Microphone Fiends

Youth Music and Youth Culture

Tricia Rose, Andrew Ross, Tricia Rose, Andrew Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135208400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Microphone Fiends, a collection of original essays and interviews, brings together some of the best known scholars, critics, journalists and performers to focus on the contemporary scene. It includes theoretical discussions of musical history along with social commentaries about genres like disco, metal and rap music, and case histories of specific movements like the Riot Grrls, funk clubbing in Rio de Janeiro, and the British rave scene.

The Dance

Continuum

In the Empire of the Beat

Discipline and Disco

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Walter Hughes

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Few forms of popular culture receive the kind of opprobrium that has been lavished on disco music since its emergence in the seventies. Although innovations in American popular music, especially those associated with dancing, sex and African-Americans, usually provoke harsh criticism at first, most eventually achieve recognition and admiration. Jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, reggae and now rap all have not only devoted listeners but intellectual defenders; conspicuously missing from this canon, however, is disco. Even at the height of its popularity, it was widely condemned, most vociferously by the admirers and consumers of popular music themselves. Today, many years after its supposed “death” at the end of the seventies, the mere memory of disco provokes from many people a vehement dismissal of it as an affront and an embarassment; moreover, musical styles that suggest the vital continuity of disco into the present, such as house music, suffer from guilt by association.

The intensity of this hostility and its peculiar rhetoric result, I would like to argue, from the enduring association of disco with male homosexuality, a link best demonstrated by the terse and ubiquitous critique that appeared on T-shirts and bumper stickers during the late seventies: “DISCO SUCKS.” But even the subtler critiques of disco implicitly echo homophobic accounts of a simultaneously emerging urban gay male minority: disco is “mindless,” “repetitive,” “synthetic,” “technological” and “commercial,” just as the men who dance to it with each other are “unnatural,” “trivial,” “decadent,” “artificial” and “indistinguishable” “clones.” Nor is the association of disco and gay men only a hostile construction; the rare apologist for this style of music, such as Richard Dyer in his 1979 essay “In Defense of Disco,” likewise associated it with the gay “subculture” that alone seemed to regard it with unabashed affection.¹ The 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, the exception that proved the rule, was an overdetermined attempt to heterosexualize disco by showing that white working-class males who harass homosexuals and rape women could dance to it, as long as it was performed not by the African-American divas preferred by gay men, but by a trio of Australian falsetti.

Historically, disco music was one element in the post-Stonewall project of reconstituting those persons medically designated “homosexuals” as members of a “gay” minority group, and of rendering them individually and collectively visible. As such, it contributed to the construction of one specific but highly publicized sector of the developing “gay community,” urban gay males, a construction assiduously pursued both by the mass media and by the urban gay males themselves. I would like to address the instrumentality of disco in this identifying process by posing the following question: just what is it about disco music that enables men to dance with each other and so represent their “sexual identity” to society? The answer I would like to propose is that disco is less a decadent indulgence than a disciplinary, regulatory discourse that paradoxically permits, even creates a form of freedom.

If disco is a form of discipline, it resembles many of the other salient aspects of urban gay male culture, such as bodybuilding, fashion, sadomasochism and safe sex. As it has developed in major American cities, gay male identity derives to a great extent from a series of practices that combine pleasure with the discipline of the self.² One significant moment of gay identification might therefore be the realization that the policing and regulation to which homosexuality is subject in our society are themselves erotic practices, practices that may be claimed for one’s own pleasure rather than being left to parents, policemen, psychiatrists, fagbashers, priests and senators from North Carolina. This moment, when one seizes from these others the power of constructing homosexuality, and usurps the pleasure attendant on this exercise of power, is a moment staged in the disco nightly. By submitting to its insistent, disciplinary beat, one learns from disco how to be one kind of gay man; one accepts, with pleasure rather than suffering, the imposition of a version of gay identity.³

Disco, as I will speak of it today, is not only a genre of music and a kind of dancing, but the venue in which both are deployed; it is, as its name suggests, site-specific music, the music of the discotheque. The name also defines it as music that is technologically reproduced, “on disk,” not performed. As long as people go out to clubs and dance to recorded music, therefore, disco lives, even if it is never “live.” This definition dispels the rumors of disco’s “death” in the early eighties; disco is electronic dance club music and as such it may be revived by infusions of rock, new wave, punk, Hi-NRG, hip hop, house, and techno-rave, but it nevertheless retains its generic continuity. Revival is both its project and its method. For urban gay men, “disco” is where you dance and what you dance to, regardless of the technicalities of musical innovation and evolution.

