Night Beat (41 page)

SKIRMISH ONE: DISCO, POP’S INTERNAL WAR

A
t the outset of the 1970s, rock & roll still prided itself on its aspirations to revolution. From rockabilly to glitter rock, it was music that not only articulated and vented the frustrations of cultural outsiders, but that also won those upstarts a station and voice that they might otherwise have been denied. But in the mid-1970s, a genuine revolution took place within the bounds of pop culture—and rock & roll
hated
it. The upheaval was called “disco,” and it subverted not just rock’s familiar notions of fun and form, but also its pretended ideals of community and meaning. It was a music that, without rhetoric or stridor, seized and transformed the pop mainstream and its long-unchallenged star systems, and it empowered cultural outlanders that rock & roll had snubbed or simply abandoned. In the process, disco became the biggest commercial pop genre of the 1970s—actually, the biggest pop music movement of all time—and in the end, its single-minded, booming beat proved to be the most resilient and enduring stylistic breakthrough of the last twenty years or so. In short, disco—the pop revolution that was quickly overthrown by an ungrateful pop world—figured out a way to outlast its own demise, a way to remain dominant, while feigning an ignoble death.

So how did this cultural rupture happen? How did disco become both one of the most popular and reviled mileposts in pop music’s history?

To answer these questions, one has to look at the confluence of musical history and social longing that produced the disco explosion. Musically, disco was a logical outgrowth of how soul music had developed in the 1960s, and how it had adapted in order to survive in the early 1970s. From the terse protofunk of James Brown and the spare but accentuated dynamics of the Stax-Volt sound, disco derived its obsession with a simple but relentlessly driving beat; and from the pop savvy of Motown, as well as from the suave romanticism of such Philadelphia-based producers and writers as Thom Bell (who had defined the Spinners’ sound) and the team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff (who worked with the O’Jays, the Intruders, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Teddy Pendergrass, among others), disco gained its undying passion for elegant, swooning, sexy surfaces that were their own irrefutable rewards. But disco was more than music as sound, or sound as style or artifice. It also aimed to reaffirm one of music’s most time-worn purposes: namely, its power as a social unifier, as a means of bringing together an audience that shared a certain social perspective and that found meaning and pleasure in the ritual of public dancing. In this sense, disco had roots in traditions as urbane as Big Band and Swing music; as rowdy as blues-style juke joints and country-western honky-tonks; and as sexually irrepressible as early rock & roll and its cleaned-up public exposition, “American Bandstand.”

More immediately, though, disco extended (in fact,
revived
) some of the most joyful ambitions of 1960s pop. In the early 1960s—before Motown or the Beatles—the media largely perceived pop music as little more than a medium of transient dance styles, like the Twist, Mashed Potato, and Hully Gully, that lived out their heady but brief vogues in crowded and intoxicating public venues, such as New York’s Peppermint Lounge, and numerous other discotheques scattered across America and Europe. When the 1960s exploded with the British Invasion and soul, it became apparent that rock was more than an agency for dancing—though clearly, dancing was now more fun, more an assertion of generational identity and power, than ever before. But as rock became more ambitious, more “significant,” it gradually abdicated the dance floor. Though it isn’t often acknowledged, the San Francisco hippie community grew out of a dance movement: young people coming together in the city’s ballrooms and clubs, to dance exhaustingly to the colorful psychedelia that was being invented by such community bands as the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead; indeed, dancing, even more than drugs or sex, was how that scene first publicly realized its ideals of communal ecstasy. But within a season or two, the scene’s followers were dancing a lot less. Instead, they were now paying serious attention to the new music, to its lyrical pronouncements and aural constructions, and as often as not, they did so from a sitting posture. By the early 1970s, rock was something you
listened
to, and for whatever the numerous and undeniable virtues of such artists as the Eagles, Pink Floyd, the Allman Brothers, or even early David Bowie, there was little about their music that inspired a mass terpsichore. Dancing was something practiced by established stars like Mick Jagger—it was not something that an audience did. The star was empowered to
move,
while the audience was obliged to pay, to watch and listen, to revere.

