I have long delighted in this 1957 quote from Dr. Joost A.M. Meerloo - what a name! - on the subject of rock and roll and dance mania. Don't think I was able to deploy it in Energy Flash itself but it got included in my Rave Theory Toolkit:
"Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!" The call repeats itself into the infinite, and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions - as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment.... Rock 'n' roll is a sign of depersonalization of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity. If we cannot stem the tide with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances. The dance craze is the infantile rage and outlet of our actual world."
Although written in flowery and windy style, this grave warning is fairly typical of the scaremongering reactions to dance crazes associated with youth music (meaning in fact black music made for all ages that suddenly connects with young white people). This discourse about the degrading and de-civilizing effects of rhythm erupted around rock'n'roll ("jungle music", leads to sex before marriage and venereal disease, etc c). But they are very similar to the frightened responses to jazz from the elder-and-squarer generation when the hot sound first seethed out of the disreputable quarters of New Orleans to conquer America and the world. Very similar analogies or connections were made to narcotic drugs, loosening of sexual inhibition, coke-crazed flappers etc.
And very similar accusations were made about acid house by the UK tabloids.
Read the whole Feb. 23, 1957 article in New York Times in which the Joost quote appeared and the hysterical tone is something else:
EXPERTS PROPOSE STUDY OF 'CRAZE'; Liken It to Medieval Lunacy, 'Contagious Dance Furies' and Bite of Tarantula
Psychologists suggested yesterday that while the rock 'n' roll craze seemed to be related to “rhythmic behavior patterns” as old as the Middle Ages, it required fullstudy as a current phenomenon. One educational psychologist asserted that what happened in and around the Paramount Theatre yesterday struck him as "very much like the medieval type of spontaneous lunacy where one person goes off and lots of other persons go off with him.” A psychopathologist, attending a meeting of the American Psychopathological Association at the Park Sheraton Hotel, feared that this was just a guess. Others present noted that a study by Dr. Reginald Lourie of Children's Hospital, Washington, indicated in 1949 that 10 to 20 per cent of all children did "some act like rocking or rolling." The study went into detail on the stimulating effects of an intensi fied musical beat. Meanwhile, a parallel between rock 'n' roll and St. Vitus Dance| has been drawn by Dr. Joost A. M. Meerlo, associate in psychiatry at Columbia University, in a study just completed for publication.
Echo of Fourteenth Century
Dr. Meerlo described the "contagious epidemic of dance fury" that "swept Germany and spread to all of Europe" toward the end of the fourteenth century. It was called both St. Vitus Dance (or Chorea Major), he continued, with its victims breaking into dancing and being unable to stop. The same activity in Italy, he noted, was referred to as Tarantism and popularly related to a toxic bite by the hairy spider called tarantula. “The Children's Crusades and the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin," Dr. Meerlo went on, "remind us of these seductive, contagious dance furies."
Dr. Meerlo described his first view of rock 'n' roll this way: Young people were moved by a juke box to dance themselves "more and more into a prehistoric rhythmic trance until it had gone far beyond all the accepted versions of human dancing."
Sweeping the country and even the world, the craze “demonstrated the violent mayhem long repressed everywhere on earth,' he asserted. " He also saw possible effects in political terms: "Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!" The call repeats itself into the infinite, and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions - as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment."
Dr. Meerlo predicted that the craze would pass "as have all paroxysms of exciting music." But he said that the psychic phenomenon was important and dangerous. He concluded in this way: "Rock 'n' roll is a sign of depersonalization of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity.
"If we cannot stem the tide with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances.
"The dance craze is the infantile rage and outlet of our actual world. In this craze the suggestion of deprivation and dissatisfaction is stimulated and advertised day by day. In their automatic need for more and more, people are getting less and less."
"The awareness of this tragic contradiction in our epoch," Dr. Meerlo said, “must bring us back to a new assessment of what value and responsibility are."
Now if you look at some of Meerloo's many other books, the good doctor does seem persistently preoccupied with loss-of-mental-control under the influence of sinister powers, the de-invidualizing dark side of crowd psychology, etc:
Patterns of Panic (1950)
Delusion and Mass-delusion (1949)
The Rape of the Mind: the psychology of thought control, menticide, and brainwashing (1956).
Suicide and Mass Suicide (1962)
Intuition and the Evil Eye.: The natural history of a superstition (1971).
"Menticide"!
Now someone who lived through the Nazi conquest of their homeland (the Netherlands) might well have a particular and pained interest in irrationality: the fragility of the civilized mind in the face of a barbarian insurgency.
And here's yet another book by Joost that makes the connection explicit:
Total War and the Human Mind: a psychologist's experiences in occupied Holland.
But, and here it gets interesting, somewhere between his remarks to the New York Times reporter Milton Bracker and his 1960 publication The Dance: From Ritual to Rock and Roll - Ballet to Ballroom, Merloo's attitude to rock 'n' roll seems to have softened somewhat, succumbed to a fascination...
This is even more apparent in the book's other title:
Dance Craze and Sacred Dance: an outlook on the eternal rock 'n' roll.
Far from some fly-by-night teen craze, rock'n'roll is "eternal" now - tapping into some undying capacity within humans to escape through trance. Its precursors echo down through the ages to primeval man. And if the (almost certainly bow-tied) Dr Meerloo is still made a little uncomfortable by its latest manifestations, the "eternal" aspect seems to give it a certain dignity.
As does the word "sacred". He seems to come round a bit to the idea that terpsichorean movements can be a form of worship.
So naturally I had to get hold of the book - and found it easily, in the wonderful library of CalArts.
It's a beautiful looking book with loads of photographs of dancers from different cultures around the world - the photos take equal billing with the text, in fact - and there's some nice drawings too. The writing fuses the scholarly and poetic registers. In some places, the text breaks up into aphorisms and short bursts - it's as though exposure to all that syncopation has loosened Meerlo up as a writer and thinker.
Shakers rattle and roll
But he's still a scholar and he's really done his research: just look at the contents pages:
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