The Political Context of "The Twist" (by Chubby Checker)

[RichM]

A few minutes ago, my wife played her recording of the 1959 hit song "The Twist." As it reverberated on our sound system, & as I was poring through the posts of DU, I reflected that such a song could not have been written in today's America.

The song reflects a spirit of genuine joyfulness & implies something about the period in which it was created. This was the America of the post-war years - a period in which America was truly prosperous, and in which there was no widespread sense that the federal government was a secretive malevolent & criminal enemy of the people. To be sure, there were many deep social problems in the America of that day. It can certainly be argued that the federal government of that era was actually less worthy of respect than people commonly realized.

But on balance, and aided by the great wave of real post-war prosperity, the United States of 1959 had great elements of hopefulness. People had lived through a terrible war and the Depression, & had seen their country not only survive, but thrive. Ordinary people had reason to regard the ruling Establishment as benign if not outright friendly to their interests, since tax policy and programs like the GI Bill made life better for middle class families.

The benign environment found cultural expression in the popular music, films & literature of the time. When one watches re-runs of My Fair Lady on TV, or hears the Beatles, or Elvis, or Smokey Robinson, Ray Charles, etc - one is hearing the kind of creativity & soulfulness that is encouraged & unleashed in a vibrant and at-least somewhat "free" society.

The "culture" of Bush's PNAC America quite predictably includes nothing like what was seen in those halcyon days. Instead, it reflects a psychotic terrified populace, confused & disoriented by 24-hr a day state propaganda, & dimly aware that it is being systematically robbed by its own government, to fund criminal wars overseas. The "culture" of Bush's America is the WWF, the insulting non-stop filth of television, songs about violence and degradation. The late '50's and 60's produced Chubby Checker and John Lennon. The 2000's produce fascists like Sean Hannity, Joe Scarborough, Ann Coulter, worthless airheads like Brittany Spears & the Hilton sisters, & TV like Joe Millionaire, Survivor, & Jerry Springer.

[niyad]

1. a most excellent observation. thank you.

[RebelOne]

2. Very interesting theory.

[DinahMoeHum]

3. If you read David Halberstam's book on Vietnam. . .

"The Making of a Quagmire", you'll see a few mentions that the Ngo Dinh Diem regime (in particular his brother Nhu and in-law Madame Nhu) banned this dance style.

Halberstam also mentions that in the aftermath of the coup that deposed Diem and the Nhus, the nightclubs opened up in full force, and The Twist was everywhere.

Yeah, it was subversive, all right, and not just in the U.S.

:evilgrin:

[kayell]

4. I for one, would never desire a return to the 50's early 60s

with almost universal discrimination against minorities, gays and women, with segregation, bomb shelters, the oppressive social mores, communist scares (yes the witchhunt was over, but much of the fear remained). That was a world where I would have had to be in the closet, or more likely married and not quite sure what was wrong with me. A world where my granddaughter would have been ostracized for being a (gasp) b*st*rd AND biracial. A world where her parents could not have legally married if they wanted to in many states. Nice place. :eyes: Thanks, but no thanks. For all the troubles of this time, we have made a lot of progress.

Now go watch Pleasantville on the video. Then read some books like The Way Things Never Were: The Truth About the "Good Old Days" by Norman H. Finkelstein.

[NJCher]

5. where does he say he wants to return?

He's just making an observation, IMO, about how the spirit of creativity is dead in our nation.

Creativity doesn't/can't thrive in a propaganda mill based on materialism.


Cher

[RichM]

6. These are all good points.

If you look carefully, you'll see that I did not intend to paint an overly-romanticized picture that denied the reality of issues such as those you raise here.

[kayell]

7. Sorry, I misread a romanticized view of the 50s into your post

I'm quitting smoking, and without my nicotine mood stabilizer, I'm a little quick with the trigger the last few days.

I'm not sure that the hopefulness theory is quite right though. A lot of great art and literature has been produced in times of great turmoil and despair.

I blame the lowered tenor of our times on the effect of corporations on culture. In the 50's they were still not nearly as powerful as they are today, but they were still a powerful force to be reckoned with. The corporations controlled what shows were acceptable on tv, how many legs had to touch the floor during movie love scenes and what songs got airtime. The happy songs of the 50s that got lots of radio play did so because that was the acceptable attitude. There were plenty of works by beat poets and underground artist that did not paint such a sanguine picture of their world.

Today the corporate world has apparently decided that what sells is violence, hate, etc.

Another aspect of this that has been brought up in some places is the effect of the general culture on peoples desires. If people are seeing the world as a happy hopeful place where the skies the limit, they may be expected to spend more $, just as your economy needs revving up to match production capabilities. You sure wouldn't want them to see unhappy, dissatisfied women and minorities on the tv sit-com or hear angry black music.

