Decoder Ring | Jump, Jive and Fail: The ’90s Swing Craze
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Super Bowl 33, Denver 7, Atlanta 3, 212 left in the first. In 1999, the Super Bowl took place in Miami, Florida, and was a face-off between the underdog Atlanta Falcons and the Denver Broncos, led by their legendary quarterback, John Elway. Elway going deep, and he's got Rod Smith. And Smith's gone.

As the teams headed into the locker rooms at the end of the second quarter, the Broncos were leading the Falcons 17-6, and there was little doubt that Denver was on its way to victory. But there is a part of this Super Bowl that remains a little mysterious, even a little confusing. And it was just about to begin. The National Football League and Radio City Entertainment proudly present today's Progressive Auto Insurance Super Bowl 33 halftime show.

As fireworks erupted from the stadium's walls, the camera, broadcasting out to 80 million people, opened on a tight shot of a man in a fedora hat jamming on a saxophone, only to expand out to reveal a stage full of musicians also wearing fedoras and vintage suits and a field full of swing dancers. ♪

The 33rd Super Bowl halftime show starred not only the musical legends Stevie Wonder and Gloria Estefan, also a neo-swing band called Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was at the Super Bowl as an emissary of a musical craze that had lately swept the nation: the so-called "swing revival."

In a short period leading up to the Super Bowl, retro-sounding songs, dance moves, vintage suits, and cocktails had become inescapable.

Swing music was all over the radio and the billboard charts and movies, TV and advertising. And so was swing dancing, which was packing classes and clubs all over the country with newly minted Lindy Hoppers. And now Swing was at the Super Bowl, jamming alongside Stevie Wonder. And yet almost immediately after Big Bad Voodoo Daddy got down at the bowl, the whole Swing thing disappeared.

This was an extremely high-profile last hurrah, and people were just about to start asking the question that has dogged this whole moment ever since. Why did that happen?

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. And there's something a little unusual about this episode. I didn't really want to make it. When we first started talking about the swing revival of the late 1990s, my initial knee-jerk reaction was just, no. I lived through it, and I remember it as being so incredibly corny.

And I know it's not just me. In fact, insofar as the Swing revival persists in the cultural memory, it's usually as a punchline or a head scratcher, as a particularly odd-seeming fad. But here's the thing: I usually like thinking about fads. What was it about the Swing revival I found so off-putting?

So we started to dig in. To my surprise, the story of Swing in the 90s is longer, more involved, and more interesting than I ever imagined. It's about an underground scene that went above ground in a major way, and how that level of success can obscure what's happening while it's happening, but also long after it's over. So today on Decoder Ring...

How did '90s swing music swing from cool to uncool so quickly?

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Go to rocketmoney.com slash decoder today. That's rocketmoney.com slash decoder. rocketmoney.com slash decoder. So if you say Swing Revival to people, if they know what you're talking about at all, they're going to conjure up the moment we just laid out when corporate America, the National Football League, Top 40 Radio, and the American public all seem to somewhat inexplicably come down with Swing fever.

But every fever starts with a germ, if you will. And this one began germinating in the late 1980s with people far from the mainstream. I definitely knew I was different, but in a way I didn't mind it. I embraced it. So I knew playing the saxophone was different. Mano Dorame grew up in South Central and East L.A., and he still lives in the city. When we spoke on Zoom, I could see the jukebox in his living room, and he was pulling off a brown fedora.

Mondo got into the saxophone from watching his father. When I was about three or four years old, he would take his saxophone out of the closet and I would just light up. His dad played him old jazz and blues records and started taking him to small clubs and bars around L.A. where fading rhythm and blues greats were playing sets in relative obscurity. And I used to go sit in with him. My dad would take me to these places and I was playing with him when I was like 14.

Mondo was into more than just old music. He loved old gangster movies and the clothing from that era. I just loved the style. And so I would go to Goodwill stores and I would find suits that looked like they were kind of from the 40s or 50s or whatever. And I would go and play these gigs.

Everyone used to tell me, why are you playing that old grandpa music for? But I always thought, how cool would it be if my peers would be into this kind of music and would dress up and put a suit on? I was kind of like living in my own little world, I guess, you know? For most of high school, Mondo's fascination with the past made him feel like a loner. But then his dad's tattoo artist told him there were some guys he should meet. And these guys felt the same way.

A few had been members of Youth Brigade, a hardcore punk band. But now they were doing something different, immersing themselves in the looks and sounds of another era, throwing themselves into 50s rockabilly and scouring secondhand stores for vintage clothes. I thought, wow, these guys are kind of like me, you know? They were living it. Like I was living it. We immediately hit it off. ♪

Everybody was saying, where'd you find that saxophone player? Wow, man, where's he from? And they were like, oh yeah, he's this Cholo guy from the neighborhood. We just met him. We kind of knew we had something. Not long after, an artist named Michael Moss was sitting at a club in San Francisco called The Deluxe. The Club Deluxe is a bar that had never changed since the 40s. Completely art deco on the inside. Absolutely magnificent. Michael hung out at The Deluxe all the time. But this night was different.

