Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (46 page)

“The single sentence that sums up why we—every person in this generation—keep going back to that period was that music was relatively innocent,” he continues. “It wasn’t based on genre—of course there was money it, it was a huge industry and completely commercialized—yet on the musical level the entire disco and dance music industry was trying out every timbral and orchestral possibility that could happen over a 4/4 or funk beat. In other words, everything was brought into play: Latin music, classical music, this is a cliché but it’s true. You had the best string session players who were playing at Lincoln Center on the weekdays and on weekends they were moonlighting for disco orchestras. There hasn’t been anything really like that since. The last time that was happening in pop music was in the ’30s and ’40s when you had huge orchestras—Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman—hiring that number of people. I like to think that it’s not really nostalgia, that if one listens to so-called pure music in an absolute sense, richness of composition and timbrality, the late ’70s are just
the
golden period.”
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On one hand, Wang’s defense of disco as “quality music” brilliantly undercuts everyone who derides disco as nothing but escapist pap and lily-livered nelly music. On the other, however, it falls into the same trap and uses the same arguments that were used to denigrate disco in its heyday. Disco is “real music” with real live musicianship, it has flesh and blood unlike the “plastic” and “canned” synthesizer music of today. With this new authenticity comes connoisseurship (even though disco has always had this aspect because of the DJs’ role in creating it). Disco now has its own canon to separate the masterworks (read: obscure rarities played by Larry Levan and David Mancuso) from the “cheese” (i.e., the popular records).
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While the VH1 crowd is gorging themselves silly on “Gee, Dad, is that you with the feathered hair?” nostalgia of Studio 54 and the Bee Gees, the underground is finding solace in rescuing rare twelve-inch singles from history’s dustbin, and, of course, raising the value of their own record collections in the process. But nostalgia is nostalgia no matter how cool it is, and even if it’s dressed up as lunatic scholarship it is just the hipper flip side of “I love the ’70s” syndrome. Although none of the perpetrators would deny the music’s gay roots, there’s also an aspect to this scene that’s nearly as pernicious as the filmic rewrites of disco history. As Wang says of fellow travelers like Metro Area (Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani), DJ Harvey, Idjut Boys, DJ Thomas (aka the Mammal), and Eric Duncan, “They’re all completely straight. They’re big white guys with big beards, and the aesthetic they’re proposing is rock and get drunk and get high and have fun to this music. It’s much more decadent than gay people are now.”
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That decadence is the key component of the disco nostalgia. Any contemporary look at disco views it through the filter of what was initially known as “the Saint’s disease.” The disco era was the last period of truly unbridled hedonism that existed and probably will exist in our lifetimes. The planets truly aligned in the 1970s—the pill, civil rights, gay rights, cheap cocaine, economic recession—for a party of epic proportions. That combination of consequence-free sex (give or take a herpes outbreak or two) and political enfranchisement will never be duplicated. Wang and his peers all came of age sexually at the exact moment that AIDS was beginning to cast its dreadful shadow across nightlife, and this was the original sin, the moment of being banished from the Garden of Eden. The collector’s instinct is to return to the garden and tend to it, making sure that no weeds emerge to spoil what’s left of it now that its prime is long past.

Art critic Philip Gefter told gay historian Charles Kaiser that in the mid-1970s, “Sex was like a handshake,” but a decade later “the novelist David Leavitt recalled the mid-1980s as ‘a time when the streets were filled with an almost palpable sense of mourning and panic.’”
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As Andrew Holleran, who had chronicled the early days of disco, put it, sex had become the Siamese twin of death. “The bars, the discotheques that are still open seem pointless in a way,” he wrote. “The social contract, the assumptions, that gave them their meaning, is gone.”
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Perhaps in response, disco’s extravagance was replaced by the severe minimalism of Chicago house music while Detroit’s techno producers were toying with the man-machine interface as a way of escaping their prisons of flesh.

