A music critic's juvenile cultural politics

If adolescence is the discovery that every tradition, every habit, every quirk of your upbringing is arbitrary, absurd, and quite possibly dispensable, then adulthood is the recognition that the same is true of every alternative you've tried since adolescence. There may be a time, early in your life, when it feels right to adopt wholesale the likes and dislikes of a narrow cultural movement. But it's hard-for some of us, anyway-to let some dogma about what you "should" like stand in the way of your actual tastes. And so, eventually, you move on-perhaps to another semi-cult, and perhaps, eventually, to a more mature eclecticism: the kind that isn't so uptight about arbitrariness, absurdity, and dispensability.

In this way, the swing revival of the '90s--like the roughly simultaneous revivals of rockabilly, traditional country-western, and martini-flavored lounge musicemerged from the world of punk. If you're suspicious of the mass media and devoted to do-it-yourself culture, there are few better ways to express this than to ignore the officially designated alternatives to the mainstream and instead fashion your own subculture out of whatever pop detritus you can lay your hands on. If you like Benny Goodman, then dammit, you listen to Benny Goodman, even if you also like Husker Du. The affection comes first; the category comes second.

Today, of course, the swing revival (which actually owes more to jump blues, a '40s genre that emerged in part from swing) includes thousands of people with no interest at all in punk rock or the punk subculture. People listen or dance to the music for hundreds of not-always-consist tent reasons, just as other people-sometimes the same people-have hundreds of reasons for listening to rap, listening to bluegrass, or playing football. To explain a subculture, one must do more than trace its genealogy.