Stolen Sweets Play Salem

"In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics...Now love may serve as a point of departure, but there is a more basic one. Love as an idea is a product of objective practice. Fundamentally, we do not start from ideas but from objective practice. Our writers and artists who come from the ranks of the intellectuals love the proletariat because society has made them feel that they and the proletariat have a common fate."---Mao Tse-tung, 1942

Two of us caught the Stolen Sweets show in Salem last Friday night. This Portland-based band is quickly making a name for themselves by touring and doing 1920s and 1930s swing, especially covering numbers done by the Boswell Sisters and some original compositions which show their great talent and their sense of humor. They narrowly avoid nostalgia by giving the music a certain edge and by mixing swing and rockabilly with modern or contemporary influences. They played in Salem on Saturday night with two other swing bands and they are currently on a tour of Oregon's historic theatres.

What does it mean to uncritically lift American popular music from the 1920s and 1930s as Stolen Sweets does? I thought about this as I listened to the band playing. These were difficult years in the US, and especially so for African-Americans and blue-collar workers. The relative prosperity which brought so many into the factories and then dashed workers' hopes in violence, a Depression and working class militancy was better explained by the blues, jazz, folk music and polkas. The times of southern rural impoverishment, segregation and lynch mobs were not yet over and so sentimental songs about the south from this period leave us with a distorted view of the place and the times. The poverty of the band's selections and lyrics clashed with their formidable skills as musicians, vocalists and composers. What does it mean to recreate the music of the 1920s and 1930s today and how do we understand it and put it in context?

Something more is at stake than one especially talented band and a few songs. Portland is a cultural capital and leads in what's hip and popular and Americans have a fascination with nostalgia and sentimentality. If Stolen Sweets does not exactly traffic in nostalgia for the bad old days, other bands do and will. Any time will do for many Americans but the present and any reality will do but ours.

Stolen Sweets is giving us beautiful music and Depression-era pop songs and approaching escapism as a real Depressions hovers outside. Moreover, there is almost nothing in their music which can be adapted to meet the requirements of the present moment, beautiful as their music is.

We can go deeper still. The band loves the music they do and they have raised it to new levels of complexity and art. What they do not love is the working class and the people of color who birthed much of their music. The songs carry many sexual and drug references and situate Chinatown and African-American neighborhoods as places of intrigue and vice, but they say nothing about the heroic efforts people make to overcome poverty and oppression, or even to cope with their effects. There were, of course, heroic songs written in the 1920s and 1930s which Stolen Sweets could adapt without sacrificing their art or their collective stage persona. Modern swing could also be written and performed and new kinds of vocal groups could be put together.

The selections and choices made by the band are one problem. Quite separate from that is the larger problem we have of class consciousness not finding its own cultural measure in the US and nostalgia substituting itself for our experiences instead. Would workers turn out for an evening of swing music and buy CDs which speak however artistically or creatively about class and class struggle? Can class struggle become hip in the way that Stolen Sweets and its competitors are hip? The trappings of working class culture are there, but what are missing are the workers ourselves and the needed class content. Can this change?