Cremin, however, was undeterred. Anticipating the implicitly racist attacks that would be leveled at Elvis Presley and his hip-shaking peers two decades later, he insisted that swing was an active threat to “modern civilization.” “Swing is atavistic and finds its beginnings in the dark jungles of the early savage,” he fulminated. “There’s an old saw that music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.” In the case of “hot” jazz, however, the opposite was true, he said. As the recent wave of sex crimes proved, music “also creates the bestial species.”