I'm sitting there and out of nowhere comes like seven, eight guys dressed in 1940s zoot suits with wide brim fedoras. I'd never seen a fedora as big as these. They were huge, almost cartoonish. Holy crap, it's a band. It was Mondo and his friends, now called Royal Crown Review, who are widely considered to be the very first neo-swing band. This band starts to play.

And my god, I'd never heard anything like it. We were the most different band. I mean, this is very far away from what was on the radio at that time. This is the era of fucking hair metal. World Crown Review's sound came from another era. A mix of rhythm and blues and rockabilly and swing, but all with a twist.

We couldn't just show up and do Count Basie songs. We had to, like, spin it our way. It was songs about shit we're going through with souped-up punk rock energy, so it wasn't nostalgia for something that we didn't even experience. I mean, it was just so fresh. That's the only thing I could think of. This is the freshest thing I've ever heard. The next day, I bought my first suit.

We were just trying to be a great band, man. This band was unique.

What Mondo didn't yet know is that right around the same time, not too far away, someone else was dreaming up a group along pretty similar lines. My vision was like a really wild cartoon come to life. Like, that was my vision of the band. Scotty Morris grew up 60 miles northwest of L.A. in Oxnard, California. When we spoke on Zoom, he was also wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and he told me that he, too, had gotten into jazz as a kid.

Thanks to Saturday morning cartoons. It was Tom and Jerry cartoons and Betty Boop cartoons, and I was hearing that wild, crazy jazz music. When I heard Louis Armstrong, when I hear New Orleans jazz music, it makes me feel a certain way. And I just started devouring as much as I could.

He started playing the trumpet. But then, like some of the guys in Royal Crown Review, he got into punk. In fact, he spent the 80s touring with his hardcore band, False Confession. That's not the answer!

But by the early 90s, Scotty was still dreaming of forming a group that could combine his musical loves. This hybrid, like, swing thing that's kind of bigger than life and wild and has punk rock energy. I could see the songs. I could see the look of the band in my head. I could see how I wanted the horn section to be free and all over the stage. I could see this movie playing in my head. Scotty was able to find enough musical kin to get a band together.

They called themselves Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. And in 1993, when they put on suits and played their first show at a friend's backyard birthday party, the crowd responded right away. And everybody went bananas. They just loved it. They yelled more and more and more and we didn't have any more, so we just played the songs in a different order.

Like Royal Crown Review, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was playing music that people of all ages knew, even if they didn't know how. Maybe their parents had listened. Maybe their grandparents. Maybe they'd heard it in a cartoon. And now here it was in front of them, but with a new, brash spirit. Everywhere these bands played, L.A., San Francisco, and all the small clubs in between, an eclectic scene was growing. ♪

People were getting dressed up. There's people like jiving. It was college kids. It was punk rock kids. It was alternative-y. Just real loose fun. You see punks bringing their parents to these shows and I was like, "Well, yeah, that's a trip." It was awesome, man. We just show up, fucking five, six vintage cars out front, all of us dappered up, tipping our caps sideways at a rackish angle and just go in and have too much fun. Was there dancing at these early shows?

Almost none. No swing dancing. It was all just sardines. Like a band was playing and everybody was bumped up against the stage to see them. And it was too fast to dance to really because like a punk rock band, we were just mowing through these tunes.

When I first heard about the absence of swing dancing at these early shows, I was surprised. The swing revival is remembered for the dancing as much as anything. And we're going to get to it. In the meantime, it felt like something unique was happening musically. This was a vibrant yet selective scene and a specifically Californian scene at that.

And then Scotty Morris of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was at a record store in Santa Barbara, and he got a tip that the retro big band sound was even larger than he knew. Some guy that worked at the record store said, hey, have you heard about this band called the Squirrel Nut Zippers? And I'm like, no. And he's like, you've got to listen to this band. They're not doing what you're doing, but they're doing what you're doing in another way. ♪

The thing that you need to know is that Chapel Hill was a fiercely indie scene and a DIY scene. Tom Maxwell was a guitarist for Squirrel Nut Zippers, who came not from California or even the West Coast.

with North Carolina. Everybody was in a band. No band sounded like anybody else. That was the least cool thing you could do. You might as well jump off a cliff, you know? You might as well, like, go and become a fucking accountant. Why would you do that?

And so when Squirrel Nut Zippers formed in 1993, they were not trying to emulate Royal Crown Review. They didn't even know the California bands existed. They also weren't trying to emulate what had by now replaced hair metal all over the radio. Grunge hit like a tidal wave. Grunge was a lot of cool bands coming out of the Pacific Northwest who all of a sudden were being lumped into this thing that was being commodified into a trend. And it got really stupid really quick.

And I was like, no, thank you. I don't want this because what that does is it stamps a sell-by date on your ass. Instead, they drew from Fats Waller and Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. They swapped overdrive pedals for acoustic instruments. Instead of flannel shirts, they were going to put on tuxedos with black tails. Because I think it was such a relief.

Dressing up, you stood a little straighter. You carried yourself differently. Instead of the sort of hunch-shouldered, you know, I'm a loser stuff, which was getting really old.

And just like with the California bands, the audiences seemed ready for it. It was like 12-year-olds were coming to the shows, their parents were coming to the shows.