Still, there were audiences for whom dancing was a vital social bond and an essential sensual act, though they were largely audiences that had been shut out by rock & roll’s developing styles and pretensions. Certainly, for the early 1970s black audience—which had enjoyed something of an alliance with the rock mainstream in the mid-1960s—pop no longer offered much embrace, or much satisfaction. For the various Hispanic audiences, and for numerous other ethnic minorities, the reality was even more exclusionary: Pop accommodated ethnic styles in only the most vague or diluted sense, as in the pyrotechnic Latin rock of Santana. In addition, there was one other large audience that had been shut out of rock’s concerns, and that was the gay underground—an audience for whom dancing proved an important assertion of identity and community. In 1973 and 1974, these audiences gradually (and perhaps a bit unwittingly) began to form an ever-expanding network—or at least they began influencing each other’s musical preferences—as dance clubs sprang up around the East Coast and Europe, and as the D.J.s at these clubs began searching out some of the hippest dance-oriented black, Hispanic, and European pop to play for these audiences. As the trend grew, the D.J.s refined their style of programming: Usually cutting back and forth between two turntables, the D.J.s aimed to play a sequence of songs in such a manner that beats between the songs were consistent, each track blending into the following track, making for a steady, seamless flow, and for a mounting mood of physical frenzy among the dancers. Like the music of the 1960s, disco was supposed to be a celebration of community and ecstasy—only this time, the revelers who were celebrating these ideals were the same ones who had been forgotten or expatriated by the established rock world.

THIS EMERGING DANCE movement turned out to be one of the most pivotal and radical developments in 1970s rock. In fact, it upended pop’s common values and its known hierarchy. Whereas, for the vast majority of the post-Beatles audience, it was the artists and their statements that constituted rock’s main pleasures and main worth, disco’s partisans agreed on some new values. What mattered in disco’s ethos wasn’t the apotheosis of the artist, but the experience and involvement of the audience itself. Consequently, disco elected a new system of pop heroes. On the romantic side, the heroes were the dancers, who were acting out this new egalitarianism on the dance floor. On the practical side, the heroes were the people who knew how to shape and manipulate sound in order to construct moods and motivate an audience—the D.J.s and producers and arrangers who were the
real
auteurs of disco style and meaning.

In other words, in disco, the artists—the singers and instrumentalists—were an essential backdrop, but they weren’t the focus of the action; disco fans didn’t go to disco shows to watch disco stars. Indeed, what disco declared was that our pop stars
weren’t
our representatives, but that we could (and should) be the stars in our own scenarios of pleasure and empowerment. To some pop fans and critics, this assertion—namely, that “everybody is a star”—seemed a bit trivial, even pathetic. But to the emerging disco audience, it amounted to nothing less than a vision of empowerment: It said that whatever the reality of your existence, you could refuse to be defined by menial conditions. You could put on your best clothes, go out in public, and act out your worthiness, as if you were entitled to all the acts and trappings of luxury that were flaunted by the dominant culture. In other words, you could appropriate those trappings. In
other
other words, strike a pose; there’s nothing to it.

In time, disco’s obsessions with dressiness would become elitist and defeating—especially once the scene’s clubs began enforcing dress codes that simply affirmed the very ideals of affluence and privilege that the original disco audience had meant to usurp, rather than simply emulate. But in the early 1970s, disco’s “everybody is a star” mentality was genuinely liberating: It had the effect of empowering (and even briefly unifying) an audience of gays, blacks, and ethnics that had, for too long, been disdained or displaced by a rock world that had become overwhelmingly white. This rising coalition of outsiders—pop’s equivalent of a silent majority—was about to become the biggest audience in pop’s history, though in a thoroughly unprecedented way. In fact, disco became a mass revolution at pretty much the same time that it remained an underground phenomenon. Because disco was a music played in clubs, a music without clearly identifiable central stars, a music that radio and pop media largely ignored at first, its massive popularity was almost invisible. Indeed, for a year or two, the disco world was a network of clubs, dancers, and music makers that didn’t so much enter the pop mainstream as simply form an equally viable alternative to that mainstream, that could launch massive-selling hits without benefit of radio or media exposure. Without intending to, the disco world had seized and exercised its own power by the most effective means possible—by means of pure commerce—and this development would have a galvanic effect on the business and culture of popular music.

