Disco As a Trauma Response
By the end of the 60’s America had been through a lot. The Vietnam War was still raging, Nixon was in the White House and just getting started cooking up his singular brand of corruption, and by all accounts the Civil Rights movement was ending. While the bridge between the 60’s and 70’s saw an end to free love a dark cloud of discontent spread over the country, there was something else on the horizon. Something that sought to cast all worries aside and lay it all out on the Dance Floor. That something started in a loft in New York City.
Many names come up when you look for the origins of Disco Music but one that often gets much of the credit is David Mancuso. Mancuso, after years of travel and nomadic soul searching (not without a healthy dose of hallucinogenic drugs, mind you) returned to his home state of New York with an elevated purpose to connect with people. Taking his love of having friends over to listen to music and the ‘Rent Parties’ common in lower income areas of the city, he started inviting more and more people over to his loft for what grew to be massive dance parties. The loft space, originally designed to hold around 50 people eventually grew to hold close to 300 every month, and the bodies were so tightly packed that one person's dancing would ripple through the crowd like a wave of sweaty, carefree intimacy.
At a time when the Gay Liberation movement was just gaining steam in the wake of the Stonewall Riots, having a place like The Loft and the newly reborn ‘Sanctuary’ led by trailblazing DJ Francis Grasso (who took the stuffy old habit of playing the top hits of the day and instead blended an organic playlist based on the moment to moment vibe of the crowd) suddenly there was a new revolution outside of the picket lines, street corners and tucked away dive bars. People from all corners of marginalized America gathered in the spaces to eschew the heavy chains weighing them down day by day to dance to an eclectic blend of music. Mancuso and Grasso would blend the jazz and soul of the day with records from African musicians and the strings of high society classical music in a way that transformed the radio waves and within a few years, every corner of America.
The way the Disco caught fire over the radio, television and movies was something of a fever dream. Soon it wasn’t just the select few attending The Loft and the regulars of Sanctuary who were dancing their worries away, but it was the entire Country. Radio Stations that used to be wall to wall with Rock music were now spinning the mirrored ball and Saturday Night Fever was breaking records in the theaters and in record stores. Disco had hit the Suburbs.
Like any things that burned too brightly, though, the flame soon subsided, and the backlash was swift, mean, and all encompassing. A ‘Disco Demolition Night’ organized by Radio personality Steve Dahl overtook a Major League Baseball game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park and culminated not only in the burning and destruction of untold numbers of Disco Albums and memorabilia but a full-scale riot in an astonishing and historically gross display. While Dahl denies the racist and homophobic component of the ‘Demolition Night’ it's hard to deny the optics of an angry mob of White people violently destroying tokens of an artform created and popularized predominantly by the Gay community and people of color.
Though ‘Disco’ as an artform was officially dead (read murdered) that wasn’t the end of dance music. Over the following decades there wasn’t a musical explosion the size of Disco perhaps until the rise of Rap of the late 80’s and early 90’s, but that doesn’t mean dance music was dead and gone. Rather it receded back into its singular, and sadly, often racialized niche corners of the music world, with genres like the post-punk New Wave of groups like New Order and Depeche Mode, the R&B/Soul of Michael Jackson and pop of Madonna, and the Euro-Dance of groups like Ace of Base. Dance has never died, but rather, segmented to serve those who seek it.
The musical landscape of the world has morphed and shifted quite substantially since the late 60’s and early 70’s. Now, with the advent of streaming and the digital revolution, music is easier to find than ever. While some people get further driven into their separate corners of the digital world, a sudden resurgence of Disco/Dance focused albums has sprouted back into the mainstream. Artists like Jessie Ware are carrying their Disco influences on their sleeve and seeing more success and recognition than ever. The biggest artist in the world, Beyonce, just this year released the best received album of her career with the appropriately titled Renaissance that was inspired head to toe by Dance music.
