A Dozen Albums Influenced By Disco

On the 30th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night, here are a dozen albums that owe at least part of their sound to the Disco revolution…

Kurtis Blow | Kurtis Blow (1980) – Except for an unfortunate cover of BTO’s ‘Taking Care Of Business’, rap’s first full length album has extended grooves that sound like they were swiped from Studio 54.

Listen: The Breaks

The Human League | Dare (1981) – This has a colder edge than most Disco, but its driving synthesizers and metronomic precision make it Disco’s dour younger cousin.

Listen: Don’t You Want Me

Michael Jackson | Thriller (1983) – MJ came of age in the disco era, and his Off The Wall is one of the classics of the genre. Hints of Disco flash through in many places on this blockbuster, most notably ‘Beat It’ and ‘P.Y.T.’.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood | Welcome To The Pleasuredome (1984) – Everything about this group and this album screams DISCO…

Depeche Mode | Catching Up With Depeche Mode (1985) – When they came around from the dark side (not often enough, in my opinion), Depeche Mode created some of the best post-Disco dance tunes. ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ is just one example of a DM song that has the bounce and message of the best Disco.

Listen: Just Can’t Get Enough

Beastie Boys | Paul’s Boutique (1989) – Tracks like ‘To All The Girls’ and ‘Shake Your Rump’ mined the spirit, if not exactly the sound, of Disco, and the video for ‘Hey Ladies’ revealed the butterfly-collared influence behind this great album…

Listen: Hey Ladies

Deee-Lite | World Clique (1990) – ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ fits seamlessly into any Disco compilation, and Deee-Lite looked like they’d been beamed right in from Paradise Garage. Music made after 1980 doesn’t get much more Disco than this.

Listen: Groove Is In The Heart

Happy Mondays | Pills ‘N’ Thrills and Bellyaches (1990) – The attitude is Punk, the rhythms are Disco, the result is a glorious mess. This sounds like Disco on spacier drugs, which come to think of it…

Listen: Loose Fit

DJ Shadow | Endtroducing… (1996) – This album might not sound much like Disco, but the beat-splicing used here is an innovation introduced by Disco DJs in the early 70′s. Without the pioneering spirit of jocks like Francis Grasso, hip-hop would sound a whole lot different, and albums like Entroducing… might not be possible.

Listen: Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt

Royksopp | Melody A.M. (2001) – Electronica as a whole owes a major debt to Disco, but within that genre certain albums stand out as particularly retro in scope. Melody A.M. for example, is light as air, but driven by percolating beats that would have made John Travolta shake his groove thing.

Listen: Eple

Metro Area | Metro Area (2002) – Disco minus lyrics equals Metro Area.

Listen: Dance Reaction

Hercules And Love Affair | Hercules And Love Affair (2008) – Unapologetically wearing its disco influences on its sleeve, this is party music for a new century. The backbeat is strictly electronica, but the attitude is all Disco, minus the troublesome cliches.

Listen: Blind

*****

And ten more…

Grandmaster Flash | The Official Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash
Various Artists | The Best Of Enjoy! Records
George Michael | Faith
Dead Or Alive | Youthquake
M/A/R/R/S | Pump Up The Volume (12″ single)
New Order | Technique
Primal Scream | Screamadelica
A3 | Exile On Coldharbour Lane
Mylo | Destroy Rock & Roll
LCD Soundsystem | LCD Soundsystem

Stayin’ Alive: How Disco Survived Demolition

“One revolution is like one cocktail, it just gets you organized for the next.” – Will Rogers

“I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.” – Hunter S. Thompson

*****

Disco Demolition Night took place 30 years ago today at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The brainchild of WLUP DJ Steve Dahl and White Sox promotion man Mike Veeck, this gimmick – which encouraged fans to bring unwanted disco records in exchange for 98 cent admission to the ballpark – took place between games of a doubleheader between the White Sox and Detroit Tigers. The offending records were blown up in the outfield, but the blast ripped a huge chunk from the outfield grass and started a small fire, hundreds of fans stormed the field and tore out the bases and pitching rubber, and the second game was eventually forfeited to the Tigers (no American league team has forfeited a game since). It’s no stretch to say that Disco Demolition Night was the most disastrous promotion in the history of baseball.

