Disco's Revenge
(Originally published on TipTop in April’05 but first published in 2003 as part of the PBS newsletter.)
Think mashups, DJs, remixes and grinning clubbers is a new phenomenon? Wrong. The formula is already 35 years old. The story of disco is what I’d call a ripping yarn. It’s the story of a tall poppy genre, once a commercial golden egg now at best humoured, at worst reviled with homophobic undertones, almost always misunderstood. It’s a tale with a wicked ironic twist to it too. With much vitriol over 20 years ago disco was pronounced dead and yet like a revived Hollywood movie franchise, disco has returned and had its revenge. After brooding in the underground that birthed it, disco has emerged from the shadows with an ‘Extreme Makeover’ under the new guises of house, techno and garage.
So what has John Travolta, ABBA, Studio 54 and the Village People got to do with Frankie Knuckles, Derrick May, the Hacienda and Paul Oakenfold? Well in regards to those specific examples of disco not really that much. You see, it depends on what you define as disco in the first place. Acts like The Village People are a wonderful example of the commercial tripe produced in the name of disco with little of its substance. The real story of disco was that of the music, clubs and DJ’s conceived in underground New York gay Black and Hispanic clubs in the late 60s/early 70s. This was a musical movement that bore little resemblance to the four billion dollars-a-year disco industry1 that the major labels scrabbled for ten years later.
Sadly much of what Australia and the rest of the world outside of New York saw of disco came in a commercialized mould; prefabricated music for the mass market and mass consumerism. This commercial disco juggernaut came about after Hollywood and the Bee Gees helped the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack sell double the number of records as the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper2. Saturday Night Fever spearheaded a record selling frenzy that lasted from 1977 to 1979 until an overloaded market fizzled into the “disco sucks” slogan. Importantly the music produced in this period, and there was a lot of it, was mostly bad and largely unrepresentative of the wider body of music that made up disco.
So what’s disco then if its not Funky Town?
Disco was first and foremost music for the dancefoor. Born from the eclectic explorations of some key New York djs, whom selected music based on its dancefloor merits, disco was a mash-up of latin, funk and R&B records. At one of discos most famous clubs, David Mancuso‘s Loft, punters were treated to a mix of funk (Sly and the Family Stone, War, Funkadelic), percussive latin, afro-funk (Olatunji, Manu Dibango, Fela Kuti), soul (The Temptations, Steve Wonder, Al Green) and of course the records that crossed genres to become something recognisably new and recognisably disco (a merge of the dancefloor sensibilities of funk with the smoothness of soul epitomised by MFSB, Fred Wesley, The O’Jays, Roy Ayers, Eddie Kendricks, The Salsoul Orchestra). Disco djs favoured the records from these multitudes of genres that were upbeat, positive, percussive and above all, that made people move.
Rising from club culture disco revolutionised the market for music, the way music was created, listened to and consumed. In the early 70’s the vinyl being spun in clubs like the Loft and Galaxy 21 was in the 7” format and didn’t play for more than four minutes. The disco market changed this, djs began editing their favourite tunes to extend the elements that appealed to the dancefloor and in the spring of 1975, began pressing these remixes on a new vinyl format, the 12”. The 12” allowed djs better handling of their records to facilitate beat-mixing, its no coincidence that the first commercially available 12” featured a remix by Walter Gibbons, a dj regarded as the best beat mixer of his day. The disco dj had became a musical trendsetter and a music producer, remixing records so they could play the 12” pressings in clubs seamlessly beat-mixed with other records, sounds familiar doesn’t it?
By 1977 the disco formula: djs, clubs, dance music and drugs had moved well beyond the gay clubs that it originated from and into the mainstream. Disco had arrived at Studio 54, a world of celebrity, money and Hollywood . Likewise the enormous sales figures of disco 12”s by small independent record labels like Salsoul and TK caught the eye of the major labels and suddenly disco became the panacea to the failing careers of artist across the music world. Milking the disco cash cow for all it was worth the majors oversold disco to the public eventually creating a backlash and a tremendous crash in the market for disco records. Mainstream America suddenly remembered that disco was not just black music; it was GAY black music, the soundtrack to the lives of a minority which, even today, enjoys little mainstream support.
