The Disco Inferno
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The event that supposedly announced ‘the death of disco’ is almost certainly better known than any event that marked its more obscure, subterranean beginnings. The July 1979 ‘disco sucks’ riots in Chicago’s Comiskey Park saw rock fans flood the sports ground and ritually PAUL WILLIAMS burn their spurned disco records. Radio stations and clubs soon abandoned the sound in too black, droves, declaring themselves opponents of too gay ‘plastic’ and ‘mindless’ musical tastes. What was it about disco—ostensibly just another musical the disco inferno subculture—that elicited such an unusually public and virulent backlash? While the TIM LAWRENCE Comiskey Park spectacle has become one Love Saves the Day: A History of American defining visual picture of the period, another Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 more generic set of images, repeatedly endlessly Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2003 since on TV, film, and in advertising, is the ISBN 0-8223-3198-5 Saturday Night Fever, flares, Abba ‘n’ Bee Gees RRP $23.95 (pb) version, which has now achieved a status almost beyond cliché.1 Disco, as made instantly stylistically identifiable by the media industries, caught the mainstream American public imagination for only perhaps two or three years. It saw a deluge of identikit fashion, cash- in films and Studio 54 paparazzi shots. The disco fad burned so brightly, and then turned to ash, the story goes. In Love Saves the Day, Tim Lawrence faith- fully documents the accurate record of an excit- ing musical and subcultural journey, rescuing it from any diminished status as either an un- fortunate glitch in the rock ’n’ roll journey, or hokey nostalgia. From the late 1960s, weekly parties in David Mancuso’s Soho Manhattan loft saw Blacks, Italian-Americans, and Latin- Americans—mostly male, mostly gay—dancing to soul and funk records at all-night parties 212 VOLUME11 NUMBER1 MARCH2005 that would reach a kind of frenzied nirvana. is of particular interest for cultural studies Mancuso would scour record stores for seven- theorists writing in the area of music sub- inch Motown, Salsoul, and Stax/Volt soul and cultures, is one that Lawrence could have more funk singles, and intersperse them with any- thoroughly explored. He is not able to clearly thing from classical preludes to African per- explain how a movement that began with cussion records. He was also obsessed with secretive, exclusive events could quickly come, fine-tuning the various elements of his parties by the mid-1970s, to apparently appeal to —the lighting, decorations, refreshments and, almost everyone (the evidence is the prolifer- most of all, the sound system—to maximise the ation of mobile discos, sports club discos, office powerful atmosphere of the event. Where for party discos, and even church discos). Particu- decades the jukebox had been the default larly when we consider that the parties chal- record selector, the 1970s underground scene lenged many basic American social norms initiated the now-familiar idea of the DJ as part concerning sexuality, musicianship, drug use shaman, part superstar. As DJs competed to be and forms of bodily interaction, we might the best, innovations were introduced, on an expect Lawrence to consider whether dancing almost party-by-party basis. They were soon all night in a non-partnered format represented, spinning two copies of the same single to for more mainstream audiences, a form of sub- extend the playing time, using records with a versive escape, or perhaps an unleashing of strong and heavy groove. DJs then started dormant urges. preparing their own extended versions of tracks Lawrence explains the burgeoning popular- with longer introductions, added instruments ity of disco as a result of, first, the irresistible and a stronger bass drum. The effect was elec- appeal of certain key records pushed by the DJs tric; converts increasingly came to base their and, second, a zeitgeist that was both economi- waking lives around the parties, and friendly cally depressed (dancing and cheap pills made competition saw new parties established in for an inexpensive evening) and increasingly otherwise disused spaces around New York. accepting of polymorphous sexuality and self- One of the difficulties in writing a history of expression (particularly in the form of ‘dressing a phenomenon that has now become a well- up’). In the sections where Lawrence does worn facet of popular culture nostalgia rests attempt a more interpretive cultural analysis, with how to effectively evoke a sense of how the results are hit and miss. For instance, his the events at the time felt open and undeter- suggestion that hauling boxes of records may mined. For all its efforts to describe the excite- have felt culturally familiar for Italian-American ment of the scene, Love Saves the Day has a DJs, since their immigrant ancestors