Joost an illusion?: Dance Literature (and Anti-Dance Literature)

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).

 But they are also very similar to the frightened responses to jazz  from the elder-and-squarer(-and-whiter) 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 of course the exact same sort of phobic hysteria erupted around acid house in the UK tabloids. 

Read the whole Feb. 23, 1957 article in New York Times in which the Meerloo 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. Meerloo, associate in psychiatry at Columbia University, in a study just completed for publication.

Echo of Fourteenth Century

Dr. Meerloo 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. Meerloo went on, "remind us of these seductive, contagious dance furies."

Dr. Meerloo 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. Meerloo 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. Meerloo 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:  

Delusion and Mass-delusion (1949)

Patterns of Panic  (1950)

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 Meerloo 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,  Meerloo’s attitude to rock 'n' roll seems to have softened somewhat, succumbed to a fascination...

This is even more apparent in the book's alternate 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. 

Hark also at the German title of the book, which translates as "Rhythm and Ecstasy" 

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 Meerloo 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: 

The word "epidemics" in the section that includes rock 'n' roll  - "Modern Dance Epidemics" -  has the sniffy, "this is a social problem" tang of the New York Times quotes, which are probably taken from a scholarly article now I think about it. 

But the actual entry on rock 'n ' roll is not as hostile or harshly judgmental - the tone perhaps is condescending, but trying to understand.

 

In the course of the writing of this section, Meerloo moves from consternated to....  accepting. His researches into the history of ritual dance have shown him that youth is not in fact permanently damaged or corrupted by these epidemics of frenzy.... that after the bacchanal burns itself out, people return to their normal social selves and functions.  In tone it recalls Adorno on the jitterbug and the swing bands: 

"They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence"

"Their ecstasy is without content.... The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character....  It has convulsive aspects reminescent of St Vitus's dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals. ... The same jitterbugs who behave as if they were electrified by syncopation, dance almost exclusively the good rhythmic parts" 

Except that in the Meerloo writing, after a stretch of what reads as condemnation, there is the sudden unexpected  concession of  the phrase "vitalizing regression". The thought that going-back (for Meerloo both to premodern, even pre-Christian ritual dance and to childhood's uncontrolled emotions) is healthy and invigorating, an outlet in a society that is otherwise a spiritual wasteland. Perhaps these crazes are benign forms of madness? "Is it all bad?", he thinks aloud?

In the next section, there is a similar movement - from equating, or seeing an affinity, between frenzied dancing and fascism, towards a viewpoint that sees liberation in ecstasy, a renewal of the spirit. 

It's almost as though he's so attached to his earlier formulations - the bombastic rhetoric of civilization collapsing - that he wants to recycle  them (the precise phrasings as used in the NY Times piece) in the new text, even as he is being carried towards a different conclusion altogether: that ritual dance and Dionysian frenzy has a purgative effect that is societally healthy and that it can transport the individual to higher planes of (un)(self)consciousness.   A kind of elective and cathartically cleansing form of brainwashing, even. 

What did I tell you? A bow tie!

Couldn't find much information about Meerloo out there... there's a Wiki that fills in his experience during the war....  and the ideas of his most famous book Rape of the Mind....  which came out during an era of great concern about brainwashing (as in The Manchurian Candidate etc) . Meerloo’s experiences of Nazi occupation (he joined the resistance, adopted a Dutch-er and more Teutonic sounding first name, Joost, rather than the Jewish Abraham) are what gave him his abiding interest in collective madness and mass hypnosis. 

But I can't help wondering if the exposure to rock and roll and the research on all its ancestors did not have a subtly depraving effect on the good doctor, at least in the sense that it opened up his overly reason-bound mind to the possibility of other planes of consciousness. That there might be more to the human mind than the mind. 

For one of his later publications has a little bit of a late-period Colin Wilson flavour: 

Hidden communion: studies in the communication theory of telepathy

More from The Dance

x

"Walking is a rhythm too!"

I wonder what Dutchman Meerlo would have had to say about gabba and jumpstyle!

Some more anti-jazz scaremongering:

Some acid house scaremongering

"An Idiotic Rave" / version galore

 

Saw this while watching (very belatedly indeed) the Ken Burns Jazz doc.

The section on ragtime in the doc reminded me that the very first single I bought was Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer", when it was issued off the back of The Sting and became a small UK hit. 

