You Should Be Dancing
Rediscovering Disco in the Brat Era
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Brat Summer has come and gone, and as winter now approaches, we lie in its denouement. As the internet narrative goes, 2024 was a year of mindless revelry, a departure from the moralism and anxiety of the early 2020s COVID era, and the music to match this mood was Charli XCX’s Brat.
Of course, Brat did not fall out of a coconut tree; it exists within the context of all that came before. A similar “Brat Summer”-esque cultural narrative was painted of a much longer and more significant dance music era a half-century ago. The disco of the late 1970s was understood as a reaction to the high-mindedness of the rock-centric 1960s. Musically, the hyper-pop of Brat (like all dance music) also descends from the innovations of disco, particularly Donna Summer’s 1977 hit “I Feel Love”.
But the comparisons end there. Contrary to disco’s perception in its heyday as being hedonistic, nihilistic, vapid, and commercial, disco music is remarkably complex and passionate. Brat, despite its merits, is a pale imitation.
Disco songs can be divided into a few main themes. Of course, there are the songs that are all about fun, lighthearted celebration (think: “Let’s Groove,” “The Hustle,” “September,” “YMCA,” “Night Fever,” “You Should Be Dancing,” “Disco Inferno,” etc.). These are the most well-known disco hits today, partially due to their continued presence in grocery stories and children’s animated films.
But most disco songs are about much more than mere “fun”; they are about eroticism, romance, and city life.
I FEEL LOVE: ROMANCE AND EROTICISM IN DISCO
Disco took soul music (with its roots in America’s black communities following the Great Migration), sped it up, and then brought it to nearly every nightclub in the country. The best way to understand disco and its soul origins is to listen to “Love Hangover” by Diana Ross. The song starts as a smooth Motown ballad. Then, two-and-a-half minutes in, the tempo accelerates, the drums attack with a four-on-the-floor beat, and an infectious bassline takes over. An ecstatic Ross repeatedly sings “I don’t need no cure” like an incantation. Disco is born.
Disco serves as proof of the power that can come with subtle eroticism.
In “Love Hangover,” we’re never told what a “love hangover“ is, and the song is more powerful for it.
In “I Don’t Know If It’s Right”, the singer Evelyn King questions whether she should give into her lover’s attempts at seduction. The music matches the lyrics: the song has no ultimate climax, only a teasing that subsides as the hesitant words “I don’t know if it’s right” fade into a whisper. There is so much tension and frisson in the song because sex is portrayed as an act of import, rather than being purely physical and casual.
There is a stark difference between the approach found here and in, say, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Bed Chem,” which revels in winking ironic frivolity rather than sincerity.
Carpenter recently drew attention for simulating oral sex at one of her concerts, triggering at least a day’s worth of Twitter discourse. Some people were mildly amused by the performance, but few were genuinely scandalized or aroused by it; the general consensus is that she does these sex acts “for the girls.”
But how can a pantomimed act on a phantom man be “for the girls”? This is only possible when sexual expression is totally divorced from the actual objects of sexual desire. Carpenter is pretending to physically pleasure a man, but she is actually pleasuring her female fanbase. Even when a man is actually physically present during these types of displays, it makes little difference. In 2013, Miley Cyrus famously twerked on Robin Thicke at the VMAs, but no one cared about the chemistry between Cyrus and Thicke. The man didn’t matter; the point was that formerly-innocent Miley was twerking. The essence of these moments is the treatment of sex as a mere act, like some sort of meme or viral dance, rather than being about the chemistry and interplay of two human beings.
Disco songs almost never spoke about sex as a mere act. Lyrics were about the love and passion that the singer felt for their partner; the act was implied, at most.
Other disco hits like “Don’t Leave Me This Way” and “Rockin’ Chair” similarly ooze with sexuality. Love is portrayed as liberating, and its lack as a sort of prison or death. But to many today, these songs would barely register as erotic. In our numb, nuance-blind, porn-sick culture, sexuality must be explicitly depicted through pantomiming and the naming of body parts.
