Malcolm X and Lindy Hop

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on this day, 19th May 1925.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by him with Alex Haley, was published shortly after his assassination in 1965. Much of the book concerns his involvement with, and later break from the Nation of Islam. But the earlier part of the book contains some fascinating memories of nightlife in Boston and New York in the early 1940s.

In Boston, Malcolm worked as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom and was clearly a big fan of the music played there. He talks approvingly of seeing Peggy Lee, Benny Gordman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and many others, and recalled the fierce dancing competitions:

'"Showtime" people would start hollering about the last hour of the dance. Then a couple of dozen really wild couples would stay on the floor, the girls changing to low-white sneakers. The band now would really be blasting, and all the other dancers would form a clapping, shouting circle to watch that wild competition as it began, covering only a quarter or so of the ballroom floor. The band, the spectators and the dancers would be making the Roseland Ballroom feel like a big rocking ship. The spotlight would be turning, pink, yellow, green, and blue, picking up the couples lindy-hopping as if they had gone mad'.

Before long, he was a zoot suit wearing dancer himself (and indeed had progressed from shining the musicians' shoes to dealing them 'reefers'), and describes with evident relish lindy-hopping to Duke Ellington: 'Laura's feet were flying: I had her in the air, down, sideways, around: backwards, up again, down, whirling... Laura inspired me to drive to new heights. Her hair was all over her face, it was running sweat, and I couldn't believe her strength. The crowd was shouting and stomping'.

Still for all its liberation, nightlife was completely racialized. At the Roseland, some white dancers attended the black dances, but no black people were allowed to dance at the white dances, even if the music was provided by black musicians. Moving to New York, black Harlem had been catering since the 1920s for wealthier whites looking for thrills but not genuine social equality. I was surprised to read the word 'hippies'' dates back to that period: 'A few of the white men around Harlem, younger ones whom we called 'hippies', acted more Negro than Negroes. This particular one talked more 'hip' than we did'.

During the war, resentment against racist treatment grew. 'During World War II, Mayor LaGuardia officially closed the Savoy Ballroom. Harlem said the real reason was to stop Negroes from dancing with white women. Harlem said no one dragged the white women in there'.  In his recent biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011), Manning Marable provides some background:

'Since its grand opening in 1926, the Savoy, located on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st streets, had quickly become the most significant cultural institution of Harlem. The great ballroom contained two large bandstands, richly carpeted lounges, and mirrored walls. During its heyday, about seven hundred thousand customers visited each year... In a period when downtown hotels and dancehalls still remained racially segregated, the Savoy was the centre for interracial dancing and entertainment. On April 22nd 1943, the Savoy was padlocked by the NYPD, on the grounds that servicemen had been solicited by prostitutes there. New York City's Bureau of Social Hygiene cited evidence that, over a nine-month period,  164 individuals has "met the source of their [venereal] diseases at the Savoy Ballroom". These alleged cases all came from armed services or coast guard personnel. Bureau officials offered absolutely no explanation as to how they had determined that the servicemen contracted diseases specifically from Savoy hookers... The Savoy remained closed throughout the summer of 1943' (it reopened in October).

During the period of the closure there there was a major riot in Harlem on 1 August 1943 after a black soldier was shot by a white policeman. 6 people died and 600 were arrested.

Marable reveals an interesting detail that Malcolm does not mention in the Autobiography - that under the stage name Jack Carlton, he performed as a bar entertainer at the Lobster Pond nightclub on 42nd street in 1944, dancing and sometimes playing the drums on stage.

Sadly it was another ballroom, the Audobon in Harlem, where Malcolm was murdered in February 1965 as he rose to speak at a public meeting there.

There's a great recreation of the Lindy Hop scene at the Roseland Ballroom in Spike Lee's film Malcolm X (1992).

Classic Party Scenes (8): The Girl with Green Eyes

The Girl with Green Eyes, starring Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave, is a 1964 film based on Edna O'Brien's novel The Lonely Girl about a brief affair between a working class shop girl up from the country and an older landowner.

It might not win too many prizes for its Irish accents, but it does retain some interest for its Dublin street scenes, and a great episode based around a night out dancing in a nightclub. Dancers are seen twisting on the floor to a live showband, and later in couples.

The scene is the Four Provinces Ballroom (or as it says on the sign 4 Provinces), which was apparently in Dublin's Harcourt Street and later became known as the Television Club before it was demolished in around 1990.

The Rita Tushingham character has to sit out the dancing, as she's forgotten her dancing shoes, but I love her modish look in this scene with button down collar, tie and braces.

The nightclub scene kicks in around 6:30 into the film.



Lots more Dublin music and cultural history at Come here to me!