And their parents were coming to the shows. And I was like, we can long haul this. This music is in our DNA as a culture and we can just keep doing this and we can put our spin on it and do something really cool and just keep going. But exactly what music is Tom talking about? The music that's part of America's cultural DNA. Pretty soon, everyone would be calling it swing. But is that quite right? ♪

The original swing music emerged in the late 1920s and 30s when Black jazz musicians developed a new sound in the ballrooms and dance halls of Kansas City, Chicago, and Harlem. It was the depths of the Depression and the popularity of this big music and the energetic, thrilling, also originally Black dancing that started to go with it is often understood as a response to the desperation of regular life.

The music quickly spread via big bands led by musical giants like Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Count Basie, as well as Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, the last two being white band leaders who made it a commercial crossover sensation that lasted through World War II.

But this original swing music, it's not what Squirrel Nut Zippers or Royal Crown Review saw themselves as playing. People started calling it swing, and we never thought that was what we were. We never claimed to be a swing band. I never even liked the word. There's so much other music that was just as important to their individual sounds. The proto-rock and roll jump blues of Louis Jordan. The gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt.

Delta Blues, 1950s R&B, Rockabilly, Calypso.

Think of it like, have you ever been to a Renaissance fair? There's this huge mishmash of looks, both historical and imaginary. Elves and crusaders and Vikings and fairies and monks, and they have nothing to do with each other or the Renaissance, except that hundreds of years later, everything from the past, real or imagined, seems like it's related.

And that's basically how the word swing, which does have a certain ring to it, would come to operate in the 90s as an umbrella term for an eclectic, ahistorical blend of anything that looked or sounded retro. And the bands who knew their specific musical influences were not wild about it.

Tom Maxwell remembers the first time he heard the term being used. It was on the Squirrel Nut Zippers' first trip out to San Francisco, when they didn't think of themselves as part of any particular genre or any larger scene. I'd never been to California. And we get on and it's packed. And all the people know all the lyrics to our songs. And I'm like, what is happening? This is weird.

Great. Super fun. But really weird. And then that night, this guy collars my bandmate in an after-party in somebody's apartment. He's like, "This swing thing is gonna be huge. You guys are really well-positioned to take advantage of the swing movement." I just knew that this was a major international youth movement.

That's Michael Moss. He's the guy who bought a suit immediately after seeing Royal Crown Review. And he was also the guy at the party. He told Squirrel Nut Zippers he wanted to start a magazine called Swing Time to chronicle what he saw as a remarkable phenomenon. How do people the same age all around the world start fucking swing bands at the same moment in history without any knowledge of each other whatsoever?

That's zeitgeist. And we just laughed. What the fuck are you talking about, you know? What are you talking about? Well, as it turns out, Michael Moss was talking about the very near future. Because the nascent swing scene was not just heating up. It was about to get... Pokeheads!

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Now we have to bring in the dancing. Many swing dancers start off in either, you know, like punk rock, goth kid. And I was a goth. In the mid-1990s, Sylvia Schuyler was just 20 years old. And the first time she got dragged to a swing class, it was not her thing. Everybody was just so nice. We were goths. I mean, they were all so much older than us. I kind of liked the dancing. I thought it was kind of fun. But I was like, I just, these people, like it was not our crowd at all.

But then a friend invited her out to a club in Long Beach where a suave crooner was playing with a live band. The hair and the blue pinstripe navy suit and everyone there was dressed to the nines. 1940s, vintage cars, like the women all had the amazing hair and there was a cigar lounge attached to it so all the guys were outside smoking cigars and I was like, okay, this I can get into.

Soon, Sylvia was hooked on swing dancing. She jettisoned the whole goth thing and was trekking around Southern California, from the Viper Room to deep Orange County supper clubs, looking for places to dance. And she was not alone. We would drive all over Los Angeles and Orange County just trying to find a live band. Christian Perry was working at a cheesecake factory when some girls invited him to a swing class.

He'd never danced before, and he knew so little about Swing, he thought the class was X-rated. But he, too, fell in love. Soon he was part of a group of friends who lived Swing 24/7, dancing all the time, trawling secondhand stores for zoot suits and scouring video stores for every old movie they could find. Back then, there was no social media, right? There was no YouTube. It was, "Who's got the latest VHS tape?" There was gold.

Whoever would have it would study it and they would be like the golden child because they had the newest moves that they just picked off the video. Christian and Sylvia and their friends and partners practiced acrobatic aerial moves they gleaned from the past, injecting ballroom swing with energy and creating an improvisational style they called street swing. It was a phenomenon that was growing alongside the music scene, but not in lockstep with it.

They were really separate. It was totally understood that they really didn't want us there. They just wanted a room full of audience members. And then all these dancers come in and it really does detract from the show, you know? The complication was that the dancers started to try to dictate how you were going to play your music and they were going to not come to you if you played too fast. And it started to become us against them.

But Sylvia and Scotty Morris of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy also agreed that there was one place where the music and the dancing were mixing, co-mingling, building on and with each other. A nightclub that was becoming the epicenter of the swing outbreak. Perhaps the most famous restaurant in all the world is the Brown Derby, grotesque symbol of a fantastic land of make-believe, Hollywood.

