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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27961 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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Latin America has some classy as hell music and dance. Actually a lot more so than the US does.

The U.S. has extremely classy dances in swing, contra/country dance, smooth ballroom, and other styles. You are greatly misinformed my friend, our dances just aren’t as covered in the media as Latin dances.

I'm tempted to quibble around the word classy, but I'm not sure I'd disagree with them in terms of volume. Afaict, though my latam experience is limited, they really do have a more vibrant, living dance scene. Swing and ballroom have had some resurgence but they're self-consciously retro and ime 'quirky.'

Country dance still seems to do well in actual rural areas, I don't know how well it does above that though.

Trad dances such as Irish Cèilidh also seem to be surviving

Two step is still popular in the suburbs.

Around my major US metro area, there is definitely more 'non-Latin' partner dance than the other way around in terms of actual amounts of events happening for west coast/east coast swing, blues, fusion, ballroom, tango, country swing, etc etc.

You can define "vibrant, living" how you want and get to that, but Latin definitely isn't overall more popular. In terms of swing, lindy and east coast are kind of retro branded but WCS and blues are quite modern and self consciously so.

That’s probably true. But guess I don’t think it’s as big a part of our culture as what I was comparing to in the respective cultures.

True, I'd agree with that. We have definitely downplayed it a lot in our culture.

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