🤑🎭A Con Artist or a Prescient Genius? Waltz Darling & Deep in Vogue: Malcolm McLaren’s Ballroom (Voguing) Experiment

The Twelve Inch 179 : Waltz Darling (Malcolm McLaren & The Bootzilla Orchestra)

What happens when a punk provocateur, a funk orchestra, and the underground ballroom scene collide with Viennese waltz and hip-hop beats?

Malcolm McLaren may be forever tied to punk, but his restless curiosity pushed him far beyond safety pins and the Sex Pistols. He understood that pop wasn’t just about music, it was fashion, business, spectacle, and spin. Depending on who you ask, McLaren was a genius, a con artist, a magpie, or simply a man who got bored too easily. In truth, he was all of those things at once.

By 1989, that restless energy gave us Waltz Darling, a forgotten oddity that mashed up Strauss, slap bass, and voguing before most of the world even knew what voguing was. If McLaren’s name rings a bell today, it’s usually thanks to Buffalo Gals (revived by Eminem), or maybe Fans, his disco-opera experiment with Madame Butterfly. But Waltz Darling stands out as his definitive “low-high-brow” masterpiece, eccentric, ambitious, and strangely ahead of its time.

In this week’s Twel…