That leads to a situation where class is increasingly expressed through what ingredients you use, rather than what you make with them. Haute cuisine is still a thing, obviously, but its much more of a rare treat now. But what I'm getting at is that fifty years ago the clearest gap between a 'working class' and a 'middle class' restaurant would be about the type of service, the setting, the names of the dishes and so on. You can still see that today, of course, but now... let's put it this way with a UK example. McDonalds- Byron Burger. Right? Or Five Guys might be a better example. The food is more expensive than traditional competitors, but the actual experience of eating it invokes a mythologised, fetishized 1950s diner. Today's middle classes pretend that they're the working classes of a previous generation- though that last thought is rather unformed.
I could go on for
pages about how this applies to modern social dance communities. Essentially, I'd argue that many middle class dancers - especially blues dancers - have a very narrow view of what these dances were, filtered through middle class notions of respectability.
I'll demonstrate this with an example about blues dance. Note that my opinions are heterodox in relation to most blues dancers, and bringing this stuff up at a real blues dance would get you at
least weird looks.
When people think of blues music, they think sadness. They think of poor oppressed black people lamenting the woes of segregation, of Jim Crow. This isn't inaccurate in certain cases, for there are certainly songs that meet that description.
This emphasis on direct response to oppression is the result, in part, of white British academics studying blues culture and emphasizing those particular aspects. What this ignores is that blues music, and blues dance, came from spaces where black people could express
all their emotions, rather than the limited servile spectrum that white people allowed them to. Blues music can certainly be sad, but it isn't
just sad. It can be joyous. It can be boastful. It can be proud.
It can also be really,
really horny.
I was once at a blues dance festival in Washington, D.C. where Chris Thomas King, a respected modern blues musician from Louisiana, told us that the word 'blues' in Louisiana creole has a sexual connotation it does not in standard American English. In my own research, I have found that academic discussions of blues culture are very frank about sexuality in those spaces.
Go to a modern blues dance, with mostly middle-class white people, and ask them about that aspect of blues dance. They will
vociferously deny its presence, or at least underplay it, all the while insisting that
they, the
respectable people, would never be so base. They will say this while they dance in very close partnerships doing moves that cannot be interpreted any other way.
These middle class whites bring with them a fetishized, romanticized view of 1920s-1950s dance venues where blues dance (as well as swing dance) were born. The popular image is of well-dressed people in frame dancing daintily to Glenn Miller-style swing. The environment is what middle class whites view as 'respectable.'
But the places where these dances were born served alcohol. There was gambling. There was sex in backrooms. There was prostitution. There were bar brawls.
Does it surprise you, then, that a dance that came from such a place could be danced in a sexualized way? Does it surprise you that people today find and exploit such possibilities?
Take this quote from the essay
Characteristics of Negro Expression by Zora Neale Hurston (one of the great black writers and scholars of her day, famous for writing
Their Eyes Were Watching God) as she describes dances in juke joints (black bars/dance halls/gambling dens/other things in the rural South, where much blues, music and dance, was developed):
“The Negro social dance is slow and sensuous. The idea in the Jook is to gain sensation, and not so much exercise. So that just enough foot movement is added to keep the dancers on the floor. A tremendous sex stimulation is gained from this. But who is trying to avoid it? The man, the woman, the time and the place have met. Rather, intimate little names are indulged in to heap fire on fire.”
As someone who has gone to blues dances for a number of years, I can vouch that I have personally been to blues dances that meet that description. Particularly, any blues dancer who really has indulged in that aspect of the dance knows the meaning of the phrase "heap fire on fire."
Also consider how
this rather unsubtle song was released in allegedly wholesome
1954.
There is strong denial (at least rhetorically) of this aspect of blues dance, and it leads to a number of unpleasant knock-down effects. Sexuality isn't openly talked about at these dances. It is not the habit of instructors to teach ways of enforcing consent, and more generally ways of navigating sexuality on the blues floor. In this culture of denial, you get women who don't know how their body language can be interpreted, men who see consent in places where it isn't, women angrily leaving blues dances because they feel like they've been lied to, and men exploiting the lack of clarity to dishonestly indulge in their vices without respecting consent.
Beyond the practical effects, this also leads modern white blues dancers to reduce the black people who created these dances to rhetorical constructs that exist to suffer. If we see people - any people - as rhetorical constructs, we
by definition deny them the things that make them human.
And I find that appalling on a moral level.
(that was a tangent - sorry about that. As you can tell, I have
opinions on the subject)