Jul 21, 2007 - 3 min - Uploaded by PostModVidCool 77 Robert Kosek; 4552 videos. Atlanta Rhythm Section - Spooky BEST version (rare. A Squirrel Nut Zipper is also a. To listen to some EXTREMELY RARE. This interactive presentation contains some of the Squirrel Nut Zippers very best live.

It’s Weird ’90s Week on Stereogum. All week long we’re looking at the strangest musical moments and trends of the decade. Check out more. One month in 1998, long before Alternative Press was a strictly emo-only concern, the magazine put Squirrel Nut Zippers, the North Carolina swing revivalists who’d scored an out-of-nowhere radio hit with “Hell,” on its cover.

I’m doing this from 18-year-old memory, but I’m pretty sure there’s a part in the profile when a couple of the band members’ wives dance, at a party, to “The Metro,” Berlin’s 1981 synthpop hit. The Alternative Press writer thinks this is the worst shit ever.

He mocks “The Metro” — and, by extension, the people who love it, including the band members’ wives or girlfriends — for personifying the worst excesses of ’80s pop. “The Metro,” to the writer, is chintzy, fake, and synthetic. It means nothing.

By contrast, the music of Squirrel Nut Zippers is steeped in history. It’s organic and authentic and deeply felt.

It means something. Well, joke’s on that guy.

Eighteen years later, “The Metro” remains an unassailable synthpop classic, and Squirrel Nut Zippers are a punchline. Precious few of us will ever admit to liking them. I’m not picking on Alternative Press in particular here. Plenty of us felt that way at the time. There was a full-bore swing revival happening, one that briefly left a deep impact on alternative radio and convinced people that it was a good idea to own a zoot suit. Squirrel Nut Zippers were, for a time, the biggest of those bands, and they were also the best.

But there were more, each with a shittier band name than the last. Royal Crown Revue. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. I loved this shit. I loved it so much. In my high school newspaper, I wrote that Squirrel Nut Zippers’ Hot was the best album of 1997. I wanted to honor the album so much that I ignored that it had come out in 1996. (My #2 of the year was Missy Elliott’s Supa Dupa Fly.) In maybe a two-year span, I saw every one of the bands from the swing revival big four live. In the summer of 1998, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy played a free radio-station afternoon show in Baltimore, and I ended up randomly seated between my then-girlfriend and an ex.

So I wasn’t just into the swing revival; I was also dating girls who were into the swing revival. So I watched Swingers many, many times, and I may have even spent a couple of days trying to talk like that. And I was one of many. Looking back, it’s hard to figure out how all this shit happened, but there are some threads to pick. After grunge began to pass out of favor, this stuff seemed like its polar opposite: sharp rather than slovenly, crisp and efficient rather than wild and intuitive, knowingly silly rather than deadly self-serious. Within the rapidly atomizing alt-rock universe, there was a hunger for something smooth and sophisticated.

Sms Peeper Activation Code. A few years before the grunge revival popped off, there was the deeper-underground but just as silly lounge revival, with Combustible Edison releasing music on Sub Pop and a ton of Esquivel reissues coming out. But if you’re looking to blame the swing revival on anyone, blame Hollywood.

Consider, if you will, the 1993 movie Swing Kids, in which Christian Bale and Noah Wyle, among others, play jazz-besotted teenagers torn apart by the rise of the Third Reich. Download Canon Utilities Zoom Browser Ex Tutorial. It ends with Robert Sean Leonard emotionally yelling the phrase “Swing Heil” over and over.

I saw this movie in the theater, and I mostly remember being bored. The wartime-melodrama stuff meant basically nothing to 13-year-old me, and the movie didn’t effectively convince me that it should. What I do remember were the dance scenes: Intricately choreographed tableaux of kicks and spins and flips and swirls. It looked fun. I probably shouldn’t even be admitting this shit in public, but the lindy hop scenes from Spike Lee’s Malcolm X left an even deeper impression. They were even more vivid and elaborate than the Swing Kids scenes, and they were way more colorful.

Lee had more fun documenting the street-hoodlum roots of Malcolm Little than he did with anything else in the movie, and even though the entire thing was great, those scenes were the ones I remembered the most. This has to be the most clueless white-kid thing in the whole fucking world — going to see Malcolm X and falling in love with the fucking swing-dancing scenes — but there it is. And then there was The Mask, an unbelievably dumb movie that I should absolutely not be mentioning in the same breath as Malcolm X.