Some have cited the evening as the final nail in Disco’s coffin, and Dahl himself has claimed that July 12th, 1979 was “the day that disco died.” But Disco didn’t die in the outfield grass at Comiskey Park on that chaotic evening – it was already losing sales, and in the process of splitting itself off into two different genres which are still going strong today. Here are five reasons why Disco survived its demolition, and lives on:

1) Music genres don’t die, they mutate. No genre is built to last for 20 years – popular music by its very nature is ever-changing – so to suppose that Disco was some vampire that needed to have a stake driven into its heart is just promotional bluster. The innovations of Disco DJs in the New York clubs would inspire and inform the technique and sound of both hip-hop and electronica, two genres which have themselves mutated multiple times since the 80′s. Music is a many headed hydra – when it’s cut off at one point, it grows in many new and different directions. To his credit, Dahl has backtracked from some of his earlier statements, and seems to regard the incident as little more than a joke. “[Disco] was a fad, and it was probably on its way out, but [DDN] hastened its demise,” he told Keith Olbermann on the 25th anniversary of the event. “I don’t want to take credit for killing it.”

2) Disco has actually aged well. I love artists who wade into the fray for a social cause, or risk their career (or at least a portion of their audience) on behalf of a political movement, but songs tied to current events age at approximately the same speed as milk. Neil Young’s ‘Let’s Impeach The President’ was a bold, invigorating musical statement two years ago, but now it sounds like ancient history. Meanwhile Donna Summer, KC & The Sunshine Band, Disco Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes, and their Disco brethren still – and always will – sound like a dance party. And who, besides a Chicago White Sox fan, doesn’t love a good dance party?

3) The Midwest wasn’t exactly a Disco hotbed. Steve Dahl thinks he hastened Disco’s demise, but did he really convince even one true Disco fan that the music actually sucked, or was he preaching to a very stoned choir? On Disco Demolition Night, even as Sox fans were doing their small part in helping their team to a fifth place finish, I guarantee that crowds of people were dancing their asses off in discos all over NYC. Disco just wasn’t built for the Midwest of the 1970′s, and people in that part of the country weren’t going to warm to it (at least until it reappeared as House Music in the mid-80′s). Let’s just say that Disco didn’t really catch fire in the Midwest until July 12th, 1979, so DDN represented more of a regional movement than a national barometer.

4) Memories outlive fads. Musical allegiances aren’t based on current Billboard charts, they’re based on life experiences. What you’re doing when you hear a particular song can effect how you hear that tune for the rest of your life. I was 10 years old when Disco Demolition Night took place, and at that point I’d been enjoying Disco for about three years – when it faltered as a commercial proposition, it didn’t die in my heart. Popular music changed and I started listening to other things (it always does, and I always do), but Disco will always be there for me in the form of KC & The Sunshine Band’s Part 3 & More, the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack and other favorites. And all it takes to bring music to life is one avid listener…

5) Disco speaks a universal language. “Disco is just jitterbug,” claimed Fred Astaire. Which was his way of saying that dance music is as much about the dancing as the music, and regardless of what you call it, people have been doing it for ages. Disco was also one of the most democratic forms of music – if people weren’t responding to it by dancing, it wasn’t going to be a hit. According to none other than Barry White, “Disco deserved a better name, a beautiful name because it was a beautiful art form. It made the consumer beautiful. The consumer was the star.” This consumer-first culture was carried forward by hip-hop’s breakdancers and electronica’s rave scene, but the spirit of Disco lives on wherever there’s a dancefloor full of people working up a sweat and putting a long week behind them.

*****

Watch the local Chicago coverage of Disco Demolition Night:

*****

Check out ESPN’s coverage of the 30th anniversary of DDN.