Of course, this meant that disco’s genuine mainstream assimilation was inevitable, and that the music itself would be co-opted and marketed as a formula. Indeed, by 1974, disco had been codified. The beat ruled—it was a tightly uniform, booming 4/4 pulse, without patience for rhythmic shifts or improvisation. But within its rigid limitations, the structure allowed for a surprising amount of nuance and variation: It could be elegant, coy, and tuneful, as in Van McCoy’s “The Hustle”; it could be taut and sweetly funky, as in Shirley and Company’s “Shame, Shame, Shame”; it could be sexy and evocative, as in the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat” and George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby”; it could be propulsive and soulful, as in Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces.” The following year, disco even launched its first certified star: a former church and theatrical singer named Donna Summer, who began as merely another prop-singer (with the mock-orgasmic “Love to Love You Baby”), and would shortly become the form’s most ambitious and enduring artist.

In the mid-1970s, disco fused with the public imagination in an incendiary mass moment. By this time, numerous artists—including Donna Summer, Labelle, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Wild Cherry, and Silver Convention—had already scored Top 10 disco hits. But the genre’s biggest milestone, of course, was the 1977
Saturday Night Fever—
a film that gave a sympathetic and fairly accurate portrayal of how disco night life provided a transcendent identity for certain East Coast working-class ethnic youths. More significant than the film, though, was its soundtrack album. Featuring the music of the Bee Gees and the Trammps, among others, it rapidly sold over 25 million copies, and set a record as the biggest-selling record in pop history at that time.

Disco’s triumph was complete, which of course only signaled the movement’s end. Actually, disco had been taken out of the hands of both its creators and its audience.
Saturday Night Fever
’s (and disco’s) biggest stars were the Bee Gees—a group of British pop stars who had created a glossy adaptation of the form’s style and popularity as a way of reviving their flagging careers. In addition, in the rush to exploit disco’s hitmaking abilities, several other established pop stars—including the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Elton John, the Eagles, and Rod Stewart—had also started accommodating their music to the disco style and its audience. Suddenly, disco’s pulse was omnipresent: It dominated film scores, TV commercials, Top 40 radio, and almost every lounge and club where recorded music was played for a dancing audience. It wasn’t just that the music was now pervasive; it also seemed bent on revising all known music history. Everything—from the hits of the Beatles to the dark beauty of Beethoven—became fair game for disco’s pounding 4/4 formula, and the sameness of it all began to rub many people the wrong way.

As disco became the pop norm, a counterreaction set in—in swift and fierce terms. By 1978, rock fans were beginning to sport T-shirts emblazoned with hostile decrees—”Disco Sucks” and “Death to Disco.” And then, in July 1979, a hard rock radio D.J. from Chicago’s WLUP turned a baseball game at Comiskey Park into an anti-disco rally. As he incited the audience to chant “Disco sucks,” the D.J. piled disco LPs into a wooden crate in center field—and exploded the crate. It was a supremely ugly moment, and its message was plain: The mainstream pop audience wasn’t about to allow a coalition of blacks and gays to usurp rock’s primacy. Indeed, it seemed hardly coincidental that, at a time when America was about to elect Ronald Reagan as president, and enter its most savage period of cultural denial, that disco’s dream of an all-embracing audience would invite rabid antipathy. Instead of opening up the pop world to a new consensus, disco had made plain that rock was fast becoming a field of diverse, often mutually antagonistic factions.