Founded in the 1920s, the Brown Derby had been a Los Angeles restaurant chain popular with Golden Age Hollywood stars. Some of the locations were even shaped like actual Brown Derby hats. By the 1990s, the chain had closed. One of the old locations in Los Feliz was converted into a nightclub called simply The Derby.

So the inside is this gorgeous vaulted round ceiling, like 20 feet high. And it was so moody and so, you know, there was brass and there was mahogany and everything was uplit and the stage was uplit and the booths were uplit and they had, you know, velvet curtains that you could appear in. And it was just the happening spot. And the most happening night was Wednesdays because that was the night Royal Crown Review played. ♪

You couldn't even get in there. There was a line literally around the block. And if you've seen the place, that's a pretty long line. The line included A-listers and upscale seamsters and swing dancers like Christian, who had to sneak in because he was underage.

Whoever showed up didn't know, but they were in for a show because we would constantly just let it rip. As soon as the music comes on, dance floor was full of all of us. Everyone would be like, jam circle, jam circle, and everyone would run. All the good dancers would run from the back to the front. The dancing was punk rock, man. Like, they were just as crazy as the band, even crazier. Everybody's cheering and it's crazy and girls are flying and everything. Soon the Derby started offering lessons to wannabe swing dancers in its bigger back room.

Sylvia Schuyler became a teacher there, and going night after night, she could tell that people were really taking notice. There was always news crews there, and there was always people taping for whatever. There was always scouts there, like they would tap us on the shoulder after we did a jam circle and say, always, oh, you guys are so cute. You guys are such good dancers. We're doing an audition for whatever, or do you want to just come be in our thing? And these scouts spotted bands, too, and offered to put them in front of a much larger audience. We got to get in this movie, The Masked.

Somebody stop me. The Mask is like a live-action Looney Tunes starring Cameron Diaz in her first big role and Jim Carrey the year he became a movie star. In a pivotal scene set in a retro nightclub, Diaz and Carrey feverishly danced to the song Hey Pachuco, which Mondo wrote. We showed up to the studio and then there's Jim Carrey and he had a yellow Zoot suit on. Let's rock this joint! Have you worn tonight?

After the mask's release in 1994, Royal Crown Review became the first neo-swing band to sign a record deal with a major label. And Big Bad Voodoo Daddy took over at the Derby. I walked in, she was waiting.

And it was all the cool kids. It was a hipster's parade for sure. Bruce Springsteen, Quincy Jones, Robert Downey Jr. and the cast of Friends were coming through. But there were also scores of regulars, including a guy named Jon Favreau. I had no idea he was an actor. I had no idea of any of it. And one day, Jon said, hey, I wrote a movie, and I want you guys to be in it.

The movie is about a group of guys enmeshed in L.A.'s swing scene and also co-stars a then-unknown Vince Vaughn. Baby, you are so money and you don't even know it. Look, T, girls don't go for me the way they go for you. In its culminating scene, Favreau's character finally gets his confidence back by swing dancing at the derby as Big Bad Voodoo Daddy plays Go Daddy-O.

The movie, of course, was Swingers. It was released in 1996 as a low-budget independent film, but it became a surprise sleeper hit. It was a launching point, and it gave us a sort of legitimacy that I think is what we were hoping for.

Around the same time, a song would legitimize the subculture even further. The melody came to Tom Maxwell of the Squirrel Nut Zippers as he was driving around Chapel Hill. I came to a stoplight and the head riff just popped into my head fully formed. I'm like, okay, cool. Well, now all I have to do is write the lyric.

Tom titled the song Hell, and it wasn't intended as a single. It was just part of the band's album, Hot. Then in early 1997, to the band's surprise, the big L.A. radio station K-Rock started to play it anyway. And it took off. The phones lit up. Everybody flipped. They were like, oh shit.

The song blew up on alternative radio nationwide, and the album went platinum. Did you have our record? God bless you. I did not. I didn't. You did not have the record? Fuck you.

Like I said, Swing was never really my thing. But at this moment, in early 1997, it was starting to be more people's thing than ever before. What had started as a number of disparate bands reacting against the musical status quo had built itself into a distinctive, robust, underground scene all about live music, dancing, drinking, flirting, and looking nice.

The whole thing was bigger and closer to the mainstream than most people had ever imagined it would be. But it was about to get closer to the mainstream still.

Thanks to a song called Zoot Suit Riot. Who's that whispering in the trees? It's two cities and they're only pipes and chains and swinging hands. Who's your daddy? Yes, I am. Zoot Suit Riot was not an alt-radio hit like hell. It was a top-40 hit. Like the kind of song you know the words to whether you've ever listened to it on purpose or not. Zoot Suit Riot.

And amazingly, it became a huge hit despite being written by a band with the majestically off-putting name The Cherry Poppin' Daddies. It was a way of saying, fuck you. Steve Perry is the lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist for Cherry Poppin' Daddies. After our first show, we were banned from just about every place to play. Just the name alone was like, we're not booking you. Just the name.

The Daddies, if you're feeling polite, got together in Eugene, Oregon, also in the early 1990s. And they were not, strictly speaking, a swing band.

