Bona fide revolutions—whether political, cultural, or spiritual —occur infrequently in history, and it’s possible to pass an entire lifetime without experiencing one. What, then, do transcendence seekers or would-be revolutionaries do in the meantime? One option is nightlife, one of society’s few sanctioned antidotes to the monotony of the day-to-day, or what the French call le quotidien. The elements that prevail during times of revolution—the exhilaration of collective experience, the inversion of social roles, the supremacy of the present, the triumph of imaginative life—can all be found in the dusk-to-dawn alternative world of the nightclub. Nightlife is, in a sense, revolution during the off-season. Passions and vices that would trouble the day are exiled to the nocturnal realm of clubs, where they are transformed into virtues, encouraged, and at the same time contained and prevented from causing social upheaval.
From the juke joint to the dance hall, American clubs in the post-war era have been the center of a cultural struggle pitting the forces of hedonism, revelry, and sexual liberation against those of socio-sexual stability and control. The furor generated in the 1950s by Elvis’s gyrating pelvis and that era’s television censorship of certain “sexually provocative” dances like the Alligator illustrated white, adult, middle-class fears of what could be called the spillover effect of dance music, the possibility that the sexualized frenzy of the dance floor might seep out onto the streets and into the suburbs of America. At an extreme the broad brushstrokes of Cold War logic painted a frightening picture of provocative dances exposing white youths to black music and culture, weakening their moral fiber, promoting juvenile delinquency, and wearing down their resistance to the perils of both miscegenation and communism. It was this chain of reasoning that led a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to conclude in 1958 that “the gangster of tomorrow is the Elvis Presley type of today.”
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