Abdullah Shabazz
Was Disco REALLY That Bad ?
I grew up in the Seventies not as a Muslim but as an African Methodist Episcopalian (AME) -- re: Protestant. As a teenager in the last half of the decade, when I wasn't in school or doing homework, I was, like most kids, into partying, dancing and sometimes clubbing when I could find an establishment that either fell for my fake ID or catered to post-pubescent youths in my age group (of which there were very few). Like virtually all of my Black contemporaries, my musical tastes ran heavily into soul, R&B, and especially funk, as well as contemporary jazz. We listened and partied to Parliament-Funkadelic, Earth-Wind and Fire, James Brown, The Ohio Players, Con Funk Shun, Rufus featuring Chaka Khan, LTD, Cameo, The Bar Kays, Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock, The Isley Brothers, The Brothers Johnson, Ray Parker, Jr., The Commodores, Kool and the Gang, Natalie Cole, The Gap Band and Rick James, just to name a few(!).
Teenagers went to house parties or high school dances then (I imagine they do now, too), where they played many of the aforementioned musicians we preferred. An overwhelming majority of clubs, or "discotheques", that a teenager could attend were establishments that didn't cater to any particular ethnic group -- let alone ours -- and as a result played music that appealed to a majority of patrons...
Now I'm not going to try and convince anybody that disco was an underrated and misunderstood musical form -- it wasn't -- or that it had any aesthetically or influentially redeeming quality -- it didn't. Disco can best be described as a orchestrated florid symphony with an ethnic groove that was intended to inspire dancing. It was a long-playing, artificial dance continuum that was mostly antiseptic, always disposable, and usually fast-food/studio-produced on a synthetic assembly line. The simple-minded lyrics, with its chant-like repetitiveness and frequent double-entendres, were perpetually sexual and about what you wanted to do that evening...
...And it was a reflection of how we as a society felt at the time. The Seventies were once described as "Sixties hedonism without the political awareness and activism." After the turbulent and war-torn decade that preceded it, society was ready to celebrate its new-found freedoms: It was party time! Disco fit in effortlessly into a society that both (1) began to feel comfortable with itself, and (2) wanted to explore its social/psycho-sexual limits. Disco gave people a vision of perpetual pleasure in which the beat would never stop, the dancing would never stop, and you could be this indefatigable sex machine. It was happy music not because life was happy, but because its producers and followers chose to pretend that life was happy. It was the ultimate escapist music and lifestyle that anybody could take part in because it cost so little to participate.
But what attracted disco to more people than any other musical genre before or since was that it had no color barriers; it practiced what society fought for in the preceding decade. Where else but a discotheque could you find a white artist soulfully singing on stage, a black DJ synthesizing the music, and a racially and culturally diverse crowd getting down? Even though its origins were ethnic and "alternative" (re: homosexual) in nature, its "anything goes" attraction appealed to everyone -- and everyone wanted to "cut loose." Alternative cultures and lifestyles that before had existed below the surface and behind closed doors now had a form of open expression. Disco catered to the lonely and the socially suppressed, and produced an illusion that the most ordinary, nondescript person could walk into a disco and take over the dance floor -- be the "King Of Disco."
But the idiosyncrasies that lent themselves to disco's appeal were what ultimately contributed to society's revulsion and eventual rejection. It's inherent campiness, self-gratification, and manufactured mass-production influenced a transparent trendiness. The satin shirts, polyester leisure suits, platform shoes, blow-dried big hairdos, glitzy electric light dance floors, gratuitous pick-up joints, and open acceptance of "disco dust" and other hard drugs -- in essence, its pagan rituals -- were part-and-parcel to a cheap phoniness that defined the disco scene. You could pretend to be anything you wanted to be. Disco's popularity sort of marginalized other forms of popular music (specifically rock), which induced a certain amount of defensiveness (these other musical artists could not understand why their music was taking a back seat to a genre that they thought was so unsubstantial).
What's more, we quickly discovered that what little artistic appeal disco had was overwhelmingly producer-driven. The people who made disco had an acute aptitude for identifying talent who weren't really talented. Apart from Donna Summers, disco was not a genre that created great careers with any longevity. We wanted to dance so much that we didn't really notice until much, much later that "artists" such as Vicki Sue Robinson, Thelma Houston, Gloria Gaynor, Peter Brown, The Trammps, Alicia Bridges, Sylvester, The Village People, Chic, Rick Dees, Roxy, Vann McCoy, Peaches & Herb and Hot Chocolate had absolutely no musical ability, not even for a musical style as devoid of substance and essense as disco. The music was so repetitively endless and unimaginative that songs indistinguishably blended together.
But these disco artists gave the illusion of partying hard, so we made them overnight stars and gave them their fifteen minutes of fame. In essence, the "stars" of disco were like the drugs the disco scene openly condoned: We were addicted to the partying so we listened and danced, and when we wanted more the disco artists/pushers gave us more, and only after we came off that dance high did we discover that the music was just a halucinogen, a narcotic feeding our addiction, giving us an artificially-induced euphoria.
As a result, disco has taken a merciless hit from both the present-day media and our politically correct, socially conscious civilization. Even those of us who were enthusiastic participants have cast aspersions on the culture and its idiosyncrasies. It has become hip, almost fashionable, and certainly acceptable for EVERYONE to blame virtually all of that decade's decedent excesses on disco, as well as rip the musical genre as being soulless, insignificant, meaningless and of absolutely no social, political, artistic or redeeming value.
I'm a little lost here. Just how can a subculture that made an effort to include everyone across the ethnic strata be of no redeeming value? Whether we want to admit it or not, all of us who lived at that time in any urban or suburban setting "got down, got funky," or did The Hustle. As a result, disco had a immense influence on our lives then, as well as how we related to others and what we listened to later. Do you think we could have gained an appreciation for Peter Gabriel and The Pet Shop Boys in the Eighties if we didn't comprehend K.C. and the Sunshine Band? Would Gloria Estefan and Shiela E. have held any appeal for us if Donna Summer hadn't "loved to love you, baby"? Eighties music truly was multicultural, where whites and blacks made music that had a soulful crossover appeal; that began with the multicultural rhythms of disco.
Then again, by today's standards, the music of the 80's had no message. Today's music is characteristic of the times we live in, as is music in any time. The Eighties crossover appeal is regarded as "sellout" today. In some cases that is true, but in most cases that characterization simply is vicious. Sting, Michael Jackson, Howard Jones, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Tina Turner, ABC, Jeffrey Osborne, Stevie Wonder, Sheena Easton, and Hall & Oates were not trying to "cross over" into another genre; they were playing a fresh new multi-tinged variety of music. Nothing characterizes the music of the Nineties more than its intrinsic polarization and anger; grunge and alternative groups, with their apparent lack of R&B beats, are enraged with dysfunctional society and what they perceive it has left their generation, while their counterparts in rap want to lash out and eliminate those they think are responsible for their oppressed lot in life. While this provides for "music with a message", it doesn't inspire a harmonious togetherness, which is indicative of the polarized, antagonistic, almost tribal times we live in.
A majority of popular musical artists of the Eighties who weren't this angry -- and unlike their disco counterparts of the Seventies really did have talent -- have found finding an audience in the Nineties excrutiatingly difficult (of the eleven artists mentioned in the previous paragraph, how many have hit the charts lately). If nothing else, disco got everyone involved.
It's not as if disco was the only musical genre where open drug use and promiscuous sex was a part of its culture. In the Seventies and early Eighties, one of the stated reasons a number of artists in a variety of popular musical disciplines got into music was because they could party with reckless abandon, and get laid. Hard rock musicians were notorious for their hard, drug-crazed living, the "groupies" who hung out waiting to have sex with the band or anybody associated with them, and preposterous clothing (as if Ace Freeley, Peter Criss, Paul Stanley, and Gene Simmons epitomized lasting style).
As for the aforementioned disco stars of the Seventies, sure most of them were talentless one-hit wonders, but what genre or decade doesn't have their share of those? Did Peter Frampton survive the Seventies? How about the Bay City Rollers? Seen MC Breed around? Or Animotion? Or Nancy Sinatra? For every Alicia Bridges there's a Debbie Boone. For every Sylvester there's a Quiet Riot. For every Thelma Houston there's a Brenda K. Starr. For every Vicki Sue Robinson there's a Katrina and the Waves...
...Somehow I don't think "The Monster Mash", "Alley Oop", or "Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini", all campy novelty songs, are thought of as music with any redeeming social quality, yet nobody really complains about them.
Furthermore, if disco was so bad, why did some of the most lasting artists of the last thirty years jump on the bandwagon an make at least one disco song in the 70's? Barbra Streisand, Deborah Harry, Bette Midler, Rod Stewart, James Brown, David Bowie, The Jacksons, and even the Rolling Stones, just to name a few, succumbed to the illusion and made disco singles because, at it's zenith, disco reaped almost 20% of the music industry's income, making up the largest market share of any other musical genre before or since. Saturday Night Fever is the top grossing "musical" of all time, and the soundtrack to the film is the second-best selling album ever. Stated simply, these eminent musicians followed the money and responded to the market. They seemed to have survived the experience just like the rest of us who fell prey to it. I have yet to hear any of them characterized as sellouts.
They say that the winners decide how history will be remembered. Since disco failed badly and lost, it is not remembered fondly by its surviving musical disciplines and their adherents; even many of disco's refugees choose not to defend it. Sure, as music disco will not be remembered as aesthetically pleasant or culturally relevant, and as a culture and era it was antiseptic, self-aggrandizing and illusory. But just like any other musical form it had an impact, positively and negatively, on how we related to each other and what we listened and danced to in the future. While it wasn't any better than any other musical type, it really wasn't that bad. Keep something in mind: Disco is not dead. The dance music, house music, and techno-pop played in today's swanky downtown night clubs and in Europe and Asia is really disco by another name, with such current practicioners as Black Box, C&C Music Factory, Technotronic, and Ace of Base. Likewise, some of the idiosyncracies that typified disco, such as extended play tracks, computer-produced sounds and sampling, are familiar attributes of a lot of today's popular music. So obviously it had some quality that evolved -- or devolved -- and continues to live on.