If anything, they were known as a ska punk band. But really, their first three albums were stylistically all over the place. We'd have swing songs, but then it would transition into like a metal song, which would transition to a psychedelic song, which would transition into a ska song. I really saw the Daddies as a kind of a multi-pronged thing, an art band.

Over the years, though, it had become clear that a lot of their fans liked their Swing songs best. They'd ask which record had the most Swing songs on it. So with Swing in the air, their manager made a suggestion. Hey, if you put all those Swing songs together, put them on the same record, he said, if you do that, I bet you I could sell those because people like that the most. They needed to come up with four new songs to fill out the compilation.

For the lyric to the opener, Steve turned to a little-known historical atrocity, the Zoot Suit Riots, a series of clashes that took place in the summer of 1943 in East L.A.,

American servicemen began violently attacking young Mexican-Americans, known as pachucos, who they identified by their zoot suits. I saw the history of the American 20th century as kind of mythic Americana that haunts us to this day, and I still feel that way.

You know, so my thought was this can be an anthem for all of us. You know, we're the Zooters, right? We're the swing. This is our music. Did you have a sense that people, anyone other than you, like how many people knew that, that it was referring to a real historical event that was bad? I don't think like that. I wanted the ambiguity in there. I didn't want to have to explain it. And if people got it, they got it.

The lyrics make almost no reference to the Riots themselves beyond the title, and the song is oddly upbeat. It was released as a single in the fall of 1997. Soon after, Steve started getting frantic phone calls from the label, saying they'd better leave Oregon and drive down to California right away, because they had a hit on their hands.

And we get there, and there's, like, fucking people everywhere, you know, like, out in front, like, with the Beatles or something. It was, like, weird, you know? The song made Billboard's Hot 100 chart, helped the album sell 2 million copies, and was even parodied by Weird Al. The Surrealist music video became one of MTV's most played of 1998 and was nominated for a Video Music Award. Did not expect it at all. I mean, no one thought that a swing song could be

popular on the radio, you know, at all. So it was just a giant mistake in the time-space continuum, really. Would you make of Zoot Suit Riot the song? Well, I wasn't a fan of it. Let's just say that. Mondo Dorame of Royal Crown Review grew up hearing about the Zoot Suit Riots from his grandfather, who'd worn a Zoot Suit himself. It was a pride thing for Mexican people, for Chicano people. And I thought, I could probably pull it off because I'm half Mexican.

And I was probably the first guy to do it, to dress like a zoot suitor. Over time, Mondo started to get a little weirded out about the preponderance of the zoot suit in the scene. He was also unsettled by the reaction to his own song about the riots, Hey Pachuco, the one Royal Crown Review performed in the mask. Its lyrics are a little more explicit than Zoot Suit Riot. Even so, Mondo felt like the audience just didn't get it.

Everybody took it like it was a party. It's a party. Let's put a zoot suit on and go out there and have fun and dance. And it wasn't about that. I was trying to tell a story for my family. Neoswing was built around fun and cutting loose. And in the colorblind 1990s, Mondo's lyrics and the complicated meaning of the zoot suit drew little notice.

Another unremarked upon aspect of swing at the time was that the music and dancing at the heart of this genre had originally been created by Black artists. But the scene was very white. Yeah, it was. And it sounds like it. Yeah.

That's John Bunkley. In the 1990s, he was well-known in Detroit for his ska band, Gangster Fun, which had started the decade before. They'd played with the Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, and Fugazi. But then John had gotten tired of the ska scene and what it was becoming. The genre would get top billing over the band. Ska night. Then you have five ska bands with ska in their name. Jimmy Scafa and Scappalopoulos.

He quit music for a while, but then in 1996, he became the frontman for a swing band called the Atomic Fireballs. And he wasn't worried about sounding like any of the bands that already existed. I feel like their music was basically not as Black as my music, you know, just to be blunt. Their music was just not as blues-inspired. It felt like a bunch of people from the suburbs of LA

of LA with a too big suit.

Like all the other bands you've heard about, from the Atomic Fireball's very first show, people loved them live. They started playing around the upper Midwest, where even at this late date, swing was not that established. The crowd was still a mix of punk and college radio kids and full of dancers doing whatever they wanted, who all responded to John's distinctive singing style, raspy and powerful, which explicitly drew a line back to classic blues shouters like Wynonie Harris.

That's what the black people would say. The white people would say Tom Waits. Fair enough. That's probably more what I was thinking, to be honest.

If race came up in the context of neo-swing at all, it was when various band members name-checked their influences. The Black artists they adored and knew they had been inspired by. For me, I was sitting at the feet of the masters. Tom Maxwell. But my stupid fucking record shifted platinum. Tom knows that his hit song, Hell, earned a lot more money than the Trinidadian calypso artists who inspired it ever did.

and that that echoes a long history. The history of popular music is the history of exploitation. It was the pretty white boys that sold all the records. Always. And all of the actual creators from the marginalized communities continued to languish. Were you thinking about any of this then? No.

In 1998, nobody was publicly asking questions about any of this, as a song like Zoot Suit Riot was bringing swing to the masses. Please welcome Cherry Poppin' Daddy! Please give a nice welcome to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy!