Disco songs are also incredibly romantic in a way that would now unfortunately read as corny and passé. A stellar example of this is “Ain’t Nothing Gonna Keep Me From You” by Teri Desario.
The listener is lured into the song with an ever-growing melange of instruments. It begins with a vivacious drum beat, followed by electric guitar, bongos, piano, bass guitar, and a string orchestra, all operating in polyphony. Then, an entire minute into the song, the violins soar and the light, airy vocals finally arrive. DeSario’s high-pitched, girlish voice at moments sounds almost trembling, which adds to the vulnerability and tenderness of the performance. Just when the song reaches its peak, there is a key change, followed by a nearly two-minute instrumental interlude, and then one final chorus.
The lyrics are powerful, suitable even for a ballad, and yet it still somehow blends in perfectly with the intoxicating bass lines and percussive pulsations of the music.
DeSario sings:
“I confess, I don't wanna let you go / And I'm burning for the love / That you don't show me anymore
And all of the dreams that we whispered about / They went into my heart and they never came out / And a love like this can die if we don't let it grow”
This theme of a woman expressing her enthrallment by a man is notably featured in other disco classics like “Heaven Must Have Sent You,” by Bonnie Pointer," “If I Can’t Have You” by Yvonne Elliman, "Last Dance” by Donna Summer,” and “The Boss” by Diana Ross. (In defiance of the concurrent feminist wave, Summer sings “I need you, by me, beside me, to guide me / To hold me, to scold me, cause when I’m bad, I’m so, so bad,” while Houston sings “Don't you understand, I'm at your command?”. To top it off, Diana Ross’s “The Boss” tells the story of a self-assured, independent girlboss whose life is turned upside down by romance, singing “Love taught me who was the boss”).
Much has been made of men’s objectification of and lack of respect toward women in 21st century music, but women’s music has become similarly unaffectionate. (This is particularly relevant to mention when discussing dance pop, where female vocalists reign supreme, due in part to their higher vocal range which allows them to soar above the bassline).
Most men today have never heard any woman tell any real or hypothetical man a sentence like “Heaven must have sent you.” Instead, female artists sing boastfully about how much men like them (“Espresso”), or how men are embarrassing (“Please Please Please”), or how men screw them over (the entire oeuvres of Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo). The closest any female song within the past decade has come to praising men has seemingly been “Good Looking” by Suki Waterhouse.
Camille Paglia (who loved disco for its hypnotic bass lines and declared herself a “great disco queen”) has often lamented the hollow nature of romance and sexuality present in contemporary pop culture. One key element of this is the fact that many women just don’t really like men.
The happy and successful heterosexual woman feels tender and maternal toward men—but this has been completely lost in our feminist era. Now women tell men, you have to be my companion and be just like a woman; be my best friend, and listen to me chatter. In other words, women don't really like men anymore -- they want men to be like women.
Whereas women previously had a deeply-embedded understanding of men as distinct from themselves, and thus felt a maternal impulse toward them which was channeled into a healthy eroticism (as is found in romantic disco lyricism), many women today respond to male rowdiness and aggression with either a hollow effort at imitation or with disdainful, moralistic scolding.
DIGGING UP DISCO’S ETHNIC ROOTS
The passion of disco music is inseparable from the genre’s cultural origins. Disco was the soundtrack of ethnic urbanites in the short, gritty period between white flight and gentrification.
Whereas 2010s electropop (which has since acquired its own nostalgic sheen) is largely rootless, 1970s disco is rooted in a distinctive ethnic and geographical lineage, descending from the blues of the rural South’s Black Belt through the funk and soul of the mid-century city.
English rock critic Nik Cohn, author of the iconic early disco article “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” (the inspiration for the iconic 1977 disco film Saturday Night Fever), noted that “the [disco] craze had started in black gay clubs, then progressed to straight blacks and gay whites and from there to mass consumption—Latinos in the Bronx, West Indians on Staten Island, and, yes, Italians in Brooklyn.”
It is crucial to note that none of these groups got along particularly well at the time (a fact that is illustrated by the Puerto Rican-Italian gang warfare in Saturday Night Fever). But they nevertheless were all united by a working class sensibility and fiery disposition toward life that brought them together on the dance floor and in the recording studio (the most iconic disco duo of all time is the Queen of Disco Donna Summer and her Italian producer Giorgio Mororder).