Classic Party Scenes (7): Black Swan

Enjoyed Black Swan, a whole movie about dancing - what's not to like? If you've been living in a cave for the last month you might need to be told that it stars Natalie Portman as a ballet dancer struggling with her dark side as she prepares for the dual role of white swan/black swan in Swan Lake. Cue sex, drugs, blood and madness. All this and great eye make up!



It also has one of the best club scenes I've seen in a movie for a while, conveying a sense of messy, druggy dissociative intimacy on a dancefloor. It was apparently filmed in the Forum in Manhattan with soundtrack courtesy of The Chemical Brothers.

Weirder than anything in the film is the usual drivel on crazed conspiracy sites where David Icke acolytes ponder how the movie fits in to the supposed global/zionist/illuminati/Hollywood mind control plot. Apparently the movie teaches us to embrace our evil natures and commit ritual sacrifice. I don't dip into this stuff very often, and am not going to link to it, but needless to say much is made of the fact that Natalie Portman is.... shock horror... Jewish. There's a lenghthy obsessive post out there with the hilarious (but they're not joking) title Natalie Portman, Kabbalistic Kitten.

Classic Party Scenes (6): Warriors, 1979

When Walter Hill's film The Warriors was released in 1979, there were fears that it would lead to an explosion of gang related violence. Watching it today the violence seems mild and indeed it seems incredibly camp, as leather vest-clad street gang the Warriors make their way back home to Coney Island fighting off other equally implausibly-dressed New York gangs along the way.

Musically my favourite scenes are those featuring the radio DJ who broadcasts a coded commentary on the gang battles with lines like 'All right now for all you boppers out there in the big city, all you street people with an ear for the action' before playing Nowhere to Run as a threat to the Warriors.

Then there's the scene where the Warriors are enticed into the club house of The Lizzies, an all-women gang who promise 'Let's party a little, get something going'. You don't need a PhD in queer studies to work out that Lizzies suggests 'Lezzies', with women dancing together to "Love Is A Fire" by Genya Ravan. Of course the welcome is a trap and as the women pull out their weapons a hapless warrior shouts 'The chicks are packed'. The film is loosely based on an ancient Greek story, so The Lizzies also stand for the Sirens.

Update: As mentioned in the comments, a sample from the film features in the mid-1990s house track Can You Dig It by Mark the 909 King (sample kicks in at about four minutes):

The Can You Dig It sample comes from a speech by gangleader Cyrus early in the film, where he calls for the gangs of New York to unite and take over the city:

This speech is also sampled in Can U Dig It? by Pop Will Eat Itself

Classic Party Scenes (5): Beat Girl (1960)

The Soho jazz clubs of the 1950s (discussed in previous post) act as the setting for the film Beat Girl (1960), in which art student Gillian Hills runs away to be a crazy Soho beatnik and then a stripper in a club run by Christopher Lee.

Not sure if the dance scene is in a real club or a studio - the music is by the John Barry Seven and the scene also features a young Oliver Reed dancing in a check shirt (about four minutes in):



The film was released in the US as 'Wild for Kicks', with the following trailer promising a 'vivid and shocking portrayal of modern youth who grow up too soon and live it up too fast' with 'beat girls and defiant boys':

Classic party scenes (4): Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Prompted by a post at the excellent Pop Feminist, it's time to consider one of the great fictional nightclubs - The Bronze in Sunnydale, California - home to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the rest of her friends in the scooby gang. Buffy obsessives - and there's a lot of us out there - have noted that no fewer than 66 of the 144 episodes of the TV programme feature at least one scene in The Bronze. Considering the number of vampire-related fatalities in or near the club, it's amazing the parents of Sunnydale let their kids go there. Still they did at least have the chosen one watching over them. It was a club with pool tables, a stage where various hopeful West Coast bands gained global TV exposure, and a balcony from where brooding and morally ambiguous creatures of the night could survey the dancefloor.



Sadly The Bronze, like the TV series, is no more - it was destroyed along with the rest of Sunnydale in the final episode. I can't believe that its five years since the demise of the best thing ever to be on TV. Here's something I wrote about it at the time:

It's the end of the world as we know it: the last days of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'

The last ever episode of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (2003) might have made me sad but it did not disappoint. Instead it demonstrated why over its seven year arc the programme remained the most interesting thing on television.

Buffy represented a conscious effort to create a female superhero(ine), but it was much more subversive than 'Wonderwoman' with better clothes and a sense of humour. The classic male superheroes have tended to be brooding loners wrestling with their isolation and their egos. The cult of the superman, whether in its Nietzche or Clark Kent form, has always had a fascistic side - the ubermensch flying high above the powerless masses.