It isn’t a stretch by any form of imagination to say that the world has gone through some traumatic years, with the pandemic reshaping daily life, economies struggling to regain their footing, and socio-political divides being the harshest in recent memory. It shouldn’t be surprising that the world is looking for something to feel good about and perhaps we’re seeing that need in music once again. Maybe Disco is not only a way we can shake off the trauma and stress of the preceding years, but a way we can finally come together and heal as a world.
At least we can hope.
Something to Dance to
In lieu of any reviews this month I thought I would just keep the dance going and shout-out some artists who are going above and beyond in keeping the world on their feet.
Jesse Ware – I already mentioned her in the article above (along with Beyonce who needs no special shout-out) and a few months back wrote a review of her most recent album That! Feels Good. Every track on this album is a highlight and, like its title, does make you feel good.
Aluna – With her recent solo release MYCELiUM, Aluna (one half of AlunaGeorge) sought to break down the barriers holding her back in the music industry and gather a group of like-minded individuals to build something pure, fun and community minded. Every track here is designed to get you moving and with highlight tracks like ‘Oh, the Glamor’ and ‘Beggin’ you will. The rhythm hits heavy, the synths twinkle and whir, and Aluna’s voice will guide you to a better land.
Amaarae – One of the most critically acclaimed releases of the year, Fountain Baby by Amaarae doesn’t take long to get its hooks into you. Blending Pop, Afro beat, and R&B she bursts forth with some of the catchiest and deepest dance tracks of 2023. With track titles like ‘Sociopathic Dance Queen’ and ‘Sex, Violence, Suicide’ you’re in for something unlike anything else.
The Grasso Playlist
For this Month's playlist I came across a list of tracks that were in heavy rotation at the beginning of Francis Grasso’s (mentioned above) burst onto the DJ scene. As you’ll be able to see in the playlist, his tastes were wide and eclectic but it's really striking in how he would cross blend the tracks in a way that was never done before. Some refer to Grasso as the Godfather of ‘beat matching,’ which is where he would take two tracks of a similar beat and layer them together.
The segment below is from the book Love Saves the Day (Tim Lawrence, 2003), where a great majority of my research came from this month, in which they talk about the revolutionary way Grasso would blend two seemingly disparate genres to get the crowd dancing like their shoes were on fire.
Grasso’s method of mixing was initially less radical than his actual selections. Leaning heavily on radio protocol as well as the practice of other discotheque DJs, he would segue from one record to the next by using his fingertip to grip the non-playing record as the turntable spun underneath. When the outgoing track recited its final phrases he would release his hold, and the two records would overlap for a couple seconds, bleeding into each other and establishing a temporary bridge – or ‘blend’ as it was more frequently described – that maintained the musical flow and helped to generate a hypnotic groove. That groove became virtually seamless if the DJ ‘slip-cued’ between two copies of an extended single in which the recording was pressed up in “two halves” on the A and B-sides of a forty-five.
These were standard tricks of a nascent trade, but, as the reaction from the dance floor became progressively more intense, Grasso set about inventing a technique that would dramatically extend the effect. Using his headphones to their full potential, the DJ started to use his left ear to listen to the incoming selection and his right ear to hear the amplified sound in order to forge an imaginary amalgam that, if everything was in place, could be transformed into sonic reality. “Somewhere in the middle of my head,” says Grasso. “I would make this mix.” The DJ’s most famous permutation layered the Latin beats of Chicago’s ‘I’m a Man’ over the erotic groans of the vocal break in Led Zepplin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” “You really couldn’t dance to the Led Zepplin once it went into that orgasmic tripping stuff, but if you mixed it with the Chicago then you could. Amazingly, the entire break of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ Lasted exactly the same time as ‘I’m a Man,’ so as the ‘I’m a Man’ finished the full song of ‘A Whole Lotta Love’ would come back.”
It’s hard to imagine just how revolutionary this type of mixing was at the time, but it's just as impossible to avoid its seismic impact.
So, this month's playlist takes a chunk of Grasso’s known archives at the time and invites you to imagine what it would be like to spin, swap, blend, and stack these sounds on top of each other to maximize their musical impact. I hope you enjoy!