There’s a tired debate in the swing dancing community. The question is rather simple: Should you swing dance to non-swing music?

Every so often a newcomer makes this observation: hey, technically you could Lindy Hop to any song in 4/4 metre! The rock steps and triple steps and all that jazz are just two-beat cells of footwork, and there’s no reason you can’t do them to different types of music. Hey, do you wanna dance to Ed Sheeran?

The rest of the community rolls their eyes—they’ve heard this a hundred times. Yes, they sigh through gritted teeth, you could technically Lindy Hop to different kinds of music. But it wouldn’t feel right. Modern tunes don’t swing like swing tunes swing. The old Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should gets trotted out. If you want to dance to Ed Sheeran, go check out West Coast Swing or something. Lindy Hop is a specific kind of black American social dance that arose alongside a specific kind of black American music, and if you divorce it from its context you do it a disservice.

There’s a very similar question that I can find absolutely no discussion about. Can you non-swing dance to swing music?

Is there another kind of dance that you can do when a Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald record comes up on the speakers? I have no clue. The only kind of dancing I’d want to do in that situation is swing dancing, so I haven’t really devoted any brain cells to exploring whether you could do something else. I did try to find discussion on this question, but it’s one of those unGoogleable things—Google keeps giving me results on the other question instead.

I imagine that if you were exclusively a salsa dancer or a polka dancer or a breakdancer (they probably have different intra-cultural terms for these, but you get the idea) and for some reason you found yourself at an event where Jonathan Stout and His Campus Five Featuring Hilary Alexander was playing over the speaker system, you could attempt to salsa or polka or break to it. But I also imagine it would feel wrong, as if you’d find it hard to get past the novelty of haha, look at us, we’re dancing to the wrong genre!

The rich, inextricable connection between swing music and swing dancing feels entirely natural to me, but I am unsettled by a thought experiment.

Suppose that a few millennia from now, a trove of Count Basie records is discovered by a postapocalyptic wandering party. This was one of those apocalypses which wiped out nearly all media from the Before Times, and the rest were left to decay, knowledge consigned to oblivion. A literal cultural Reset button. In particular, oral tradition has failed to preserve any of the dances we know.

In the curious event that the foragers are able to play “Don’t Be That Way” on their reconstructed gramophones and it drives them to dance, what would that dance look like? Would it bear any resemblance to swing dancing as we know it?