“The personal is political” was always implicit in disco culture, but AIDS and the initial reaction to it by the government and health-care industry necessarily brought that to the fore. The body became the main political battleground in the ’80s, and whether it was still managing to generate the will to dance, thumbing your nose at the puritans by advocating safe sex practices, or confronting the religious right at the doorstep of an abortion clinic, pleasure, desire, and sex all became struggle—it was something you had to fight for. This was why punks and intellectuals joined forces with disco in the ’80s, and why this sound is being revisited again today.

Groups like the Rapture, Radio 4, LCD Soundsystem, Chicks on Speed, and the whole electroclash crew are raiding the early ’80s rapprochement among punk, disco, funk, and reggae for ideas, inspiration, and sound, for a way of making sense of a world where the body is now a battleground between science and “nature,” where trickle-down economics and rampant privatization have replaced the contract between government and its citizens. The music offered a seductive vision of the world where style collided with substance, where deconstruction made a reconciliation with melody and hooks, where groove embraced distortion, where punk’s outcast geek was transformed by the fairy godmother of disco into a “Halston, Gucci … Fiorucci”–clad suavecito with a social conscience and a brain. The punk-dance sound resonates now because of its sharp, acidic, left-wing cynicism. It’s a voice that almost the entirety of today’s popular music has silenced. Unlike the bedazzled groove of Timbaland or the Neptunes embracing money, glitz, and technology with equal verve, early ’80s punk-disco was dance music as a way of shaking off the heebie-jeebies, shedding the skin of the daytime daze, jolting you out of your nightmares, only for you to realize that you weren’t imagining anything. As Was (Not Was) once pleaded, “Tell me that I’m dreaming.”

*   *   *

In 1994, a rather bizarre sound echoed around the terraces of Europe’s football stadiums and crisscrossed the continent. It was the sound of thousands of testosterone-fueled young men chanting the tune of “Go West,” a hit for the Pet Shop Boys the preceding autumn and originally a hit for the Village People in 1979. Granted, they were often singing stuff like “Stand up if you’re a Schalke fan” or “One-nil to the Arsenal” and were using the song simply because it has a simple, very-easy-to-remember melody, but the massed chorale of unswervingly straight voices expressing tribal violence to the tune of one of the campest visions of earthly paradise was a breathtaking spectacle.

No one is very sure where it started—different accounts place its genesis in Italy, Turkey, and West Bromwich Albion in the British Midlands—but what is certain is that it is emblematic of the very different relationship that Europe has with disco, and pop music as a whole, as compared to the United States. While the Village People are now accepted at American athletic contests as intermission entertainment where fathers are permitted to be goofy with their young children whom they’ve dragged along to the game, using disco as a vehicle for displaying macho pride is unthinkable. In European pop culture, on the other hand, flamboyant frippery and violence often go hand in hand—just think of the teddy boy subculture, groups of working-class toughs dressed up in Elizabethan finery who scandalized Britain in the 1950s.

Not only did disco music not die in Europe, it wasn’t even a blip on the chart the way it was stateside; it was simply business as usual. Perhaps this was because pop music has never been anything other than a collection of disposable baubles and trinkets in Europe; with the possible exception of French chanson, it’s never been a question of it expressing the heart and soul of a culture. Compare, for example, the way the United Kingdom and the United States bemoan the state of popular music: In Britain it’s always that no one in America is buying the music, it’s always a matter of commerce; whereas in the United States it’s a matter of declining morals and the erosion of the character of its young people.

