A special treat this Sunday for all our disco-fan readers outside the UK, The Joy Of Disco is a BBC documentary about that much derided music genre that seemed to come out of nowhere to change the world in the late 70s.
I’ve seen a lot of documentaries about disco, and this is undoubtedly one of the best. Featuring new interviews with many of the key players (Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers, Nona Hendryx, David Mancuso, Tom Moulton, Kathy Sledge, Nicky Siano and lots more) and some great, rare footage of top nitespots like The Gallery and Studio 54, this is a real treat for the disco fanatic.
But what really makes The Joy Of Disco so good (and well worth a watch, even if you are not a disco fan) is the placing of the music in its proper historical and social context. Disco was black, urban music that became the soundtrack to the gay liberation movement and, according to the program makers:
foregrounded female desire in the age of feminism and led to the birth of modern club culture as we know it today, before taking the world by storm.
All up to the (seemingly inevitable) racist and homophobic “Disco Sucks” backlash. That put paid to the faddishness of the genre, but ultimately, by driving it back underground to the gay and black clubs that spawned it, helped make it stronger than ever and actually did very little to kill the sheer joy of the music itself.
The Joy Of Disco explores these issues in the kind of detail they deserve. It aired on BBC4 on Friday night, and some industrious soul has already put it up on YouTube to share the love (yes, it’s another case of get it before it’s gone). This is highly recommended viewing - you won’t see anything this interesting, exciting or fabulously funky on your screens this evening:
Another act who featured on My Awesome Best of 2011 Mixtape and who deserve special mention for the little beauty: ‘My Love Grows In The Dark’ is the new video by SSION (aka Cody Critchloe) and it is simply gorgeous.
SSION’s excellent 2011 long player Bent was my second favourite album of last year, only being pipped at the post for the title “best of” by John Maus’ extraordinary We Must Become The Pitiless Censors of Ourselves. Bent was released as a free download for just one month, but if you didn’t get it (and why not?! I told you so!) fear not, it will be getting a physical re-release soon on Dovecote Records with an accompanying tour.
As well as performing, writing and recording as the floating collective SSION since the late 90s, Cody Critcheloe is a video director who has recently helmed clips for both Santigold and Peaches. It shows: he is an artist with real vision, talent and skill and I’m glad to report I will be posting an interview with Cody in the very near future.
Musically “My Love…” is classy, catchy and excellently produced dance-pop (it’s how I always really wanted the Scissor Sisters to sound, no mean feat that) and in the ace video he rocks a look that’s a bizarre hybrid of Boy George, Andrew WK and Snoop Dogg. Spring is in the air, so let some aural sunshine in:
SSION “My Love Grows In The Dark”
SSION (the band) will be performing live in New York tonight at the Highline Ballroom. More details for this (highly recommended) gig here.
While looking up a suitable image for last night’s post on disco by Simon Frith, I came across a film called Disco Fever, a disco-exploitation oddity from the same year as the article, 1978.
As a fan of both disco music and cult cinema I was surprised to never have heard of this, and now I’m wondering if any of our readers have seen it? In case your memory needs jogging, it stars Casey Kasem and some dude called Fabian, and a lot of the action seems to revolve around a discotheque which is onboard a jumbo jet. Here’s the original trailer for further investigation (this film may just be so bad it’s good, or it may just be so bad):
From the Daily Mirror newspaper, 1978 (uploaded by Cornershop15)
This 1978 essay on the cultural meaning of disco by the respected British musicologist Simon Frith (author of Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music and Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll) was recently unearthed and re-published by the ever excellent DJHistory.com.
It goes some way towards highlighting the difference in appreciation of the genre on both sides of the Atlantic—it always seemed to me that disco never had the cultural impact in the UK that it had in the States, possibly because of the distinct ethnic and social heritage of the music—while Britain had to wait another ten years to experience its own genuine dance revolution.
What is common on both sides of the Atlantic, and of interest to anyone who likes disco music or lived through these years, was the sneering derision the genre faced from rock listeners and their corresponding press. It took another 20 to 30 years to rehabilitate disco’s reputation, and it’s interesting to read these very criticisms usually levelled by the music media coming from a self-professed disco fan:
In public I’m into punk like everybody else (saviour of rock ‘n’ roll’s soul and all that) but privately I’m a junk rock junkie and the junkiest music of all is disco. Everybody hates it. Hippies hate it, progressives hate it, punks hate it, teds hate it, NME hates it, even Derek Jewell hates it.
Disco is music for the disillusioned. It isn’t art: no auteurs in disco, just calculated dessicating machines. It isn’t folk: no disco subcultures, no disco kids seething with symbolic expression It isn’t even much fun: no jokes, no irony, only a hard rhythmed purposefulness. Disco is the sound of consumption. It exists only in its dancing function: when the music stops all that’s left is a pool of sweat on the floor. And disco’s power is the power of consumption. The critics are right: disco is dehumanising – all those twitching limbs, glazed-eyed, mindless. The disco aesthetic excludes feeling, it offers a glimpse of a harsh sci-fi future. ‘What’s your name, what’s your number?’ sings Andrea True in my current favourite single, and it’s not his telephone number she wants, but his position in the disco order of things. The problem of pogoing, I’ve found, is not that it’s too energetic for anyone over 30 years and 11 stone, but that it requires too much thought.
