How the Nazis gave us disco

[Cyrus]

Dave, you 're  a treasure...

Cyrus

Dave Monroe wrote:

> How the Nazis gave us disco
>(Filed: 12/08/2006)
>
>A French wartime subculture gave rise to the modern
>DJ, says Frank Broughton
>
>Exactly 100 years ago, by broadcasting Handel to some
>very surprised ships' radio operators, Canadian
>inventor Reginald Fessenden became the world's first
>DJ. To celebrate the disc jockey's centenary, Bill
>Brewster and I have greatly expanded our book Last
>Night a DJ Saved My Life - The History of the Disc
>Jockey (Headline). Most think of DJs as mere
>entertainers, players piggybacking on other people's
>talent. We argue that the DJ is central to the story
>of popular music - that as taste-maker and musical
>gatekeeper, he has been the main motive force in its
>evolution. By championing the obscure, by importing
>and cross-pollinating different styles, and by
>gleefully splintering recorded sound in ways that have
>horrified musicians, the DJ has been music's most
>ardent revolutionary.
>
>Research for the new edition took in acid house, the
>births of drum and bass and UK garage, and the strange
>Galapagos Islands of dance music which blossomed in
>mainland Europe when disco dried up. But for me most
>pressing was the part of our story that was slipping
>from living memory: the birth of the modern nightclub
>in Paris. Exactly why does the discothèque bear a
>French name? Tracing the answer took us all the way
>back to smoky cellars in occupied Paris. It also
>revealed one of the most bizarre youth movements in
>history.
>
>Imagine, amid the grey serge of wartime France, a
>tribe of youngsters with all the colourful decadence
>of punks or teddy boys. Wearing zoot suits cut off at
>the knee (the better to show off their brightly
>coloured socks), with hair sculpted into grand quiffs,
>and shoes with triple-height soles - looking like
>glam-rock footwear 30 years early - these were the
>kids who would lay the foundations of nightclubbing.
>Ladies and gentlemen, les Zazous.
>
>The Zazou look was completed with high collars,
>impossibly tight ties and long sheepskin-lined
>jackets, with a curved-handled umbrella carried at all
>times (copied from British prime minister Neville
>Chamberlain, regarded as quite a style icon). Female
>Zazous wore short skirts, shabby furs, wooden platform
>shoes and dark glasses with big lenses, and chose to
>go hatless, to better show off the single lock of hair
>they had bleached or dyed. They took their name from
>the Cab Calloway-style scatting in a song Je Suis
>Swing, by their hero, French jazz singer Johnny Hess.
>
>Like peacock versions of Hamburg's swing kids, the
>Zazous thrived in opposition to the Nazis' hatred of
>jazz. When Goebbels issued edicts banning the "rhythms
>of belly-dancing negroes", the remnants of
>Montmartre's jazz community were deported, interned,
>or at very least unemployed. The scene that had raised
>Josephine Baker to legend resorted to home-grown
>musicians playing US jazz standards, renamed on
>programmes to fool the censors.
>
>While the adults skirted the Nazi regulations, their
>younger counterparts favoured far more public
>defiance. Raising a finger to the world, the Zazous
>would shout "Swing", give a little hop, then cry out,
>"Zazou hey, hey, hey, za Zazou!," followed by three
>slaps on the hip, two shrugs of the shoulder and a
>turn of the head. Not surprisingly, Zazous were
>regular targets for the boot-boys of the
>collaborationist Vichy government, suffering organised
>beatings, having their heads shaved and being cast out
>to sweat in the fields.
>
>As the pogroms began, some Zazous went even further
>and took to wearing yellow stars of David to show
>solidarity with the Jews. To underline their outlaw
>musical taste, they wrote "swing" across them. Several
>found themselves in internment camps as a result. Even
>stranger, when liberation was imminent, female Zazous
>blacked up their faces to show their love for jazz and
>America.
>
>Crucially, it was the Zazous who gave Paris its
>enduring taste for dancing in cellars to records.
>Unable to congregate openly, they took their precious
>swing 78s underground, for les bals clandestins in
>cafés off the Champs-Élysées or in the Latin Quarter.
>There, they would throw English slang at each other,
>swap American novels and jitterbug to all hours.
>
>In Paris, les Zazous remain a potent symbol of
>resistance - against both the Nazis and the stuffiness
>of an older generation. They were also the first club
>kids. After the liberation, Eddie Barclay, wartime
>jazz pianist, legendary lounge lizard and founder of
>the French record industry, followed their example and
>established the first nightclub to dispense with live
>music. So while the precise etymology of discothèque
>has so far defied discovery, we know that the concept
>of an intimate underground record club is ours thanks
>to the Third Reich and the jazz-loving layabouts who
>defied it.
># 'Last Night a DJ Saved My Life' is published by
>Headline. For a complete timeline of 100 years of
>DJing, go to http://djcentenary.com
>
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=FCJ5DQLBE11DZQFIQMGCFFOAVCBQUIV0?xml=/arts/2006/08/12/bmdisco12.xml
>
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