Keynotes and Plenaries
Melissa Blanco Borelli (Royal Holloway, University of London)
“Put Your Body In It”: Disco, Divas, And Dance Studies
Stephanie Mills’ disco classic, “Put Your Body In It” invites us to get up, free ourselves and just dance. Using these instructions as a point of departure, this presentation will examine how disco ushered in new ways to consider dancing bodies in all of their racialized, gendered, and sexualized complexities. Dance Studies offers the analytical lens to examine the ways in which the practice, performance and pleasure of disco foreground the significance of intersectional alliances on and off the dance floor.
Melissa Blanco Borelli is Senior Lecturer in Dance in the Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests are always interdisciplinary: Dance, critical race theory, black and Latinx cultural production, media, film, popular culture, feminist historiography, performance ethnography and performative writing. She is author of She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (recipient of the de la Torre Bueno Prize for Best Book in Dance Studies, 2016, Dance Studies Association), and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen. Other scholarship has appeared in edited collections Black Performance Theory, The Oxford Handbook of Screendance, Zizek and Performance, and the journals Women and Performance, Brolga, International Journal of Performance and Digital Media, and International Journal of Screendance. She is the incoming Editor for Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies and her guest edited volume on race, nation and screendance for International Journal of Screendance just came out. She was recently awarded an RCUK Newton Fund grant to work with Afro Colombian communities affected by the Colombian armed conflict.
Tim Lawrence (University of East London)
Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and… Disco
Challenging the conventional reading of disco as a genre that defined the 1970s, riled punks and rappers in equal measure, and owed its downfall to corporate exploitation and homophobic opposition, Tim Lawrence argues for it to be understood as a convergent cultural practice rooted in countercultural politics and the melting pot demographics of NYC. Developing an argument sketched out in Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79, he maintains that disco embodied the emergence of a new form of postindustrial creativity that carried the promise of a flexible, cooperative, participatory social democratic settlement. This form of disco suffered its first near-death experience not in 1979, when the national backlash against disco reached its peak, but in 1984, with the setback traceable back to 1975. How come?
SYLVESTER AND DISCO CULTURE: THE ARTIST, ICON, DIVA IN HIS TIME AND IN OURS
Organizer and presider/host: Joshua Gamson (University of San Francisco)
Bringing together scholars, performers, DJs, and artists, this session considers the disco star Sylvester as diva, icon, artist, and person. Sylvester’s life, music and legacy offer an opportunity to think and feel the ways in which disco combined art, fashion, identity, industry, and community; brought forward the tension between realness and artifice; celebrated and troubled blackness, queerness, and gender nonconformity; transformed stigmatized statuses into community on and off the dance floor; and helped to create and sustain a distinct dance music sound.
Malik Gaines (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University)
You Are My Friend: Intimacy and Sylvester’s Disco
Sylvester was best known for his energetic disco hits, though his musical history shows deep engagement with more established musical forms, including soul, rock, and gospel. Those genres offered different expressive approaches and formal structures that allow for the production of intimacy. Traces of these forms can be found in the disco songs, which deliver intimacy to the embodied and sexualized place of disco dancing. Despite his theatricalized dress and non-normative androgyny, and the glam and speed of the disco format, Sylvester uses these black expressive strategies to produce realness. As in the famous song “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real,” that realness is felt in the intimacy. Rather than a subject or object of intimacy, Sylvester’s oeuvre, grounded in black historical terms, animates intimacy as queer relation.
Jason King (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University)
You Are My Friend: Sylvester’s 1979 Living Proof Album as a Document of Social Compassion
In 1979, openly gay black disco artist Sylvester recorded his first live album, entitled “Living Proof,” on a Sunday night in May at the San Francisco Opera House. As a seemingly paradoxical live disco album, the work (alongside Donna Summer’s “Live and More” album) remains a pivotal moment in the evolution of technologized black soulful dance music as well as a spectacular musical document of pre-AIDS forms of radical queer sociality. In particular, the reconstructive musical impulses of Sylvester’s album (most of the songs on the album, even the original tunes, are reworked versions) as well as the stage dynamics, reference democratic forms of intimacy—contact, sociality, ensemblism and collectivity.