Buffy may have been 'the chosen one' with unique abilities, but she always fought as part of a closely knit affinity group to which all members made their own particular contribution: wisdom and experience (Giles); a good heart and personal integrity (Xander); kick-ass lesbian witchiness (Willow).

In the final, seventh series, the tension between Buffy as 'chosen one' and the rest reached crisis point as the core gang was joined by a small army of potential slayers from across the world. At one point they mutinied against her orders before the contradiction was brilliantly resolved in the final episode by Buffy relinquishing her uniqueness, declaring: "In every generation, one slayer is born... because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule... So I say we change the rule. I say my power should be our power". In doing so she empowered all the potential vampire slayers, and by implication young women in general: "From now on, every girl in the world who might be a slayer will be a slayer. Every girl who could have the power will have the power".

Buffy and her pals referred to themselves as the Scooby Gang in self-mocking homage to the 70s cartoon strip. But in Scooby Doo the ending is always the same - once the kids have unmasked the villain they hand him over to the cops and the normal social order is restored. In the Buffyverse the state offered no such protection - police, priests and politicians tended to be either stupid or actively in collusion with demonic forces.

In the final series it was business as usual. The preacher who picked up the girl fleeing from her pursuers turned out to be the most evil of all, while the potential slayers had to beat up a group of cops intent on killing Faith (slayer no.2).

Marx wrote that "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." Buffy might not have been this explicit, but it hinted at it in episodes such as 'Anne' where Buffy runs away from home and finds work as a waitress in a diner. While experiencing the delights of casualised wage slavery she discovers that young homeless people are disappearing, seduced by religious missionaries offering a promise of help. When they reappear they have aged overnight into dying, decrepit old people. Buffy soon finds out the secret: an underground sweatshop run by demons where people are worked until they are exhausted. Naturally Buffy leads a slave revolt.

In the final scene of the last episode, schools, shops and the whole town were consigned to the hellmouth of history, as Sunnydale was swallowed up by the earth. Xander declared: "All those shops gone. The Gap, Starbucks, Toys 'R' Us. Who will remember all those landmarks unless we tell the world about them?". The end of the world as they knew it - but smiling they stood to face a better one.

Classic party scenes (3): Desperately Seeking Susan

In Susan Seidelman's 1985 film, bored housewife Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) swaps lives with bohemian rock chick/gangster's moll Susan (played by Madonna playing herself), leading Roberta's husband ('the spa king of New Jersey') to seek out Susan to help him find his wiife. 'Meet me at 30 West 21st Street' says Susan/Madonna and so the hapless yuppie finds himself dancing to 'Get Into the Groove' surrounded by an assortment of post-punk/new romantic haircuts. Earlier in the film, by way of contrast, we've seen his own tedious house party - a few nibbles, no dancing, conversations with dentists. Out on the dancefloor he really lets go, well loosens his tie anyway - 'only when I'm dancing can I feel this free'.

The scene was shot in real New York club Danceteria (fondly remembered here before by Charles Donelan), with various regulars and staff from the club in the film scene.

Classic party scenes (2): Basic Instinct

It's 1992 and cop Michael Douglas pursues suspect psycho Sharon Stone into a San Francisco club with sex, drugs and pumping sounds by Channel X (Rave the Rhythm) and LaTour (Blue). Jacques Peretti once characterised this as 'The Citizen Kane of club scenes... in which Michael Douglas, playing an Andrew Neil-lookalike in V-neck jumper and no shirt (a sweaty fashion detail signifying middle-aged man smelling out sex) watches Sharon Stone, who taunts his manhood by indulging in a faux-lesbian sex dance'.

Apparently this scene was not filmed in a real club but on a Hollywood film set inspired by the Limelight Club in New York.

Classic party scenes (1): Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) is a kind of even-more druggy The Monkees with breasts, in which a young female band (The Kelly Affair, later renamed The Carrie Nations) taste the decadent delights of Los Angeles only to be caught up in Manson-murder style slaughter.

It features a couple of classic party scenes, set at the mansion of Ronnie Barzall, a Phil Spector-like music manager. People dance energetically to a show by psychedelic band the Strawberry Alarm Clock . It's all gyrating hips, hands in the air, a smattering of semi-naked dancers amongst the swingers and groovy people, sex and drugs in beds and swimming pools in adjoining rooms. It's not a hippy crowd as such, more a mixture of freaks and suit-clad jet set. Best of all is the dialogue: "This is my happening and it freaks me out!", "In a scene like this you get a contact-high!" and the ultimate chat up line "you're a groovy boy, I'd like to strap you on some time".

There's also a bit where a woman on a chain says "What I see is beyond your dreaming", a line I immediately recognised as a sample and thanks to Dissensus now know to have been used on Roni Size's Mad Cat from the New Forms album (1997). Lots of trailers and clips from the film here.