Magic Moment: Breakfast At Sulimay’s

What happens when a trio of sharp Philadelphia senior citizens – Joe, Ann, and Bill – review the latest releases from contemporary artists like Young Jeezy, T.I., Yo La Tengo and Raphael Saadiq? Breakfast At Sulimay’s, an online series set in a Philly breakfast joint, provides the answer every week. In this episode, the gang review new albums by Wilco and Dirty Projectors. “I won’t be whistling that tune…” is just one of the many opinions expressed in this great series…

Click here to watch the whole series.

Bad Apple: Let’s Get Lost

[Today: The ghost of Chet Baker...]

In general I’m a big fan of Chet Baker’s music. Most everything he made before 1970 is worth a spin, and although his stuff with strings is a little trying, his recordings with Gerry Mulligan rank as some of the greatest music ever preserved on tape. But by 1987, when much of this music was recorded, he was spent both musically and physically. Listening to these songs is a grueling experience for anyone, but particularly for a Baker fan who knows what he sounded like in the 50′s and 60′s and can weigh how much his skills had deteriorated in the intervening decades.

Chet Baker Sings And Plays From The Film “Let’s Get Lost” is a selection of songs from a 1989 documentary that follows Baker during the last years of his life and juxtaposes that footage with images of his younger self. Baker was a longtime heroin addict, and by the 1980′s his personal habits had taken an obvious toll on his music and appearance – by the time these songs were recorded, he looked ravaged by time, and could barely carry a tune. ‘Moon & Sand (Motivo di Raggi di Luna)’ is a slurred mess, ‘For Heaven’s Sake’ sounds like an inebriated and unskilled Chet Baker impersonator (although his trumpet work on this song is the highlight of the album), and the rest veers between sloppy and sleepy.

I’ve not seen the accompanying documentary, so perhaps I’m missing the visual context that gives this music its purpose. Director Bruce Weber was responsible for all the iconic black and white 50′s photos of Baker that have helped shape his pretty-boy jazz legend. Weber was reportedly interested in contrasting the young, handsome Baker with the scarred mess that he’d become. Cinematically that’s all well and good, but musically it’s a big fat downer. Baker’s horn doesn’t sound bad, but his voice – not great to begin with – is beyond shot, and unfortunately he sings on almost every song here. And while tracks like ‘Blame It On My Youth’ have a certain poignancy that would serve as excellent anti-drug messages, I can’t imagine Let’s Get Lost is anybody’s idea of a good time.

Buried Treasure: Run For Your Life

[Today: Three minutes of rock & roll perfection...]

The Raw Meat is less than a footnote in the history of rock – this group enjoyed a brief residency at the Cheetah in NYC, and released one lone single before breaking up just weeks before a scheduled appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Their single – ‘Funky Humpback’ b/w ‘Run For Your Life’ – features a pretty forgettable A-side, but ‘Run For Your Life’ is a savage, funked up piece of raw soul that had me thinking I recognized the lyrics, checking Google, and then exclaiming “THIS IS A BEATLES SONG?!?”

This sounds like what might have resulted if Captain Beefheart gobbled speed, decided to emulate Otis Redding, and packed off to Memphis to record with the Stax/Volt horns. It takes the psychotic heart of this Beatles tune – which is masked by their Fab Four charm – and turns it loose, with great blasts of horns, a fierce backbeat, and a frontman who sings like 50 miles of dirty gravel road. The Raw Meat approached this tune as if they had nothing to lose – and indeed they didn’t – making it one of the great Beatles covers of all-time. TRM didn’t just anticipate punk with this track, they created a punk/funk/rock/soul hybrid that still sounds miles ahead of any record that will be released next week.

The 45 is the great rock equalizer, and even though they never released a full-length album, for 3 solid minutes, The Raw Meat stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Elvis Presley, Otis Redding, James Brown, The Stones, The Stooges or any other ground-breaking, exciting performer of the last 50 years. Really great singles ride an ascending arc of excitement that takes you up & up & up and leaves you exhausted, spent, broke, in the gutter with your ears blown out of your head, and ready to put the needle back and do it all over again. ‘Run For Your Life’ is such a kick in the groin that one can’t help but wonder what might have happened if this group had stuck together long enough to play Ed Sullivan. For one song at least, The Raw Meat was the greatest band in the world, so maybe it’s best to just leave it at that…

Listen: Run For Your Life

Masterpiece: Done By The Forces Of Nature

[Today: The Jungle Brothers go their own way...]