After the commercial crash of disco in 1979, disco returned to its underground roots, splintered and birthed the genres of dance music familiar to us today. Two former disco djing partners, Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, continued their musical explorations into the 80’s going on to found the house and garage music scenes in Chicago and New York . These two genres are the most obvious offspring of disco; even today they employ many of the same musical aesthetics, albeit using electronic rather then acoustic instruments. Less obvious today is techno’s debt to disco. Hidden by the manifestos and bravado of the early techno pioneers is a linage that can be clearly traced back to disco, after all the Detroit music scene was conceived from the developing house scene in nearby Chicago.
The uptake of dance music in Europe in the late 80’s paved the way for its return to the mainstream consciousness by freeing it from the homophobic and racial associations that bound it to the underground in the US. Across the Atlantic white heterosexual clubs in London and Manchester discovered the house records of New York and Chicago precipitating the ecstasy-fuelled clubbing of 1988’s “Summer of Love”. Up until that point house had been painted with the same brush as its predecessor, as ‘fag’ and ‘black’ music. Clubbers in the UK, knowing nothing of these prejudices and seeing only the positive force of the music, embraced it with such gusto that their government would attempt to outlaw it.
The UK underground quickly forged a bewildering array of dance music genres and sub-genres. Tracing the evolution of the genre known as ‘two step’ offers a startling example of the extent of musical change that occurred in the clubs of ‘Cool Britannia’ during the 90’s: acid house and techno upped the BPM’s to give us hardcore and gabba, which then cross pollinated with hip hop to give rise to jungle and drum’n‘bass, which when crossed with New York’s garage scene gave us speed garage and two step, all in the space of ten years!
By the 90s, Australia was getting its first real taste of disco’s prescribed club culture as its musical descendents reached our shores. Relaxed venue liquor licensing laws, a willingness to grant event licences to large rave parties, a cross between the US and UK’s approach to the licensing of the airwaves (allowing stations like PBS to broadcast) and a love of anything British, acted as catalysts for Australia’s adoption of dance music. Twice removed from the source, few made the direct link between the music played in Australian clubs with that played in the clubs of 70’s New York. For anglophiles the title of the ‘Godfathers of dance music’ was often accredited to the individuals involved in the UK’s ‘Summer of Love’, others looked to crown the likes of Frankie Knuckles and Derrick May with this title. To add to the confusion, those of the pioneering disco djs like Francois Kevorkian and Danny Krivit who had actually survived the hedonism of disco were re-branded as pioneering house djs! Somehow, discos role in the story of dance music had been usurped.
In Australia today, dance music, club and dj culture has achieved mainstream acceptance. Inevitably the curiosity of dance music enthusiasts looking to understand the context under which this music came about has begun to create a market for original and reissued disco vinyl pressings. Many record stores stocking the latest dance music 12” now have sections devoted to re-issues of disco, old-school hiphop, 70’s funk and soul. So too, second hand record stores, which only recently boasted hansom stocks of unwanted disco records are beginning to see units move. Still the market remains small and the perception of disco remains poor even amongst dance music fans. Indeed with Saturday Night Fever — The Musical set to premier in Melbourne at the end of this year it would seem that the commercial Hollywood version of the disco story has eclipsed any semblance of its reality. The irony is of course that while their parents indulge themselves in the false nostalgia of Saturday Night Fever — The Musical, their children will be dancing to beat of disco’s real message.
Further reading:
Last Night A DJ Saved My Life: The History Of The Disc Jockey by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton (Grove Press, 2000)
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture 1970-1979 by Tim Lawrence (Duke University Press, 2004)
1 Albert Goldman — Disco! (Hawthorn, 1978)
2 Albert Goldman — Disco! (Hawthorn, 1978)