If on the other hand, you would like to whip the population up into a fearful frenzy, incite their base instincts for violent war - well that would be a good time for lots of killing video games, military shows, even shows that inure them to the sight of blood and gore like CSI. Gee that sounds like I'm blaming the government more than the corporates doesn't it? But not really, since at this point, they look like much of the same from here.

[Cocoa]

8. an alternate take on that song...

could it also be considered to be that era's equivalent of "Don't worry be happy"?

[niyad]

9. as an antidote to all the gloorm and fear-mongering and despair,

I urge everyone to read ira chernus' column as seen on commondreams day before yesterday:

(full article in link at bottom)

The Most Radical Act: Do It Today

by Ira Chernus

 
OK, everyone. Time out. You've been reading commondreams.org, and everything else you can get your hands on, to keep up with all the latest terrible news. You want to know every detail about how George W. and all the other nefarious characters are screwing up our world. You are outraged every day, because you are paying attention.

Well, time out. I hereby give you permission -- in fact I order you -- to take off a few hours, or even the whole day if you can swing it. Go out and enjoy the glorious autumn before it disappears. Take a long, long walk to see the trees. If there aren't any trees where you live, just enjoy the clouds floating across the autumn sky. I hope it is at least half as beautiful where you live as it is where I live. And I hope you can take your walk with a friend.

It's the most radical thing you can do today. Taking a long walk on a beautiful autumn day reminds us why we do all this political work and make all these efforts for social change. It reminds us of what we are aiming for and working for, why we feel responsible for keeping well-informed about all the world's ills.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..

That's why we take that walk: to experience now the kind of world we want to live in all the time, some day in the future. That's what makes it a radical act.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
A long time ago, when those of us who believe in a better world proudly bore the label RADICAL, we used to read authors who did more than tell us how badly our world is screwed up. They told us why. They gave us deep explanations, in dense abstruse theories. The most popular of these authors was a philosopher named Herbert Marcuse.

Marcuse said that the economic and political injustice of our world is only a symptom. The deeper underlying disease is repression. What makes us truly human -- our ability to imagine, to feel beauty, to take pleasure, to love -- is systematically repressed by the global capitalist system. The system keeps us pacified by feeding us digitized substitutes like TV sit-coms, web porn, and internet dating. The true revolution would be to throw off those substitutes and fill our lives with the real thing.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
So time out. Take a long walk on a beautiful autumn day. It is more than just a brief vacation from the harsh reality of our world. If you understand the full meaning of what you are doing, it is the most radical act you can do today. It is an act of faith in a truly better, truly alive, truly human world. Every step you take is a step into that world, a step that turns imagination into reality. Every step reminds you that imagination can be the most real reality of all.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1017-01.htm

[starroute]

10. 1959 was no picnic

You're smurging a lot of stuff together, but most of the good parts were either earlier or later.

Rock for example. By 1959, Elvis was in the Army. Buddy Holly died in that plane crash in February. Radio was dominated by manufactured pop idols, not much different from today -- Frankie Avalon, Fabian, and that lot. 1959 was also the year of the radio payola scandal. With rare exceptions, the music didn't start to get decent again until the Beatles showed up at the beginning of '64.

Politically, this was the period of brinkmanship, with what seemed like a new nerve-wracking crisis every six months or so. This country was more hated than at any other time prior to the present. It was the era of "Yankee Go Home" and of Nixon being pelted with rotton tomatoes.

It was, in many ways, the peak of the Cold War. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, it seemed to many people that they had caught up to the US technologically and might actually surpass it. It's no coincidence that the John Birch Society was founded in 1958. It was an amazingly paranoid time, second in its hysteria only to the McCarthyite era of the early 50's.

In most respects, the 1958-62 period seems strikingly similar to the present day. I will grant that in one way, it was significantly different -- the economy was growing, and despite three recessions under Eisenhower, people generally felt that (if we could avoid atomic doom) the future would be better than the past.

On the other hand, there was a terrible claustrophobia about the 50's, which was closely entangled with the economic optimism. Conformity. Madison Avenue. Men in gray flannel suits. Women in shirtwaist dresses and little white gloves and flowered hats. Suburban housewives going quietly insane. It's all there in the popular fiction of the time.

The present day, for all its problems, is far more open and multiplex and culturally diverse than that. Our cities are livelier, our food and our clothing and our music are more varied. If we can just kick our way out of the conceptual limitations that are holding us down, the potentials for real creativity are endless.

We may need someone from outside to jump-start us. (Have you forgotten that the Beatles were not Americans, but outsiders reminding us of all the great 50's rock that we had mostly never heard because it hadn't made the Top 40?) But within the next few years, something is going to some from somewhere and blow our socks off. And you will be amazed at how different everything suddenly looks.