The Rites of Springfest

This Sunday is Springfest, the one day every year when even the grouchiest critics of the Undergraduate Council are tempted to acknowledge that maybe it doesn't do everything wrong after all. If last year's success repeats, twice as many students as voted in this fall's election will flock to the MAC Quad to see their termbill dollars hard at work. They'll enjoy the infamous beer-gulag, herds of elephant ears…

And music. Springfest gives students a break from the tedious train of Yo-Yo Ma's, Boston Philharmonics and Mendelssohn String Quartets who regularly file through Harvard's hallowed music halls playing works from centuries past. The council imports a more timely, more popular act so that (at least for one weekend) the most studious students on earth can get down to fanfares intended for common men.

There's something odd and not a little disquieting about mixing Harvard's timeless gravitas with the flighty transience of popular music. It's why one cringes when, on warm spring afternoons, rock seeps into the Yard from open dorm windows. It's why, during Take Back the Night week, former Cliffies' dancing to Madonna's "Express Yourself" atop Widener's steps seems the basest possible blasphemy. After all, every music has its place--blues its dimly lit bar, opera its ornate hall, reggae its lonely beach; popular music belongs neither in cathedrals nor in the academic equivalents thereof.

Whereas elite universities (in theory, at least) concern themselves with the heights of human excellence, pop music seems universally low. This is due in part to the fact that such music is popular: It appeals not to aesthetes, but to the musically unsophisticated masses. If the musically knowledgeable enjoy it all the same, it is not by virtue of their knowledge: One can learn to appreciate a Mendelssohn concerto; the same is not true of, say, a given track on the latest Violent Femmes CD. One either enjoys it or not--there's no learning involved.

Then again, this year the Council has not invited a Violent Femmes clone to Springfest. Instead we have Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, whose music tries to revive swing--which, as a popular music, has been dormant for some 50 years now. With the help of several similar bands--most notably Squirrel Nut Zipper and the Brian Setzer Orchestra--and the applause of countless conservative culture warriors, they've been fairly successful. However, it's worth asking if their music is really so different from that of the Violent Femmes of the world.

It's often said that jazz is the American music, but it's rarely explained why. If democracy is the rule of the poor, jazz is a uniquely democratic music--it was created by the poor, and, at least in its youth, was played primarily for the poor. Also, the rise of swing roughly corresponded to the emergence of two powerful popularizers: radio and the recording industry. As a result, swing was the first genuinely popular music--its appeal transcended class, gender and race.

The curious thing about swing, though, is that it was popular and poignant simultaneously, at once low and high, democratic and aristocratic. At its best, swing wedded a danceable rhythm to challenging harmonics and inspired improvisation, producing a single musical form capable of pleasing aesthetes along with everyone else. Swing was the ancients' mixed regime--not in speech, but in music.

Of course, there was then, as there is now, the seemingly universal tension between the artist's authenticity and the demands of his audience. This often led to regrettable consequences, like the Guy Lombardo schmaltz familiar to frequent viewers of PBS fundraisers and other lost souls. But remarkable, and remarkably lucrative, artistic freedom remained for those who were faithful to the omnipotent dah, dah da-dah.

The musicians who took advantage of that freedom knew they were making noble music. Swing boasted Duke Ellington, Earl Hines and Count Basie, the rarest of rarities--magnanimous men within a democracy. The same men were largely dependent on that democracy for their nobility. Within what other regime could the son of a coachman--the grandson of a slave!--become a duke?

But after decades of high and popular music--indeed music worthy of a Core class some 50 years after the fact--came bop, the dizzying complexity of which (and the fact that you can't dance to it) allowed rock, via R&B, to become the popular music. Magnanimity, the crown-virtue of swing, yielded to rock's rebelliousness--which is not a virtue at all, but the weak, ugly stepchild of courage. Nowadays, the glorious mixed-regime-in-music has devolved into plain democracy-in-music: those concerned with musical excellence via jazz can still subsist (democracy is colorful, after all), but the regime is ruled by today's popular music, a low medley of anthems to equality.

Comes now Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, after the Fall, promising to reclaim the lost virtues of yesteryear. Some have flocked to their sect--several of the aforementioned culture warriors, for instance. But they are, sadly, misled. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy has taken what was low, danceable and popular from the swing era and amplified it. Their "Big Bad" has replaced a claim to nobility--replacing magnanimity with pomposity; their swagger has replaced a justly dignified comportment; and their music follows in tow. Which is not to say that they are unenjoyable--they are, in my opinion, the best of the contemporary swing bands, and one can certainly dance to their music. They are as fine a choice for Springfest as any other band. But there is a certain melancholy hidden in their music as well: the unfulfilled, perhaps unfulfillable, promise of a second coming.

Hugh P. Liebert '01 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.