Another reason for disco’s unremarkableness in Europe is perhaps how important the gay aesthetic has been to its pop scene. “It was fascinating, from the sixties onwards, to see how often gays and their lifestyle had cropped up in the history of British music business,” wrote Simon Napier-Bell, a gay man who is one of Britain’s most prominent music managers. “The number of gay people in major record companies has been negligible. Even the number of gay artists has been very small. Yet their importance seems to outweigh their numbers. In one form or another, the influence of gays on the British industry has been on a par with the influence of blacks and black music on the American industry.”
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So it’s hardly surprising, then, that ever since groups like Duran Duran and ABC made the links between Chic and Roxy Music even more apparent in the early ’80s and Stock, Aitken & Waterman pilfered the Hi-NRG formula for their run of British pop hits in the late ’80s, disco has never been very far from the top of the European pop charts. In the early ’90s Ian Levine emerged as the producer of the most influential pop group of the decade, Take That. Initially conceived as Britain’s answer to New Kids on the Block, Take That redefined the boy band formula by combining Elton John earnestness with disco dazzle. The dazzle initially came from Levine, who produced covers of Tavares’s “It Only Takes a Minute” and Barry Manilow’s “Could It Be Magic” for the group. When Levine was bumped from the group in 1993, producer Dave Lee (aka Joey Negro, one of the world’s biggest disco trainspotters and advocates) was hired to produce a version of Dan Hartman’s “Relight My Fire” for the group. Ever since, disco has dominated the European charts in the shape of covers (All Saints’ “Lady Marmalade”) and samples (Alcazar’s “Cryin’ at the Discoteque”).

When America decided to put its own spin on the boy band format, the basis wasn’t disco, but hip-hop. Rather than injecting Botox into disco’s jowls, Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, America’s two biggest boy bands, bleached R&B that was about five years out of date, used hip-hop slang that was almost as old, and dusted off some hoary “running man” dance routines to melt the hearts of Midwestern girls. Hip-hop has become the lingua franca of American pop music, and unless you’re on a reality television show it’s practically impossible to break the Top 10 without someone rapping on your single.

The old chestnut about the United States and the United Kingdom being two countries separated by a common language has never been more appropriate. Hip-hop is wholly about individuality, about distinguishing oneself from the crowd with the dopest lyrics, the flyest threads, the freshest kicks; it’s a culture solely concerned with competition and, at times, a brazen, mercenary, go-for-mine capitalism. Hip-hop came of age at the exact time America was abandoning whatever pretenses it had of being a social democracy—it was the soundtrack to the birth of the corporate state.

Like hip-hop, disco may have started in New York, but these days it’s as European as social welfare programs and high-carb diets. Disco may have been trapped between two visions of the world—between a utopian, communitarian dream and a hard-bitten cynical view where nothing moves but the money—but, ultimately, disco was and is about inclusivity and community, about pleasure and leisure rather than labor, about the democracy of the dance floor rather than the false idols of the stage. It was, as Danny Wang suggests, a time when anything and everything could be united under the banner of the 4/4, when music was still about fun and not about survival.

TIMELINE

Spring 1939.
The Swing-Jugend (Swing Kids), a small middle-class youth movement dedicated to jazz and outrageous fashion as a reaction to Nazi discipline, starts gathering momentum in Hamburg, Germany. Their underground parties, where people danced to records chosen by a “disc jockey” for a specific crowd, were the origins of the disco aesthetic.

1942–43.
According to writer Albert Goldman, La Discothèque, a basement nightclub with only a turntable for entertainment, opens in Paris.

1947–48.
Paul Pacine opens the Whisky à Go Go on the Rue de Beaujolais in Paris and sets in motion the discotheque as the main form of European nightlife, particularly for the jet set.

1961.
The Twist takes off among the celeb crowd as they gather at a Times Square dive called the Peppermint Lounge.

December 1963.
Graphic artist Harvey Ball designs the first smiley face.

July 2, 1964.
The Civil Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination in employment and public places, is passed.

July 18, 1964.
“Race riot” in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods of New York.

1965.
Roger Eagle starts DJing at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and helps create the foundation for the Northern Soul scene, which would have an enormous impact on disco.

May 1965.
The ultratrendy Arthur opens in New York. It was here that DJ Terry Noel became the first DJ to mix records.

1966.
The multiracial band from north London, the Equals, release their first single, “Hold Me Closer.” The following year, the flip, “Baby Come Back,” becomes a huge hit across Europe, setting in motion Europop and soon Eurodisco.

September 1968.
The Continental Baths, an over-the-top and overground gay pleasure palace, opens in New York.

November 1968.
Richard Nixon wins the presidential election by appealing to “America’s silent majority.”