[LINK] "Long live disco"

[rfmcdonald]

I largely approve of Dorian Lynskey's Guardian article arguing that, whatever it's called, disco is a dominant strain in pop music.

To understand the scale of disco's triumph you have to appreciate the magnitude of its initial rise and fall. Pop music has always been susceptible to fads but disco's imperial phase is the closest it has ever got to the irrational exuberance of a stock-market bubble. Between July 1977 and August 1979 30 out of 38 US Billboard No 1 singles were disco records, whether by titans of the form (Chic, the Bee Gees, Donna Summer), canny dilettantes (Blondie, the Rolling Stones) or corny opportunists (Meco, with his glitterball Star Wars medley). The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack remains the seventh biggest-selling album ever made. Passengers on the bandwagon included KISS, the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman and the Cookie Monster.

At the same time it was hated: by older black artists who resented the way it replaced the muscle and grit of funk with a mindless, frictionless groove; by punks who saw it as crass, bubbleheaded capitalism incarnate; by macho rock fans who believed its effeminacy was infecting even some of their favourite artists; by pundits who made it a cultural lightning rod for their growing angst about national decline and America's place in the world. In a telling coincidence, the summer of 1979, when baseball fans trashed disco records at Chicago's Comiskey Park and the Knack's My Sharona ousted Chic's Good Times from the top of the Billboard chart, also saw the launch of Jerry Falwell's ultra-conservative lobby group The Moral Majority. And of course some people hated it, as people tend to, simply because it was everywhere.

To Chic's Nile Rodgers the backlash "felt like it was racism, like it was book-burning", but a more potent driver than prejudice was embarrassment. To some longstanding opponents it might have been too black, too gay, too European or too female, but it only lost the public when it became too naff. The industry's attitude was, roughly, let us never speak of this again. "Disco was dead by 81," says pioneering house DJ Frankie Knuckles. "Overnight it went from disco to country-and-western and heavy rock. The industry was trying to get 360 degrees from what was going on the day before and they didn't want anything that in the slightest way resembled disco."

Knuckles and the other gay African Americans who invented house music began the process of rescuing disco from its own excesses by stripping away the cliches and reconnecting it with its subversive counter-cultural roots. Tough and electronic, house was disco in the raw. Years later the house producer Gusto looped a sample of Harvey Mason's Groovin' You over a drum machine and pointedly called the result Disco's Revenge. But disco bounced back quickly in the mainstream, too, just with a different identity and updated production. Michael Jackson's Thriller retained the lessons he learned on Off the Wall while Madonna approached Nile Rodgers to produce Like a Virgin. Like beneficiaries of a musical witness relocation programme, Billie Jean and Into the Groove were disco records in all but name, as were the early Hi-NRG productions of Stock Aitken Waterman. "No one has named the dominant trend in 80s music because they're afraid to: it's disco, and all the critics know it," wrote proud fan Bentley Boyd in 1987. "They know it and fear it. It is the strange uncle who lives in the attic and can't be acknowledged."

This was the strange thing. Disco had so thoroughly reconfigured pop that even as some of the biggest musicians of the 80s assimiliated its tenets – the synthetic four-to-the-floor beat, the celebration of dancing and community, the dominance of black and female artists, the hints of sexual ambiguity in someone such as Prince – audiences regarded their music as a different entity because nobody was wearing polyester jumpsuits and employing a Barry Gibb falsetto. It was just a matter of time before the spectre of ridicule passed and the continuum became more obvious.

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Huh. I had just started thinking about disco and its changes; this seems to answer some of my questions. Thanks.