I’ve been watching dancing for years, and that includes DWTS. That show’s trajectory over the years, evaluated in the framework of what I know about dance and the little bit I know about music, reinforces my belief that a great deal of our “entertainment” undermines our knowledge of the past, history, and of course “good taste” but that latter is not really what I’m ranting about here.

Specifically, the entire talking head cast of DWTS (and SCD) goes along with really absurd or twisted view of what were important pieces of our cultural background.

A specific problem is how they handle “Latin” dances and music. The show (and this includes the original Strictly Come Dancing (SCD) version on the BBC) presents a very historically inaccurate story of what some of the music was, and still is, and what the dances were.

An example: the performance numbers are given a title like “Salsa” though the music chosen to be played has nothing specifically tying it to the historical genre, and the dance number has little likewise to do with the genre. This may seem like a minor point to some, but I propose the producers of the show are just another example of how a dominant group (in this case the Anglo-American entertainment companies like the BBC and Disney) will simply take for themselves someone else’s cultural heritage, often without credit or with incorrect attribution, and try to rewrite history. The idea of course is to make profit off of a “brand” - in this case the brand is “Salsa”, without actually delivering the original goods.

This is about cultural history, more than political history and the latter is what most people like to argue about (which we do here.) But the same operation that can rewrite cultural history for their own benefit will just as easily rewrite political history.

Cultural hegemony I guess is a marxist term but I view this case as more as an example of how the quest for fast money (as opposed to long term investment - in this case in cultural knowledge and appreciation) pushes aside an appreciation for what is historical reality.