Like most designations on the political spectrum, “far right” is an elastic term stretchable according to the beholder. A consensus on what that far right is also differs across times and locations. Yet, while recognizing the flaws of inevitable generalizations, common far-right traits can be traced between movements as disparate as Germany’s National Socialist Party and America’s Ku Klux Klan. Both engaged in paradoxical relationships with popular music, each oscillating between responses of condemnation and co-option, sometimes simultaneously.
Swingtime for Hitler
As jazz developed in the US at the end of the 19th century, it spread to Europe, its propulsive rhythms driving new life and energy into the old world and its established cultures. By the ’20s, young people in Britain, France, and Germany were gazing starry-eyed across the Atlantic, yearning for and welcoming over the music, dance, clothes, and street vernacular emanating from African-American communities in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. Such desires and developments did not sit well with the Nazi party as it made its presence felt in Germany at the close of that decade.