Disco Revival: Beyond Gaynor

Great things happened in 1970s America. We celebrated our Bicentennial, birthed both “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” and impeached a president. By the end of the decade, we were also home to around 15,000 discothèques. Disco was a four billion dollar industry, yet my mother still has an avowed hatred the most popular musical genre of her early youth. “I was really more of a funk girl,” she would claim, turning the dial as a Gloria Gaynor tune came across the radio. But dropping me off for my first year of college, she confessed, “I went to Studio 54 once. It was closing. I barely saw anything and left.” At the time, I took this extra-contextual detour as a strange, but earnest, act of de-maternalization—a PG-13 parable with the moral that, while we all at one point find ourselves in dens of vice, we can and should make sane decisions nonetheless. Recently though, I just can’t help but think that perhaps she was just as embarrassed by the culture that, briefly, her generation was enamored of. “I was really more into Sly,” she would trail off.

So when I returned home recently and began playing music with four-on-the-floor beats, hi-hats, vampy singers, and a fair amount of cowbelling, she was surprised to say the least.

The disco I was playing is not the capital-D Disco of wedding receptions and campaign theme songs. It’s a dance music made in the early 70s by all-embracing, forward-thinking people, and it’s been overshadowed by the more garish, less nuanced music of the latter part of that decade. Genre, race, class, and sexual orientation had no bearing on what direction these original innovators would take, precisely because they represented the most marginalized of minorities in America. The greatest ambassador of this brand of disco, at least in my mind, is a now little known producer and composer named Arthur Russell. A pockmarked gay Iowa farmboy and classically trained cellist, Russell spent his youth between a Buddhist monastery, psychedelic San Francisco, and ultimately New York City, where he produced dance music with a singularity deserving of his improbable biography. This proto-disco he has come to stand for was marked by a graceful sense of levity, camp, and a fundamental belief in people’s ability to appreciate complexity and duality. I mean, what more could a bunch of Black, Latino, and gay DJs hope for but that—a normalization of what was normal for them.

It is this optimism—and the belief that the brightest future would see a blurring of the dividing line between intricacy and accessibility—that separates this disco from main stage Disco. Perhaps as a result of this hopefulness, many abandoned these ideals for a shot at visibility and acceptance–even if it meant stripping tunes of both layers and intentionality. And so the culture lost its focus.

In truth though, the ideals of disco never truly went away, they simply remained dormant, assuming alternative aliases. There was simply too much uncharted territory, too much potential, not to keep exploring. So the style-that-dare-not-speak-its-name came to be known as house music, or simply dance music. Sampling and DJ culture immediately found refuge in early rap and hip-hop, and schism genres like dance-punk and techno emerged.

From Prince’s “1999” and Madonna’s “Holiday” in the 80s, to Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman” in the 90s, to Maroon 5’s “Makes Me Wonder,” and ,most recently, Rihanna; the hi-hat and cowbell have lingered.

They’re less and less surreptitious. With the recent digital release of reissues by artists like Russell, the sensibilities of those early innovators are more relevant now than ever.

This last fin de siècle saw the rise and fall of Britpop (Oasis, Blur) and the Post-Punk Revival/New York Rock Rennaissance (The Strokes, The Libertines). Both movements suffered from the perception of having valued nostalgia over relevancy, or even quality. When Strokes lead singer Julian Casablancas sang, “I’ve got nothing to say, I’ve got nothing to say,” everyone believed him.

For the third time round in the last decade or so, people have wised up. There is a group of artists, on both sides of the Atlantic, who seem averse to nostalgia. One hub of activity is New York based label DFA Records, founded by Tim Goldsworthy and LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy. Murphy’s been pushing conversion to the disco ideals for almost a decade now, to growing success, along with groups like London’s Hot Chip and Melbourne’s Cut Copy.

Their music is faster, deeper, and more likely to rattle you than anything my mother might have heard as Studio 54 was closing. Just as disco was never really the same as Disco, this new wave should not be considered a Disco revival. Rather, it is a new willingness to embrace duality and nuance. Just because a song is coquettish or vampy, doesn’t preclude it from coming from a serious or earnest place. Songs can offer a meaningful perspective on getting older (LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”) and still have a backbeat. Artists need not be self-consciously serious to be serious.

DFA artist Hercules and Love Affair, one of the forerunners of this new set of innovators, is another exemplar of this new, layered dance music. Their eponymously titled debut album has met with both critical and limited commercial acclaim.

It is clear then that people are more comfortable with the intersection of divergent styles than ever before, if signaled by nothing else than the sizable crowd for Girl Talk this past weekend at notoriously conservative Harvard. Given this comfort, the question now is how to move past the novelty of mashing up Mariah Carey and James Taylor, avoid another descent into nostalgia, and continue the eternal forward march of creation and discovery.

Remarkably, in a security-obsessed era typified by Bloombergian, antiseptic New York and Big Brother London, people are leaning more and more toward experimentation and ingenuity.

As a result of the commercialization of Disco, too many good ideas aren’t seen to fruition, and with the spread of AIDS in later decades, many of those who could have kept innovating passed.

These new artists mark a resurgence in the belief that there’s still room for innovation, that we aren’t fated to a future of cut-and-paste musical wizardry and sentimentality for the old world undergrounds we never knew. My mother is likely to always see herself as a “Sly girl,” but if more groups continue to channel the ideals of early disco into their music as some are now, perhaps she’ll come clean, and brag to my brother that she did quite a bit more than show up to the disco as it lay dying.

—Columnist Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvard.edu.