once curious lack of suspense. This is forgivable; we did the same with their luggage, feels a little know roughly what was going to happen, the forced. (58) most interesting part is how. Yet, this topic of More illuminating is his (brief) mention the underground-overground dynamic, which of the significance of how public gatherings of PAUL WILLIAMS—TOO BLACK, TOO GAY: THE DISCO INFERNO213 those with alternative lifestyles moved from the the same intensity, previously. Second, greater fields and streets in the 1960s to behind closed attention to non guitar-rock musical forms doors in the 1970s. The conservative backlash would provide a corrective to the ‘rockist’ against demonstrations and public militancy by tradition that has emerged in cultural studies. the end of the 1960s (given the events at Kent While Lawrence offers no comments on the State and Jackson State Universities, or the biases of scholarly popular musical criticism, Altamont Music Festival), along with a more another author, Reebee Garofalo, has acknowl- general feeling of disillusionment that ‘the edged the importance of disco, which he states, revolution’ would not be forthcoming, meant ‘may have scored a larger political victory than that liberation became an increasingly private, punk’, because people of all colours were on personal affair. Interestingly, most of Lawrence’s the dance floor together.2 Given that scholarly interviewees downplay the significance of the work on rock ’n’ roll has tended to rely on a anti-police riots in the West Village, centered combination of lyrical analysis and the semi- on the Stonewall Inn. This, in turn, causes otics of key ‘rebel figures’ (even when focusing Lawrence to muse whether the tentative public on issues of gender and sexuality),3 disco seems acceptance of gay lifestyles in the 1970s had to offer critics fewer cues or angles with which less to do with activist organisations like the to capture the movement—unless it is charac- Gay Liberation Front, and more to do with terised through mindlessness, or abandonment. trendsetters who were able to subvert dominant In the hope of casting some sort of fresh angle heterosexual masculinity through stylistic on the age-old question of what the music changes in popular culture. (184) This section ‘means,’ it is better to ask: if music can mean, of his discussion also valuably points out that, where does this meaning occur? In this case, in contrast to most of those involved with 1960s meaning occurs in the formation of new, hybrid countercultural movements, gay Black and forms of community that came to be based, Latino men had ‘nothing to drop out from’. For recursively, around knowing what dancing to them, disco was not something that explicitly this music meant (and investing one’s sense of protested in some kind of countercultural self in it). Given his subject matter, it is dis- fashion, but was an affirmative statement. appointing that Lawrence fails to discuss the Disco (or 1970s dance music, Lawrence’s ‘politics of dancing’ as it differs from the ‘politics preferred tag) has not received anywhere near of rocking’. By foregrounding the body-of- the same attention from cultural studies dancers in context, a more nuanced under- scholars as rock music (and punk in particular, standing of identity and resistance (of the kind with which it cohabitated). As a musical and developed by Angela McRobbie) could result.4 subcultural form it certainly deserves increased Compared to other musical subcultures, attention, in the first place simply because DJ where the music being heard spurred fans to culture, remixing, and dancing all night had do-it-themselves, the disco scene was very never come together in the same way, or with much concerned with doing what was needed 214 VOLUME11 NUMBER1 MARCH2005 to create the vibe. Although the DJs competed operated in the same scene, and did so co- by making new edits and remixes of their operatively, points to do the productive tension music, these weren’t available for others to between the cerebral and the sensual, or own, nor did they even wear the name of their between tuning in and tuning out, that con- creator. In other words, the party—not the tinues as a key dynamic of today’s dance music record—was the product of which they were scene. proud. The original musicians behind the Considering that Lawrence originally came records, for their part, tended to be established to this project wanting to write a history of funk groups who worked with studio engineers, the (already far-better documented) 1990s rave who were joined by a new breed of European scene, it is perhaps surprising that he focuses studio producers (most notably, Kraftwerk). greatly on ‘key players’. After all, disco provided Increasingly, from 1976, record companies the template for 1990s dance music, the hired producers to make profitable ‘disco mixes’ analysis of which has focused as much on the of artists on their rosters.