Retrospectively, whenever this fact swam into memory again, I'd always think it was a bit uncool to have this as your first 7-inch single, given that at the time T.Rex Sweet Bowie etc were at their height while things like "Theme from 'Shaft'" were on the radio (a fave of mine as it happens - the wah-wah always made me think of a helicopter's whirring blades... 9-year-old me had no idea what that sound was - that it even came from a guitar). 

But watching the Burns epic, I decided that it was in fact supremely cool and showed a susceptibility to dance rhythm at a tender age - okay, very early 20th Century dance rhythm but still...  

As I recall, there were actually two dueling versions of "The Entertainer" released at that time and I might have accidentally bought the less-preferred rendition - not as bright and bouncy. Nowadays there are so many interpretations of  Joplins's tunes out there it's hard to know which one to go with (the Rifkind and Strickland recordings seem to be favored by some of those who know). But there are also a bunch of piano roll versions.  

It's like the head you have to put on when delving into classical music - like, which pianist's version of Satie's Trois Gymnopedies is the one to go for? Or which conductor's take on the Pastoral Symphony?. The level of variation in feel, attack, tempo, recording ambience, clarity etc is disconcerting for someone who grew up on pop music where there is a Definitive Recording.  

Now maybe you'd think that having been through the dance music culture and lived with (indeed reveled in) the whole remix thing, that this would set you up for this approach to listening. But it's different I think - a remix makes all kinds of substantial structural alterations and adds new material, so it is easy to accept a remix as an almost new piece of music - or something that only overlaps in places with the original. But the interpretative element in classical (and this applies in a different way with jazz... and in yet another different way with showbiz's many arrangements and vocalist interpretations vis-a-vis standards) can be disconcerting precisely for being subtler: the notes are exactly the same, the duration of the song is close, the timbre palette doesn't stray much from "piano" (in the case of "The Entertainer"), but somehow that proximity makes you hyper-aware of all those tiny differences in the player's touch and timing, in the recording ambience, that pervade the entire performance.  Every note is imbued with this difference. 

Perhaps the thing to shed is the idea that you'll find the perfect version of a piece that you prefer to all others, and just enjoy the subtlety of the iterative  range.  

Yet conversely, a form of variation that I do really enjoy with music is the way a song or album can sound really quite different when heard on different formats, through different playback set-ups.  I'll hear different things in a piece heard via streamer on the car stereo, than I do listening to the same streamer but through these computer speakers. Different things again through headphones off an iPod (no really, I still have one, still use it!). And if I happen to have the piece of music on vinyl or CD, there'll be different things again if played on the proper hi-fi with large speakers. We also have a boombox in the kitchen, so sometimes old cassettes get played - another format whose sound properties have a particular appeal.

I suppose the rock-era equivalent to the "many different orchestras / conductors / recording dates"  dilemma that you get with navigating classical music recordings, is the wallet-emptying racket that is audiophilia. You can get into comparing all these different remasterings and formats. Rebuying things in the latest remix, or ponying up for one of those half-speed mastering jobs that supposedly pull more information out of the tape and then what was a single album gets turned into 2 x 45rpm platters for the deep-grooved ultra-fidelity that offers.  Another sub-game here is hunting down particular back-in-the-day pressings that were legendarily closer to the original tapes, or pressed better quality vinyl. (People even have lore on legendarily superior mastering engineers whose cut is better).  Then there's the original mono mixes versus stereo mixes done then versus stereo mixes done today dilemma - yet another game. (The whole business of hi-fi equipment, cartridges, styluses, cables etc is another game altogether, an extra level of complexification and combinational possibiltiies, not to mention wealth-extraction... I hasten to add that I don't actively participate in any of these games, but am fascinated by those who do). 

These versions galore are not new renditions in the interpretative sense; the variation happens at the level of the mix and the mastering. The fundamental audio text is stable. The format and version choices are perhaps like trying on different glasses that change how clearly you perceive what is there; they don't change what is there. 

Or do they? In rock, pop, etc, the mix is what's there; it's not some transparent overlay extraneous to the music itself. The ranking and distribution of the elements in audio space is inseparable from  composition. To make one strand of overdubbed instrumentation peek out more prominently is to change the balance of the constituent elements. 

Another analogy: painting restoration. Removing all the discolorant crud off the surface of a painting, the tarnished  with age pigment and the adulterants deposited via the atmosphere, this reveals the true colours of the original. But for some viewers, they'd actually loved the semi-obscured image, its atmospheric murkiness; that was the original painting as far as they were concerned. 

Certainly there are records that have never sounded quite right when I've heard them later in much superior circumstances than the original hearing / bonding, when it might have been a taped off a friend, or an advance cassette.