That was the year everybody was coming in, crushing. Because everybody got signed up within a few months. We were playing these big shows, festivals with like Foo Fighters, and we did the Warped Tour. We were getting a lot of attention. We were now not on the peripheral. We were now in center view. Swing was making a dent in the music business. One day we just felt like, fuck man, everybody knows what it is now. Everybody gets it now. Yeah.

Part of me, the 14-year-old, was like, oh yeah, give the baby his bottle. Mm, yes, immortality. And then the rest of me was like, what's the other shoe that's going to drop? Tom's instincts, it turns out, were right on. It just wasn't a shoe that dropped. It was a pair of pants. When the Gap commercial came, it's done. It's done. ♪

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Next day.

When Carl Byrd graduated from college in the early 1990s with a degree in graphic design, he headed to San Francisco hoping to get a job at The Gap. I started in a store at The Gap. I was folding T-shirts.

And by like 1998, I was the art director. The Gap at the time was basically dressing America. It was the destination for t-shirts and jeans and dress shirts and pocket tees in 20 colors, right? We used to put a movie star in a Gap pocket tee or a supermodel in a white button-down and it looked like a million bucks. The Gap had long advertised their stylish basics in print and increasingly on television.

One day in 1997, Carl and the rest of the Gap's in-house advertising team were informed they needed to come up with a new TV spot that would infuse some cool into a dowdy material. Now we have to do khakis. And we're like, oh shit, what do we do?

Khaki conjured images of schlumpy grown-ups and casual Fridays. They needed something with zhuzh. And they were stumped until Carl's boss and The Gap's then-creative director, a woman named Lisa Prisco, walked into the office brandishing a videotape. And she goes, I was watching Daddy Long Legs with Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron. And there's a scene in the middle of the movie where Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire start dancing in front of a wall of people in khaki suits and dresses. And they're like,

And that was the idea. She's like, I think it's dancing. We had heard that there were kids, young people going and doing swing dancing at the Derby. And I think Lisa had gone once, but it wasn't like we were swing dancers. It was like, hey, people at the Derby in LA are swing dancing again. Maybe we should do swing dancing. It was kind of like that.

The ad was directed by Matthew Ralston, who's made hundreds of music videos, including for Beyonce and TLC. He wanted to use a new fangled technique he'd seen in a European Smirnoff ice commercial, where the subject is frozen midair as the camera appears to spin around them.

You know this effect because it would become extraordinarily famous the next year as bullet time. And it was used in The Matrix. Trinity!

But this was the first time American audiences were going to see it in the service of some incredible swing dancing overseen by the accomplished choreographer Travis Payne, who had a particular dance reference in mind. This cult film called Hell's a Poppin'. Hell's a Poppin'. Oh, Satan's on a tear. Hell's a Poppin'.

They're screaming everywhere. Hell's a Poppin' is an almost unclassifiably anarchic comedy from 1941 that jumps wildly between different vignettes, vaudeville style. And there's this dance number in the middle that's African-American dancers doing Lindy Hop, like flipping and jumping and swirling around. Come on, Lindy Hop!

The dancers were all part of the Black dance troupe Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, the group that introduced lifts, jumps, flips to swing. It's some of the most awe-inspiring, high-flying dancing ever committed to celluloid. That's what the commercial was going to be based on. And they needed dancers who could do it.

Did you guys ever watch Hell's a Poppin'? Of course. Hell's a Poppin's great. Yep. Those are Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. Remember Christian Perry? He's one of the swing dancers you heard from earlier who would pour over old movies with his friends looking for swing moves.

He auditioned and got cast as one of the four principal dancers. And Travis Payne allowed me to do my thing. So that's what you saw. Raw jitterbugging. In the ad, Christian's got chin-length black hair parted in the middle, and he's wearing khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt that's flapping open. He and his partner, a brunette with a pixie cut, also wearing khakis, emerge from a wall of other khaki-clad models. At

At one point, he jumps over his partner's head and freezes there, and the camera spins around him, that bullet time effect, as an extraordinarily catchy song plays. Baby, baby, it looks like it's gonna hail.

We went hard on, let's find music that makes us feel something. If we can make people feel something about The Gap, they're going to go to the store. The song Carl Byrd and the rest of The Gap team selected out of dozens was the 1956 recording of Jump, Jive and Wail by Louis Prima. It was just like magical. We knew it.

There was a giant field meeting with hundreds and hundreds of store managers and executives. They played that commercial and people went nuts. People stood on their chairs, like standing ovation the first time they saw that commercial. I think my mom called and was like, "Christian, is that you on TV? You're dancing all over the place, everywhere." We put it on national television, on every single network, everywhere in America in prime time. The khakis were flying out the door.

The commercial is fun, joyful, and infectious. It became a water cooler advertisement, so popular that when the Brian Setzer Orchestra released a cover of the song in the ad, it became the biggest swing song yet. And the members of the swing scene itself all seemed to know that the commercial had changed something, for better or worse.

including Michael Moss, the editor of Swing Time magazine. I mean, it was exciting. You know, we wanted to succeed. We wanted to show people how awesome what we were doing was.