Popular music has always been dance music; disco is nothing but dance music. It has no rock’n’roll connotations; off the dance floor it is utterly meaningless, lyrically, musically and aesthetically. Every disco sound is subordinate to its physical function; disco progress is technological progress. The end doesn’t change but the means to that end, the ultimate beat, are refined and improved – hence drum machines, synthesisers, 12” pressings. And disco is dance music in the abstract, content determined by form. Popular dance music of the past, in the 1930s say, was a form determined by its content. The content was developed by dance hall instructors and sheet music salesmen and band leaders whose rules of partnership, decorum, uplift and grace, can still be followed in ‘Come Dancing’: the music is strictly subordinate to the conventions of flounce and simper. In contrast, when Boney M, German manufactured black American androgynes, sing for our dancing pleasure, ‘Belfast’, it means nothing at all. Any two syllables arranged and sounding just so would do and how we dance to them is, of course, entirely our own affair. There are no rules in disco, it’s just that individual expression means nothing when there’s nothing individual to express. I trace disco back to the twist, the first dance gimmick to be taken seriously and the first dance step to be without any redeeming social feature. I blame disco on Motown, the first company to realise that if the beat is right, soul power can be expressed without either the passion or emotion that made it soul power in the first place.
You can read the rest of the essay here. In the meantime, here’s something by Andrea True Connection. It’s not “What’s Your Name What’s Your Number?” as mentioned in the essay itself, as I’ve never been a big fan of that track. Instead it’s an earlier gem by the band that predates the awfully similar sounding “Is It Love You’re After” by Rose Royce by a good three years:
Yes, another new video by another Hometapes band, but hey, when the goods are this potent I am compelled to share. Bear In Heaven are not content with merely making accessibly catchy dance rock for hipsters of all ages. No, they also are intent on altering your brain’s chemistry via the severe abuse of the zooooooom. Move over, strobe lights, here’s something far worse for you !
Drag superstar Alexia Twister recreates Madonna’s entire Super Bowl spectacle in Brazilian gay club Victoria Haus - a rather amazing feat considering this show was probably produced with less money than the cost of Cee Lo’s dressing room deli tray.
Despite being a bit of an MIA skeptic in the past, I have to admit I fuckin’ love this video!
Amid all the brouhaha surrounding Madonna’s “Give Me All Your Luvin’”, which also premiered on Friday (it’s ok, nothing special), it seemed a bit mystifying as to why MIA would choose to premier her own video on the same day. Who the hell competes with Madonna? Especially when you are already featured in her song? Well, put that thought on ice my friends, because “Bad Girls” is worth a dozen “Give Me All Your Luvin’“s.
Director Romain Gavras takes the standard music video tropes of cars and girls, transplants it to a North African setting, and captures some beautiful imagery and wicked stunts on the way (the kind of thing we’re normally used to seeing in shakey, low-res YouTube clips). Most importantly though, this succeeds where other MIA and Gavras videos have failed - in particular the infamous “ginger-killing” clip for “Born Free” - in that it’s not patronising.
To me MIA works best when she’s not trying to be controversial, but just does what she does. She’s so inherently different from what passes for mainstream “pop” performers nowadays, that she doesn’t need to work harder to seem more edgy or confrontational. That’s why “Bad Girls” succeeds where “Born Free” failed, and why its simplicity is a lot more subversive. Rather than bludgeoning us over the head with exploding body parts, it gently reminds us: “Hey guys, look, Arabs are cool too! They’re not just cannon fodder for Arnie films and Western Imperialist wars.”
Bad Rave Flyers is “a blog dedicated to showcasing the worst and most lazy in graphic design for club and rave flyers.” Says the anonymous author:
I spend a lot of time looking at event listings on messageboards. I’ve always been fascinated by how bad most rave & club flyers are, especially ones for events with mostly local DJs. As a testament to this, I’ve decided to compile my favorites into one place.
Indeed, some of these flyers are terrible. But before we go laughing ourselves into a false sense of superiority, it has to be stated that EVERYONE who has been involved in djing or club promoting has at some point created their own bad rave flyer. I still have mine lurking at the back of a closet somewhere. It may not be as bad as these, but consider it a rite of passage every club industry professional must go through.
Don Cornelius, creator and star of Soul Tain, has been found dead at his home in Sherman Oaks, California. From TMZ:
Law enforcement sources tell us ... Cornelius died from a gunshot wound to the head and officials believe the wound was self-inflicted.
Sad news indeed - I had only posted on Soul Train here on DM a few weeks ago. Thanks for all the awesomeness, Don! In memory here’s the man himself introducing the legendary Soul Train line dancers to Earth Wind and Fire’s “Mighty Mighty” in 1974:
