Tony Herrington, on The Wire’s blog, battling against the underexamined assumption that “disco sucks” (does anyone still think that?), imagines disco as a form of protest in a capitalist wasteland:
The wisdom (if we can call it that) on disco that prevails in multiple subcultural nooks and crannies from Noise to alt.rock to Improv is that it is suffocating escapist froth, a retreat from the frontline of the Real into a dressed up, dumbed down, perpetual denial state of corny, showbizzy razzle-dazzle, all flaunt and flirt, oblivious to everything other than the solipsistic desire to go bang with all your friends at once, night in, night out. (Is it necessary to point out that such judgments rarely seem based on close encounters with disco’s actual milieu, let alone a close analysis of the actual music, which in its original state melted a complex of Afro rhythms – Bronx salsa, gospel and R&B, samba and Afrobeat – into a mix that was insouciant enough to suck up Broadway showtunes, Hollywood musicals, early synth experiments, jazz, minimalism and exotica? But then disco is the ultimate example of a genre whose complex reality and backstory has been obscured by its subsequent global commodity status, as the music that taste forgot, the sound that sucks.)
But as those revisionist disco historians Peter Shapiro and Tim Lawrence have already demonstrated, disco’s detractors should consider a couple of other angles on its supposedly head-in-the-stars refusal to grapple with the issues, its decadent insistence on fun and frivolity in the face of all the urgent evidence to the contrary (and is it necessary to reiterate the WASP-ish dimension to so much anti-disco rhetoric?)
For instance, rather than ‘speaking truth to power’ in the nominally engaged manner of protest songs of all stripes (rock, folk, R&B) – songs whose visceral platitudes and patinas seduced their audiences into thinking they were right there on the barricades, fed their sense of moral superiority in the taxonomy of cultural consumers – what if in its original incarnation, disco’s inclusive dancing-in-the-ruins vibe actively turned its back to the cynical machinations of prevailing elites and hierarchies? Consider the climate and conditions in which disco emerged, which is to say the dog days of the early 70s in the necropolis of Manhattan, when America was freezing in the chill winds of global economic meltdown and rampant political conservatism, and the pitiless systemic response to Vietnam protests, civil rights and the rise of identity politics. Now consider the possibility that, instead of knuckling under to this harsh 70s reality, disco proudly and defiantly resisted it by having the nous and the nerve to walk away, disappearing into a polymorphously perverse autonomous zone where none of it mattered, and where divisions of class, race, gender and sexuality were allowed to dissolve in a cavalcade of esoteric rituals that suspended time for as long as the night allowed.
In what follows, he traces how “revolutionary gestures become stadium grandstanding.”
Yesterday afternoon I tuned in to the reliably old school Kiss FM and caught the apex of its new jack swing segment. The DJ billed the set as a celebration of “homegrown artists,” underscoring the extent to which that particular sound became synonymous with black New York in the early nineties. The culture of new jack swing, with its aura of sophistication, seemed to augur the sort of bustling buppie urban life that awaited middle-class youngsters like me. That was our vision of adulthood.
The triumph of hip-hop, among other things,1 changed all that. Donnie Simpson went out and Joe Clair came in, though that’s a crude way to put it. New jack swing was, I suppose, the last great iteration of a certain kind of black urbanity. Its visual aesthetics were rooted largely in mid-century jazz and R&B culture—baggy, bright-colored suits, wavy or processed hair, goatees, horn-rimmed glasses, etc. The music itself combined smooth vocal arrangements and sunny keyboard vamps with funk breaks or loud, drum machine beats. Today it sounds surprisingly sprightly. In my mind, it also remains freighted with notions of what was or could have been, for the version of black city life to which new jack swing supposedly formed a sonic backdrop disappeared, by all accounts, a long time ago. The ideal, needless to say, lives on for some.
A few years ago I ran into Johnny Kemp at a house party in Hamilton Heights. I learned that he still performs in clubs and lounges uptown. New York is funny that way.
Song: Max & Intro, “Beogradska Devojka” (demo); Video from Pejzazi u magli (Yugoslavia, 1984), dir. Jovan Jovanovic.
The prevalence of YouTube as a song sharing platform has lead to some ugly commonplaces: songs for which there were never videos are paired with slideshows, or lyrics processed through home video editing dissolves. But occasionally a fan will adapt an existing video for the song, and this can be a remarkable product of the internet age: a sublime combination of unusual sources and a disregard for older music-video conventions. There was, for example, the memorable combination of Ariel Pink’s “Beverly Kills” with a Friskies ad. Above is (as far as I can make out) a deft bit of editing by photographer Alex Gaidouk, who compressed an obscure Yugoslav film about young heroin addicts, Pejzazi u magli (1984) to fit an obscure single by fellow Serbians Max & Intro, “Beogradska Devojka” (1985).
Cover of twelve-inch single for Big Ben Tribe, “Tarzan Loves the Summer Nights” (Gong Records 5), 1984. Design by Grison, photograph by Mio.
According to discogs user TomKay, Big Ben Tribe’s “Tarzan Loves The Summer Nights” is “about a woman who has a romantic/sexual fantasy about living in the jungle with a handsome and brave Tarzan.” Could be, but I can’t be certain. Where most Italo disco leans on distinct, usually repetitive vocal samples, “Tarzan” swings through seven minutes of dangling synth lines, following only breathy, indistinct female vocals. The programming always threatens to get hot but never overheats.
Big Ben Tribe would go on to collaborate with Tony Carrasco, who two years prior to “Tarzan” produced Klein & MBO’s “Dirty Talk” — an Italo track that was one of the building blocks of house. The result of their teaming up, oddly enough, was a cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” which sold well enough to make it into dollar bins. The revenge of revisionism is a market for “Tarzan” that will pay over a hundred Euros for a mint copy.
Cover for The Whispers' "And The Beat Goes On" single. Solar Records 7831 (Belgian reissue, 1987).
“And The Beat Goes On” went to US #19 / UK #2 in 1979; but, the sort of denatured dance-track that it is, managed to reappear in 1987 on UK charts, packaged with the more recent, and evolved B-side “Some Kinda Lover” (orig. 1984). Always flexible to the point of being almost transparent, The Whispers formed in the mid-60s and at first paralleled the development of the Isley Brothers (they were also centered around brothers), though without quite the range or inventiveness. By the end of the next decade, however, they discovered that disco suited their layered song structures, and began to settle into a sound that combined funky — though not quite funk — guitars, carefully arranged vocal dynamics, and intricate synthesizer lines with drum programming.
“Some Kinda Lover” has this era of the band’s typical sugar coating of musical professionalism (doo-wop vocals; perfectly doubled beats) with a caramel core — in this case, a sprightly lead guitar lick decorating the white-space in the chorus. The same role would be taken by an electric piano in 1987’s “Rock Steady,” in which the band would go more fully electro (and reach US #7).
A new contributor to the blog, Megan’s investigation of the cultural climate for pop music in 1994 will appear in the first issue of Ply. She writes regularly for Mere Duchess as Not Susan.
Mariah Carey early on was a constitutionally perfect substrate in which to suspend the industry of pop. Of ambiguous race, donning, always, a denim bottom and a black top, the female effect was somewhere between inner city first grade teacher and Disney princess. Her role was simple: provide an aspirational vocal track against a backdrop of hi-fi karaoke. No prismatic cultural opuses like Madonna or Janet dance sequences necessary, just a set of pipes and some hand gestures orbiting around a velveted bed of princess neckline.
The ’89–’94 pleasure in hearing a singer soar was parallel to the figure skater mania of the time; it was watching a mouth form a word and do aural nonsense with it from behind. When Mariah got into the whistle tones—into registers only a dog could hear—there was a sort of 4H quality to the experience. Athletic vocals like these had an uplifting element, the kind of thing that could transport an accounts payable clerk from the earthly limits of a Wednesday. It was a broad experience manufactured for a broad audience, with no need to deal in symbology or lyrics.
Mariah’s reign as princess/vocalist ended interestingly coterminously with the Disney noblewomen’s run in theaters. “Fantasy” represented her first hybrid attempt. It was a good one, but it subterfuged the voice as the center of the experience, replacing it with the signage of pop. The transition made there proved to be an irreversible one, probably, in fact, by choice, but also, in effect, by chance. Though Celine Dion kept on as a broad belter for another few years, the blockbuster vocalist model was damaged. Singing, even very athletic singing, wouldn’t suffice without branding or directionality. Obliged after this moment in any full-scale industry effort was a piano (singer songwriter), a dance routine, an off-the-rack R&B/country/dance insinuation, or a rapper to croon alongside of.
All of this makes the moment of “Hero,” “I’ll Be There,” “Without You” and the like sort of singular. The Carey-Mottola marriage, with all its royal (cartoon) wedding trappings stamped a version of mastery on the music industry at its financial peak: the Cinderella story of the session vocalist and producer prince surpassing Elvis in number ones. You could embed plenty of cynical connotations there, but then who can resist the lure of a heyday, especially one that encompasses such a pure (somehow naive, somehow Clintonian?) aggregated form of American style-power.
The “Fantasy” shift for Mariah also brought with it the assertion of a personality, which was awkward for everyone for many years and something only the drag queen fan in me can really get behind. Though the pleasures of “Honey,” “Always Be My Baby” and “We Belong Together” are many, the experience is fractured and dependent on neutralizing the source; accepting it as a cultural document instead of the heart-infused output of a set of lungs. Gone is the young, black bodysuited Mariah of B-cup, bland video, and “Emotions” high note; the coherent source of prosaic joy emblematic a pop period that she made and was.