But there's not a single person at a Swing concert who'd be caught dead in a pair of fucking khakis. There was one real Swing dancer in the commercial, and we all gave him the hardest time, Christian. We were just like, you sell out. I think I pissed a lot of Swing dancers off, yeah. I'm sitting on my couch, and there's the Gap ad. And there's all these kids throwing themselves around doing the Lindy Hop. And I'm like, that's the end of Swing.

Or at least the end of a phase of Swing. Remember, the musicians in particular had started making this music because they wanted to be different. An alternative to the mainstream, whether that was hair metal or grunge. That was the whole thing. We all wanted to do something different.

And now we're feeling like, yeah, we're not different anymore. In fact, in mixing and matching the genres of America's musical past, they had actually created a sound that was familiar, accessible, and non-threatening to just about every American. They had made the perfect soundtrack for selling stuff. It opened up Madison Avenue. It made everybody, you know, want to use swing and make it a thing.

There was no stopping it now. The craziest part of the swing craze was on. Well, swing music is hip. It is happening. It is off the hook. The swing dance world quadrupled. Clubs were just popping up everywhere, everywhere. Working on this episode, we heard multiple stories from friends and colleagues who right after the Gap ad aired hired a swing band for their wedding.

And it wasn't just weddings. Swing bands were showing up anywhere and everywhere you might need a band, and plenty you didn't. They were at award shows and on like every single movie soundtrack, and there was a Broadway show in the works. They were on the radio and the charts, with swing albums selling in the millions and record labels still signing up swing bands as fast as they could form.

And it's at this stage of saturation that we come back to where we started, to swing at the Super Bowl. Big bad voodoo daddy. I'm in a sky booth watching the game with Katie Lang,

And kiss. I mean, come on. And Big Bad Booty Daddy, please. So we just took it. We're like, all right, this is great. Whatever. They did that wicked duet with Stevie Wonder and all that. I mean, how do you not be proud for your boys? How do you not be proud for your fucking boys? That's the pinnacle. It's the pinnacle. They made it to the top right there. They were there. The whole world saw them. If you were going to stop the story right here, the question you might have is simply why?

Why did Swing resonate so much at this time?

This comes up a lot when you're looking into neo-swing, and one of the most common answers has to do with the national mood. The early 1990s had been hard. There was an economic depression and the first Iraq War, and it was the height of the AIDS crisis. And so by the late 1990s, that period of Clintonian optimism and the dawning of a new millennium, people were ready to party like it was 1999.

And musically, buoyancy was big, whether it was Swing or whatever was on MTV's Total Request Live. Hip-hop tricked out with giant melodic hooks and teen pop. But explanations like this always feel a little tidy to me. And the more I've learned about Ne-Yo Swing, the less I think you need some national vibes-based explanation.

It might have looked like Swing was strange or came on like a fever, but really, as with so much music that breaks through, it was part of a subculture with deep roots that got the attention of tastemakers and record companies, advertising agencies, and entertainment conglomerates.

If the explosion that followed was outsized relative to the size of the scene, again, that's not because Swing was weird. It's because it was familiar and accessible to the maximal number of Americans, the perfect fit for the Super Bowl. But after the Super Bowl, Swing did not keep climbing. ♪

Which brings us to the next question. Not why Swing caught on, but why it fell out of favor so fast. There were by now structural flaws in the whole trend.

For one thing, with new bands popping up every day, the talent was stretched thin and the music itself was getting worse. Really bad bands started coming out. No weirdness, no, just a kind of an aesthetic straitjacket. It was just going to see like Disney on ice. Very traditional. I wanted to see the music live and thrive in the here and now and future.

The two biggest swing songs of all by now were the German musician Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5, which was not connected with American Swing, but was lumped in with it all the same, and the cover of the song from The Gap ad, which is to say, not a neo-swing song at all, just classic swing.

And the problem wasn't only with the music. Music by this point wasn't even the face of swing anymore, so much as a backing track to a highly over-the-top aesthetic, rife with cliched fedoras and martini glasses and Betty Page haircuts. Scottie Morris may have started Big Bad Voodoo Daddy with a vision of it being a cartoon come to life.

But Neo Swing was now beyond cartoonish. It had become caricature. We were on the Roseanne Barr show, and...

I said to them, I don't want zoot suited swing dancers with big feathers in their hats wearing shiny zoot suits because it just looked silly to me. And they were like, oh, absolutely no problem. No problem at all. And we get up and we start playing. And all of a sudden, these zoot suited swing dancers with shiny suits and feathers in their hats were dancing in front of us. And it was just like, that is not what I signed up for. And then we played like the Miss USA pageant during the

swimsuit competition. You got your swing dancers and you got the women walking past me in their bikinis. And there's Donald Trump. It's the cheesiest thing you would ever see. I don't think I belong in this universe. Like, I don't, like, this doesn't make any sense to me. And not long after the Super Bowl, it stopped making sense to almost everyone else, too.

Michael Moss, the founder of Swing Time magazine, could see it. He had a giant map of America on his wall with pins stuck all over it, each representing a swing club. And in the beginning of 99 is when I start to see the pins disappearing off of the map. And it starts in the center of the country and it moves towards the coast. So I know the end is coming. The scene was dead. It was dead. You couldn't get a show off.

