Is it odd that a book dedicated to collective joy can be the source of so much personal frustration?
    Barbara Ehrenreich, who has written on many other topics, here tackles the subject of the sublimation of desire in western civilization, an idea that has been much discussed over the last 50 years, dominating an entire strain of literature throughout the 1960s. What is frustrating about Dancing in the Streets is that so much of it rests on those ideas traded back and forth in the 1960s — Ehrenreich uses the 1964 hit song by Martha & the Vandellas for her title, but gives very little indication that anyone outside the field of academic anthropology has ever shown an interest in this field.
    Ehrenreich’s idea is a simple one: at some point in their development, every culture must balance the rational demands of social organization and group protection with the irrational needs of emotional well-being. During the process of modernization that began during the Renaissance and the Reformation, the scales of western societies ultimately tipped towards the rational, a dependence that became exacerbated during the rapid industrialization of the 19th century. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said as much at the time and the famed Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer claimed in the early 20th century that the whole business of popular culture was to manufacture surrogates of desire to keep the working classes preoccupied.
    None of that is mentioned in Dancing in the Streets, but Ehrenreich is at her best when she talks about the tension in pre-modern societies, such as the Greeks and Romans, with the constant pull between Dionysius/Bacchus revelries in an otherwise rationally ordered society. She is less convincing when she attempts to demonstrate that the introduction of the firearm required much more social regimentation, a feat that was accomplished in part by the Calvinists during the Reformation. While her argument is compelling, it is her depth of research that undermines her position. For example, the failure to mention noted rock critic Greil Marcus, who wrote about the elimination of desire throughout the Middle Ages in his famed 1990 work, Lipstick Traces. Many other authors have written far more important books than Marcus has on the Reformation, so his absence at this point is unimportant. Where it does start to play a more crucial role is in her chapter on rock and roll and the ’60s. Ehrenreich is content to quote one book on rock here, namely Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave’s 1988 Anti-Rock, which deals with the early efforts to ban rock ’n’ roll. Later, she starts describing the development of arena rock as more of a passive spectacle, and refers briefly to French theorist Guy Debord, who along with his avant-garde coterie, the Situationist International, was introduced to many English readers in Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. So, the question becomes not what does Erhenreich do well, but does Dancing in the Streets offer anything new?
    The answer unfortunately is no. At just over 300 pages, it is brief enough to offer an introduction to those interested in finding out more, though again, the depth of research and bibliography will leave many readers on their own to figure out where to go next.