“But is hip-hop really music?” my mother-in-law Judy asked me over cocktails last August. Coming from anyone else, this would be a thinly veiled jab, a comment that hip-hop was most definitely not music. But my mother-in-law is a good egg, and not the judgmental sort, so from her it came as a genuine inquiry. Perhaps she’d been misjudging hip-hop because she was viewing it within the context of music, while this was some other kind of art altogether. I laughed and assured her that hip-hop was indeed music, but what I really wanted to do was drop the needle on the Jungle Brothers’ Done By The Forces Of Nature.

This 1989 album is a showcase for everything that’s right about hip-hop: thoughtful lyrics, clever rhymes, positive vibrations, smart samples, and good humor. Absent from its grooves are knuckle-headed misogyny, violent imagery, gratuitous cursing, and lame skits. The Jungle Brothers’ tunes live in a different universe from the typical rap topics – ghettos, guns and hos – and instead deal with subjects such as black pride, hard work, vegetarianism, house music and belly dancers. This is an upbeat joyride through real black consciousness, minus the stereotypes, and these tunes are driven by an outstanding collection of funky samples. Done By The Forces Of Nature is less frenetic than the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, but both albums clearly came from an era when sampling old records was a low-cost, at-will proposition, and both artists exquisitely pillaged the past to create something undeniably new.

‘What U Waitin’ 4?’ was selected by VH1 as the 88th greatest hip-hop song of all-time, but it’s hard to think of many tunes in any genre that are better than this. There are at least twelve different infectious grooves embedded within the song, which is an open invitation to get down and boogie. ‘Feelin’ Alright’ pays tribute to the joys of a two-month paid vacation in Africa, and ‘Acknowledge Your Own History’ is a non-preachy primer on the typecasting of American history. Appropriately enough for a rap album named after a line in the Bhagavad Gita, Done By The Forces Of Nature sold just 27,000 copies on release. But 20 years later it remains one of the freshest, funkiest, smartest albums on the market – proof positive that hip-hop has an intellectual pulse and actually qualifies as music.

Listen: What U Waitin’ 4?

Listen: Feelin’ Alright

Doubleshot Tuesday: Masters Of War/War Pigs

[Today: Death of a war pig...]

“But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.”

- Bob Dylan, ‘Masters Of War’

*****

Robert S. McNamara, the longest-serving Secretary of Defense in the history of the United States, died yesterday at age 93. My feelings on this topic were drolly summed up by a friend’s FaceBook update, which read: “ROBERT McNAMARA DEAD AT 93. ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG.” McNamara was one of the chief architects of the Vietnam war, but in recent years he’d struck a tone of remorse and apology about the way that war was handled – most notably in Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning 2003 documentary Fog Of War. McNamara admitted that he had underestimated the fortitude of the North Vietnamese army and overestimated the general threat of Communism. He was a man haunted by the failure of the war and the death of 58,000 American soldiers under his watch.

One of those dead was my uncle Donnie – by all accounts a popular, outgoing guy who was quietly mourned throughout my extended family. I never knew Don, but a 5×7 black & white photo of him in military dress sat in a frame in the living room of our little house on Piedmont St. I looked at his forever-young face almost every day through my middle school and high school years, and wondered what he was about. But photos are a poor substitute for flesh and blood, and trying to get a sense of him – through a few glowing adjectives from my mom and aunts – was like chasing water down the drain. He was gone, and all the talking in the world wasn’t going to bring him back.

