The Roaring Twenties Redux

We are approaching 100 years of cool.

Yes, for the vast majority of human existence, nobody was cool or hip or happenin or tight or flexing or phat or badass or whatever the kids are saying today.

Those concepts didn’t exist.

So everyone — from kings to peasants, from farmers to pirates — just went about their business, devoid of coolness, until the day they died.

And then the 1920s arrived.

All of a sudden, we had jazz and nightclubs and drinking and carousing. We had crazy parties, hipster lingo (e.g., “the bee’s knees”) and America’s first wild women, the flappers.

Seriously, how cool were the flappers?

But the development of this new human state of mind provoked an equally strong backlash. So we had the first scolds, the first self-righteous hypocrites, and the first moral panics.

Why did this happen?

Well, as usual in America, you can blame it on Black people… or more accurately, you can blame it on White people who blamed it on Black people.

You see, the 1920s saw the rise of jazz, often proclaimed as the only music genre created in the United States. Of course, I would argue that the blues is an original music form that was born in America, and the same can be said of rock and roll as well as rap/hip-hop (and yes, Black people invented all of them).

In any case, jazz musicians were primarily Black, and the White audience that danced to those crazy beats had upended a cultural norm that no one ever thought would be upended.

For the first time in American history, Black people were influencing White people. Never before had White Americans admired or respected Black people the way they did with jazz musicians. This was simply unprecedented, and to many White people, it was unimaginable and abominable as well.

And this inversion of societal mores promptly caused much of White America to freak the fuck out.

The criminalization of drug use, the demonization of the younger generation, the hysteria about loud music, the terror over premarital sex — all of it had its roots in the 1920s. And all of these cultural fears were based upon the jagged foundation of racism, the true root fear for so much of our country’s hatred and paranoia.

This particular set of horrors is closing in on a century of cultivation. And as we all know, these fears are stronger than ever with a very large and very loud portion of America.

But to be fair, without apocalyptic sermonizing and uptight judgement and close-minded intolerance, we would not have their antithesis: the concept of being cool.

So here’s a salute to those wild, bawdy, and edgy 1920s jazz lovers, partying until sunrise and drinking bathtub gin and dancing bizarre jitterbugs like the chicken flip, the kangaroo dip, and the monkey glide (all real dances, by the way).

We can all only hope to be half as cool as they were.