You said swing, it became a dirty word. The mentality of the major label record industry of the late 1990s was like, inflate the balloon until it pops and then just get another balloon. Once they're done with it, once they don't see dollar signs anymore, out it goes.

When Big Bad Voodoo Daddy released their next album in 1999, just a few months after the Super Bowl and a follow-up to a record that had gone platinum, the response was worse than indifference. I can't even get over, like, it got such terrible reviews and it was like, Swing was completely out of fashion and this record was garbage and don't give this band a second look. How did that feel?

It made me sad. It hurt my feelings so much. It's unbelievable because I put my heart and soul into this. And unfortunately, Neoswing's reputation was only going to get worse. Tom Maxwell parted ways with Squirrel Nut Zippers in June of 1999. I just couldn't do it anymore. I quit the band.

Three years later, with swing music still fresh in the grave, he put out his first solo record and booked an interview on the long-running, prestigious NPR show Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross. Tom Maxwell is a former member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, one of the most popular bands behind what has been described as the neo-swing movement. Terry Gross, legend. And her whole thing is, why does this swing movement suck so hard? One of the problems I have with the kind of...

Terry Gross may have been one of the first

But she has not been the last. Every four years, I have to read another shit-ass article about how much the swing movement sucked. It's true. There are articles and there are random digs on sitcoms and stand-up sets and SNL sketches. They're all wearing giant, oversized suits. I don't even know what style that is. Slow your roll, Rover. We're a swing revival revival band.

The eye roll is so widespread that it's even extended to the people who made it all happen. I looked back and I was like, "God, was it just clowny?" I just thought, did I fool myself into thinking it was cool? It was just too earnest. The whole scene is corny. Oh, it is so corny. I hope every singer has been so bluntness on how L7 Square a lot of it is.

But it didn't start off that way. It was so cool and it was cool. Like, that's the weird thing. Like, my first lesson, I thought it was corny. But when we got into the whole derby scene, it wasn't corny. They were like, I'm telling you, like, it only felt corny when the other people were doing it. And then as it petered out, it felt cornier again. At this point, I have to admit, I have been convinced that Swing was once cool.

And then, yes, the whole thing became a cynical cash grab. The musical talent pool nowhere big or deep enough to sustain it. And it all turned into martinis and sequin boas and a handful of airsat songs you couldn't escape on the radio. But this trajectory I just outlined, it's normal. Trends often start somewhere specific and then get overblown and cringey.

So this raises what to me is the juiciest question about neo-swing. Why of all our flings with fads, our trysts with trends, does this one seem so doofy in hindsight? Why aren't we more gentle with it? I think the answer also hinges on cool. Not what's cool in any moment, but how cool ages. How it looks after the fact.

The people involved in Swing cared about fun and they put in effort to have it. They attended to presentation and skill, to their sound, their dance moves, their look. But then the whole context around Swing shifted. Effort and fun stopped being legible as jabs against the sloppy, depressing musical status quo.

Unlike punk, goth, grunge even, subcultures that also had their own codes and costumes, you couldn't see the rebellion in swing anymore. You couldn't see the punk in it. Because what was left looked very theatrical, very try-hard, a little unoriginal, even a little small-c conservative and grandparent approved. Whatever had been cool about it,

just couldn't get through anymore. Side by side, Charles did it.

Don't get me wrong, it hasn't stopped Swing from soldiering on. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is still together and selling out performing arts centers. Swing dancing still has a vibrant international scene. One of our producers went to see people doing it in person in San Francisco, and everyone there was having so much fun, free from the tyranny of cool. I'd rather be doing this than any other activity, honestly. Hand to hand, Charles.

But we're not all so enlightened. Not even the people originally involved with Neo Swing, who cared about Kool themselves and surely thought at the time that what they were doing was. Maybe that's another reason why Neo Swing, a fairly innocuous, relatively short-lived scene, keeps getting dinged all these decades later. It's not just that it's something goofy we once did. It's proof that though we don't like to think about it,

We're surely doing something goofy right now. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. Thank you to our listeners Lorraine Denman and Alex Friendly for originally asking us about the 90s swing revival. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoderring at slate.com.

Also, new and exciting, you can now call us at our new decodering hotline. The number is 347-460-7281. Please call us. We'd love to hear from you.

And if you are or want to become a Slate Plus listener, and you should, you can stick around and listen to a longer version of my conversation with John Bunkley from the Atomic Fireballs. Believe it or not, there actually is more to say about all of this. Not just about the swing revival and John's fascinating life, but everything.

also about Swing's connection to the Ska revival. The Swing scene, without knowing it, read the playbook of Ska. It's like, oh, this is how we get to generalize something and make it suck.

This episode was reported by Sophie Codner and me, Willa Paskin. It was written and produced by me, Sophie, and Evan Chung, with some mix help from Max Friedman. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Evan, Max, and Katie Shepard. Derek John is executive producer. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

I'd like to thank Kristen Emhoff, Tom Bryan, Stephanie Landwehr, and Ken Partridge, whose conversation and book, Hell of a Hat, The Rise of 90s Ska and Swing, was extremely helpful. We'll link to it on our show page. We'll see you in two weeks. Have you heard about double nomics? It's okay if you haven't. It's extremely niche and practiced by Discover.

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