You might like
this documentary on British blues pioneer Long John Baldry, which goes into the blues cutting through to white British youths in the 50s and 60s. There, you can see photos and clips of youths clearly having a raucous time ("and I dare say a sexuality that was inescapable" quoth a writer in it).
Thanks! I'll need to watch this at some point.
SpanishSpy's post made me think of that entry from Stuff White People Like, "Black Music Black People Don't Listen To Anymore" (though that also extended it to a white middle-class fetishisation of 1980s/early 1990s hip-hop of which I myself was once guilty). Also of the way a lot of Right-wing white people (the people born and brought up here passively racist, the white flighters, especially from the Brexit heartland of the West Midlands, actively so) in my part of England think of rock music as if it were indigenous - in a way people here would once have reserved for Hardy and Barnes or, in musical terms, the Yetties - and see it as the native culture they voted Leave to maintain, even to the point of thinking their children and grandchildren are offending against its principles by listening to contemporary Black pop, when of course if it hadn't been for a cross-fertilisation between poor rural whites and Black people, and the former recognising that they had more in common with the latter than they did with the Eisenhower WASP elite as small-town and rural kids listening to Tion Wayne & Russ Millions' "Body" recognise that they have more in common with those artists than they do with the Cameronite-Johnsonian Rock Right establishment, rock would never have existed at all and whatever would be the ruling culture in Britain today would be wholly different.
I just read this and found it to be hilarious and true in my experience.
All true. I think the thing is to reframe the question. In many ways, it's not the fact that there's less formality. There is, sure. The important thing, though, is that it's changed: so many systems of formality are about upholding class distinctions, traditional morality, orderly society and a feeling of comfort.
Traditional systems of formality in the Anglosphere were always going to erode, because by the early twentieth century they were increasingly unable to fulfil those purposes. There's plenty of formalities that have survived, as anyone who's ever learned how to present themselves for a job interview or attended a wine-and-cheese function knows.
But frock-coats and 'your most obedient servant' were not doomed by the World Wars but by the fact that both leftism and modern capitalism moved beyond the social needs of that kind of rigmarole. It's left to State Openings of Parliament now because it's part of a comforting story of who (we like to imagine) we were, and part of the reason that works is because we can be pleased we've moved beyond it.
You could preserve it longer with a sharp reactionary turn, perhaps. The Whites win in Russia, a few years later a British General Strike gets put down and we get Prime Minister Curzon and Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks and half the cabinet is from the Lords. There's no Great Depression and Hoover doesn't screw the pooch, so we get another term of a President who insists on wearing dinner jackets every evening and being announced by trumpet players.
But that's just holding back the tide.
A better bet would be to look at new formalities emerging after the first wave of the counterculture. Plenty of people in the Labour movement have no time for the 'anything goes' approach of young, well-to-do radicals. You can imagine a world where after a more successful few decades from 68' there's actually more emphasis on wearing suits and firm handshakes than today- because in a worker's democracy professionalism is one of the highest virtues. Just an idea. Nehru jackets and Mao suits are their own kind of social signifier.
A resurgence of formal meals is also doable. Plenty of precedent there, going back to the nineteenth century as well. But you need a society that doesn't incline towards atomisation.
That's another thing we haven't talked about: as the slightly obnoxious book has it, people are 'Bowling Alone' now. Unless you can keep up membership in church groups, unions, sports clubs, beneficent societies, hobby groups and PTAs, people simply aren't meeting enough in structured enough ways to actually necessitate a lot of these formalities.
This got me thinking - in certain contexts and in certain places, people today most certainly have a fetishization of old-school formality, oftentimes stripped of its original context.
I'm a lifelong resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia. For most of that time, I've lived in Arlington, a suburb of Washington, D.C. that doesn't feel particularly 'Southern;' I'd often joke that, before the offending object was removed, that the South truly began at the gigantic Confederate flag visible from I-95 in Stafford county near Fredericksburg (about a forty-five minute drive south of where I live).
South of that flagpole, people still very much use a formality in certain contexts that is absent in the Northeast or out West. People still use 'sir' and 'ma'am,' those old stereotypical Southern words that many people mock the region for.
North of that flagpole and south of the Potomac (which defines the Maryland/DC border), they mock the 'yokels' in the Appalachians or Southside or the Tidewater for their old-fashionedness. However, there is a variant of that old formality, albeit a somewhat updated one. Men are still 'sir,' but women are 'miss,' not 'ma'am;' I grew up calling my teachers those titles. As much as some of us would like to deny it, Northern Virginia is still Virginia; this is bolstered by the formality of the military, which has a huge presence around here.
And in another context:
In these social dance circles I regularly circulate in, there very much is a fetishization of old-school ball formality. For many people, these are opportunities to dress nicely and to bow and curtsy, often to music of the 1920s to the 1950s (which itself forms a strange potpourri of musical styles that would never be played together when they were the popular genres - at these dances you can expect to hear Delta blues, Glenn Miller-style swing, and fifties rock 'n' roll within minutes of each other). I went to one such event at a 1920s mansion last Friday, and that was very much the appeal, for myself as well as for others.
It's a formality that does not always respect the norms of the old ballrooms. There are no
dance cards (when I first heard of these as a new ballroomer, my first reaction was 'that's barbaric'), for one, and men and women can dance both roles. The 1920s ballroom I dance in when there is no plague is now racially integrated (as a Filipino-American, I wouldn't have been let in until the sixties), and it has a display about desegregation there. Some people wear hats on the floor - this was not the case eighty to ninety years ago.
It's the pursuit of that formality that I think leads to this denial of the sexuality that has historically been in these dances. I'm currently reading a book on sexuality in American music and it makes the point, which I have seen elsewhere, that to the black people who created blues and swing and other such music and dance, open expression of sexuality was a liberating thing; it was an affirmation that they were, in fact, full human beings. The book further argues that white people interpreted this expression as mere lust and not as that self-affirmation.
I've seen this personally - there very much are people at blues dances who take that element to an inappropriate extreme. It has led to blues dance being slandered as 'the horny dance' and its dancers insulted for that reason.
This tendency to reduce such a history to mere lustfulness, I am tentatively willing to say (I need to finish the book), is what created the modern hellscape of pop music, sexualized for no reason more than shock value or lining an executive's pockets. If this is the case, I will make a bold statement: that something that originally empowered the enslaved and the oppressed has been turned into the vicious machine of exploitation that is the modern music industry is a tragedy of the highest order.
(sorry - that was another tangent)