The Italian appreciation of disco, which is also famously depicted in Saturday Night Fever’s iconic opening sequence of a John Travolta in full guido mode strutting down a Brooklyn street, is part of a long tradition of Italians embracing maximalism. It’s in the same vein as the operas of Verdi and Puccini and the dramatic religious processions and ornate architectural flourishes of Italian Catholic churches.
Electropop, while it has some bangers, is mostly music for a homogenized, gray-blob-ified America. It terminates disco’s cultural lineage and only picks up its beat and technological innovations.
In cities where public life was being gradually uprooted by deindustrialization and a mass exodus to the suburbs, disco provided a new community on the dance floor. Disco is not a fully-sufficient substitute for a fulfilling life and community (as evidenced by the eventual death spirals of countless Studio 54 nightclub patrons), but it’s something.
MAROONED IN THE BURBS
A striking number of disco songs have city life as the main focus of the lyrics.
One example is “There But For the Grace of God” by Machine, a song that belongs in history textbooks as a chronicle of 20th century America.
The song goes:
“Carlos and Carmen Vidal just had a child / A lovely girl with a crooked smile
Now they gotta split 'cause the Bronx ain't fit / For a kid to grow up in
Let's find a place they say, somewhere far away / With no blacks, no Jews and no gays
There but for the grace of God go I [...]
And year after year the kid has to hear / The do's, the don'ts and the dears
And when she's ten years old she digs that Rock 'n' Roll / But Papi bans it from the home [...]
Baby, she turns out to be a natural freak / Gaining weight and losing sleep
And when she's sweet sixteen, she packs her things and leaves / With a man she met on the street
Carmen starts to bawl, bangs her head to the wall / Too much love is worse than none at all”
More than almost any other example, this song clearly outlines the failure of the overprotective suburban nuclear family. Safely nestled away from the spontaneity of the city, the Vidal daughter comes to resent her golden cage and ultimately flees. (Today, the Vidal girl would be more likely to get medicated than flee).
Throughout history, most people weren’t as tightly cooped up as they are today in their car-centric nuclear family dwellings, physically separated from a wider network of peers and extended family. Paglia has noted that “Human beings were never intended to be trapped in a house with just their parents.” The story of Carlos and Carmen Vidal’s child is a case example of what happens when a sensitive and precocious youth feels trapped.
A wide variety of other disco songs touch upon the theme of urban life: “Street Life” by The Crusaders, “Native New Yorker” by Odyssey, and, most famously, “Stayin’ Alive” by The Bee Gees. They all tell the story of the harshness of city life while implicitly celebrating it. Odyssey sings “There you are lost in the shadows, searchin' for someone / To set you free from New York City,” all the while the entire magic of the song lay in its heartfelt descriptions of the streets and subways of that very city.
TRADS AT THE DISCO
Disco reveals countless truths about the complex nature of art in mass society. Disco is anti-moralistic, but also deeply romantic and imbued with meaning. Disco was a nationwide phenomenon, and yet also rooted in the history of distinct ethnic communities. Disco captured the zeitgeist of the late 1970s, and yet it also captures timeless human yearnings.
Sometimes a great musical movement has so much truth and power in it that it pisses everyone off a little bit. Disco is too racy for trads and too trad for liberals and nihilists.
Disco is the sonic and physical expression of a zeal for life: a love of movement, of other people, and of the spontaneous interaction fostered by the city. At the root of disco is an understanding of life as a gift and an openness to transcendence, elements which are missing in self-aware, self-aggrandizing postmodern pop.
Disco was a true movement, for better or worse. It’s rare to find movements today. Instead, we have memes — fleeting, lime green images.
As disco approaches its 50th anniversary, we would do well to remember that before there was “Mean Girls,” there was “Bad Girls.”
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Although it is technically "City Pop" not Disco, Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love" may be the emotionally truest cri de disco coeur on record.
The live version from Tokyo's Nippon Budokan is the absolute shit.