national following until, in 1998 or so, after the pop music world of the 90s had used up literally every other genre, swing started getting radio play, the Gap made their commercial, the whole thing became a joke, and evaporated leaving everyone wonder what the fuck had happened.
As a cultural commentator this is my personal take on this whole swing revival phenomenon: The underground scene in the post-punk era has been characterized by increasing levels of open mindedness as new talent grows up in the crucible of Punk or Metal and then realizes the purists are kind of stupid. Once you realize you can play anything you start experimenting with everything. In the pre internet era scenes were created in the traditional manner, by people liking what their friends are doing, taking inspiration from that, and creating feedback loops of even concentrating talent in local areas. The record industry and the popular media, which are always looking for the next big thing, would constantly scour the country for active scenes that were producing talent that they could hire. Unfortunately during the 90s, as everyone was finishing the replacement of their record collections and profit margins were beginning to constrict, record companies stopped being willing to sit on odd talent and continue to promote it. This results in one hit wonders. Everyone knows about the sophomore slump. If your record label isn’t willing to promote your third record after your second is a failure that guarantees you will become a one hit wonder.
Combine this process with the underground’s constant generation of new and exciting genres, and the mass media’s tendency to push things until the point of over exposure, and you get the constant flitting between styles that we saw in the 90s. As the internet took off it allowed an even faster move between styles in the underground since everyone could do their own thing and still find fellow travelers. The result may have been the rise of indie as a necessary blanket term for all underground genres, as well as a gradual homogenization of the entire underground. Meanwhile the record industry, whose inability to adapt to technology combine with their own price-gouging and inability to work with talent, has seen their profit margins implode at the same time that the underground essentially realized that they no longer needed the studios to get their music heard and stopped returning their calls. While I think in previous eras mainstream studios represented the uptake of the most energetic members of the underground, I think that in the modern era they have become disconnected from what young artists are doing, and as such represent a self contained reality that will eventually perish.
As far as the swing revival goes, we are left looking back on it in confusion. What a weird little fad, we think. Thank god it went away quickly and didn’t leave us with as many embarrassing photos as the 50s retro thing did. I think it’s kind of sad though. The studios basically came in and turned an entire, legitimate genre of underground creative endeavor into a huge joke. It is amazing the amount of damage one Gap commercial can do.
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy were one of the first swing groups to form, and this is their first album. They have all the awesome things one hopes for in a genre pioneer’s first album. It is hard to do a successful swing album in a traditional lo-fi, there are just too many players sonically, but there’s some really convincingly hokey moments where you can just hear the band struggling to find the delicate balance between retro and modern sensibilities. By and large the vocals focus on more of a crooning quality than on any kind of gravely delivery. This, combine with the insistently 40s feel of the song topics, combine to make the songs charming and fun in the way any good period piece is. It is kind of like watching a noir version of P.G. Wodehouse. To modern eyes a lot of what they are doing is completely ridiculous, and part of the fun and humor is that they know it too, but they are going to sell it, 100%, down to the hilt, because that is the only way to make it good and because they really do love the material.
This album represents pretty much all the good and bad of its genre. There’s a lot of creativity and they even jump between big-band genres, even throwing in a war-era French jazz-ballad. The production and delivery are a bit on the glossy side, possibly even more than was necessary, but I felt this was made up for by the almost ramshackle nature of the lyrics. One can see from the production values where it all went wrong, but this is a really fun album, from before the Gap commercial. If you see it and its on the cheap side, which I’m sure it would be, it’s worth the money. Unless of course you are a jazz aficionado. If you are, I am not really sure why you are reading this. You should probably leave. Go on. Git.
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