So you’ll excuse me if I don’t shed any tears at the passing of McNamara, a man David Halberstam piercingly described as one of The Best And The Brightest. His bumbling in Vietnam led to the pointless deaths of fine young men all across this country, and the draft system devised by his defense department spread that pain evenly throughout every city and town in America. Bob McNamara was worse than diabolically evil, he was powerfully incompetent, and my only regret is that he had but one life to give for his sins against this country. Unfairly, he died peacefully in his sleep at age 93, after sending tens of thousands of kids to a violent, premature end. I for one refuse to let this butcher pass quietly…

Listen: Masters Of War [Bob Dylan]

Listen: War Pigs-Luke’s Wall [Black Sabbath]

A Day At The Flea VIII

The P and I spent part of our holiday weekend at the local flea market. Here’s some of what we came away with…

Freddie King | Let’s Hide Away and Dance Away

Ray Charles | The Blues Featuring Ray Charles

Freddy Fender | Before The Next Teardrop Falls (Spanish Series)

Lenny Bruce | The Law, Language, And Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce | Fantasy Promo Album

Ella Fitzgerald & Billie Holiday | At Newport

Cootie Williams & Rex Stewart | Cootie & Rex In The Big Challenge

Kool & The Gang | Greatest Hits!

Bud Shank Quartet With Bob Cooper | Jazz At Cal-Tech

Roberto Clemente | Memorial Album

Woody Guthrie | Archive Of Folk Music

Stan Kenton | Cuban Fire!

Various Artists | Phil Spector’s 20 Greatest Hits

Robert Francis Kennedy | A Memorial

El Cerrito 78rpm Record Swap Meets | 1981 poster

4 Quintessentially American Albums

With apologies to Betsy Ross, here are four quintessentially American albums…

The Black Crowes | Amorica

4 adjectives: organic, grooving, stoned, horny

Listen: High Head Blues

Johnny Cash | America: A 200-Year Salute In Story And Song

4 adjectives: proud, tough, resilient, god-fearing

Listen: Ragged Old Flag [from the compilation Life]

Sly & The Family Stone | There’s A Riot Goin’ On

4 adjectives: angry, armed, revolutionary, buzzed

Listen: Thank You For Talkin’ To Me Africa

Outkast | Stankonia

4 adjectives: articulate, funny, funky, stylish

Listen: B.O.B.

*****

HAPPY 4th OF JULY!!!

Buried Treasure: The Black Light

[Today: Castles made of sand...]

From sea to shining sea, America is a vast tapestry of cultures and values. The four corners of this country often seem to have little in common besides the flag that flies overhead, but for my money it’s the breadth and difference of opinion that makes the United States so formidable. And America is only becoming more colorful – the US Census Bureau projects that by 2042, whites will no longer constitute a majority of the US population. This shifting demographic landscape invites speculation about what “American music” really sounds like, and a quick glance at the stats shows that by the middle of this century, it will probably sound a lot less like The Beach Boys and a lot more like Calexico.

This Tucson, AZ-based group is comprised of ex-Giant Sand members Jon Convertino and Joey Burns – along with an ever-rotating cast of musicians – and named for a border town that sits on the California side of Mexico. Through a hybrid of Mariachi trumpets and guitars, twangy rock, and found sounds, their music captures the great open spaces of the American southwest. Burns has playfully described Calexico’s sound as “Ambient Mariachi Death Rock”, and that joke probably gets closer to the crux of their sound than reams of critical analysis could. The history and mystery of Mexico runs deep within the grooves of The Black Light, and it’s an album of non-stop, shimmering motion.

From a lonely train whistle, ‘Minas de Cobre (For Better Metal)’ builds into a Mariachi foot-stomper that’s punctuated by a squadron of spicy trumpets. The instrumental ‘Gypsy’s Curse’ is as foreboding as its title implies, and ‘The Ride (Pt II)’ puts the top down for a spin through the “the neon hub of downtown.” These songs connect together into a loose concept album about being on the run in the Southwest, but what really ties this music together is an atmosphere of lovely, sprawling decay. The Black Light is a luxurious, multi-hued castle built from grains of desert sand – a structure that represents the future sound of America.

Listen: Minas de Cobre (For Better Metal)

Listen: Gypsy’s Curse

Listen: The Ride (Pt II)