But these definitions also evoke the rhetoric of the critical attack on disco: dance music cannot be serious music because it speaks to our bodies, not to our minds or aesthetic sensibilities; it is commercially produced for consumption in an urban environment; it abandons the inspired composition or improvisation of the singer or instrumentalist in favor of a slick, overproduced studio product; all of which leads to what disco defender Brian Chin calls “the classic lie” that “disco kill[ed] ‘real’ music.”⁴ Whatever aesthetic evaluation one makes of disco, one must understand that its importance to the formation of gay male identity lies precisely in those characteristics which are most often decried in this way as musically murderous.

Foremost among these is the beat. Disco foregrounds the beat, makes it consistent, simple, repetitive. The origins of disco music have been traced by house historian Anthony Thomas to late sixties DJs in mostly gay, black clubs, who spliced together the faster soul songs into a continuous dance “mix” that provided a predictable, unbroken rhythm conducive to a long spate of dancing.⁵ As Vicki Sue Robinson says in an early hit, disco “turns the beat around, turns it upside down.” This troping and inversion of the beat makes it the dominant element in the music, and attributes to it the irresistibility that is disco’s recurrent theme. As the lyrics of disco songs make clear for us in a characteristically redundant way, the beat brooks no denial, but moves us, controls us, deprives us of our will. Dancing becomes a form of submission to this overmastering beat.

The oft-noted vacuity of the lyrics of disco songs is itself a part of the medium’s message; they usually strive only to translate the rhetoric of the beat into simple imperatives: “Got to keep on dancing, got to keep on making me high”; “My body, your body, everybody work your body”; “Come on come on get busy, do it, I want to see you party.” Often these lyrics become little but counting, a repetitive enumeration that signifies only a precipitancy of succession without teleology or terminus (“five, four, three, two, one, let’s go” or “one, two, three, shake your body down”). Language is subjugated to the beat, and drained of its pretensions to meaning; almost all traces of syntax or structure are abandoned, reducing language to the simplest sequential repetition, a mere verbal echo of the beat itself.

This emptying out of language parallels the refusal of narrative structure in the song overall. There is rarely an identifiable direction, progression or climax in disco music; the prolongation of its own continuity is its only end. The mixing of the music by the producer and the remixing of it by the club DJ shatter, rebuild, and reshatter any architectonics a disco song might ever have possessed, making it difficult to identify its beginning or end. In the discotheque, the “disco-text” strives to shake off all remnants of its own textuality, to become pure, unconstructed, undifferentiated discourse, this purity being another expression of its unmediated power to stimulate dancing.

The process of dissolving musical, linguistic and narrative structures that disco dramatizes reflects a similar unmaking of the artist. Critics point out the hopelessness of identifying the actual creator of a disco song: is it the composer, the lyricist, the singer, the producer, the arranger or the DJ? To an unprecedented degree, disco mystifies its authorial origins, as we see in the obscure collective names given to disco “groups” (such as Hues Corporation, Machine, or Black Box) or in performers such as the Village People or Shannon, who are patently the “creations” of their producers. One is encouraged to entertain the alarming fantasy that disco music is nothing but a beat generated, recorded and broadcast entirely by machines, a rhythmic signifying chain that may link any number of people on its way from the recording studio to the dance floor, but that originates with no one and arrives nowhere in particular.

These are some of the ways in which disco represents itself as literally disconcerting. It thereby allows the gay man’s dissenting existence, precisely by enacting the destruction of the socialized self represented in conventional cultural products by language, narrative structure and authorial control...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Histories and Futures
• Locating Hip Hop
• The Dance Continuum
• Rock, Rituals and Rights
• Contributor Notes