Vintage Aesthetic Stalinism

This is good old school David Brooks-era Weekly Standard:

For the last few years, America has experienced a revival in swing dancing. Big bands and young neo-swing “jump and jive” groups like the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies — who are currently receiving airplay on rock radio and selling ten thousand copies a week of their Zoot Suit Riot album — are once again playing the music of Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Louis Jordan, and Cab Calloway in clubs and ballrooms jammed to the walls with jitterbuggers, most of them in their teens, twenties, and thirties. Indeed, the phenomenon has gotten so big that the Gap clothing store is running an ad featuring jitterbuggers lindy-hopping to Louis Prima’s 1956 “Jump, Jive, and Wail.”

This is good news for conservatives. If swing takes over pop culture the way rock-and-roll did in the early 1950s, it could do more to repair the cultural damage of the last thirty years than the war on drugs, the Republican Congress, and the Christian Coalition combined.

I am glad the long-lived cultural relevance of the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies heralded the rise of a conservative, backward-looking culture that prioritized white people, fedoras, and dresses that showed enough to turn on Bobo’s employees but not so much as the make those women likely users of Plan B.

I would also like to note that in I believe 1994, I was on a city league basketball team with the saxophone player from Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.