Adrian Loving (artist, DJ/ Entrepreneur and Instructor at Georgetown Day School)
Glam Rock Fantasy to Black Futurism: A Portrait of Sylvester in Album Cover Art
This presentation considers the image of Sylvester on album covers as an “artistic portrait” by which aspects of creativity, design and identity are presented. With bold airbrush color, geometric motif and afrocentric iconography, Sylvester is placed prominently into a realm of creative abstraction and introduces notions of futurism in his marketed image. I also trace his evolution of androgyny and glam through his album covers, beginning with the Hot Band and progressing through later versions of his visual and stylistic transitions of hair, makeup and fashion – swerving through gender seamlessly.
Louis Niebur (University of Nevada, Reno)
Menergy: Sylvester and the Creation of the San Francisco Disco Sound
In late 1979, mainstream disco collapsed under its own weight. But in San Francisco between 1979 and 1985, led by Sylvester and a group of gay musicians, producers and labels, disco didn’t die, didn’t suck, and was gayer than it had ever been. Lush, expensive string sections were replaced by cool, synthesized counterpoint. Funky basslines were replaced by robotic, rhythmically steady electronic octaves, but at its heart, this new “High Energy” style, retained the essence of disco. Sylvester’s sensual and soulful falsetto, four on the floor bass drums, off-beat high hats hissing away, chromatic bass lines, and provocatively erotic lyrics; all continued the legacy of disco out of the mainstream and inside America’s gay nightclubs. This paper will examine Sylvester’s transition from Top 40 disco star to underground High-Energy dance club diva, his move to gay-owned Megatone Records, and the role of producers like Patrick Cowley in the creation of the distinctive San Francisco sound.
David McAlmont (vocalist and songwriter)
The Sound of Sylvester
Sylvester Panellist bios:
Malik Gaines is is a writer and artist, a member of the performance group My Barbarian, and Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is the author of Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible and many articles, short essays and interviews about art and performance for journals, magazines, museum publications, and artists’ monographs.
Joshua Gamson is Professor of Sociology and Assistant Dean at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of many articles on culture, social movements, and sexualities and of four books, including The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco.
Jason King, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and the founding faculty member at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. A journalist, musician, DJ and producer, he is a regular contributor to major publications as well as a producer and host at CNN and NPR. He is a member of the founding Hip Hop Council at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the bandleader, producer, songwriter and driving force behind Company Freak, an international dance music collective.
Adrian Loving is a noted contemporary art and music historian, visual artist and DJ/ entrepreneur, and instructor of Visual Art, Film, and Video at Georgetown Day School. His most recent book/video project, Fade 2 Grey, explores the intersection of androgyny, art and fashion with a focus on musicians from the 1980s.
David McAlmont is a celebrated British singer and songwriter.
Louis Niebur is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research explores popular music of the post-war era, including the significance of music to LGBTQ communities, particularly as it has shifted between live music, the jukebox, and the disc jockey in the context of queer spaces.
Roundtable, DISCO: WOMEN AND GIRLS FANTASISE
Chelsea Adewunmi, Sara Jane Bailes, Lesley Model, Flora Pitrolo, Anika Vajagic
Chair: Arabella Stanger
This roundtable discussion explores disco as both catalyst and host for women’s and girls’ practices of fantasy. Taking the categories of ‘disco’ and ‘women and girls’ to be elastic, we think together about the ways in which women and girls have claimed disco cultures (and have been claimed by those cultures in turn) as sites for the production of otherworlds: of dystopias and daydreams. We explore the material spaces, places, sounds, moves, and climates of disco that have played host to feminine, feminist, and womanist practices of the imagination. We wonder whether disco is women’s fantasy or if women are disco’s fantasy and in so doing foreground the ways that fantastical disco women and girls embody, resist or negotiate both the assembled social pressures and the emergent sensory pleasures that play through and around their bodies.
Artists’ works
Refractions In Biography
(performance installation)
Refractions In Biography takes the disco ball as a living, breathing, rotating character that has borne witness to every dance floor and scene across all contexts and points in time. S/he bore bore witness to the advent of disco, its early utopian promises and later on s/he dangled above the empty dance floors of Paradise Garage when casualties in the community began to escalate. S/he hangs above the dance floors of the world today, looking down upon phone screens floating in the dark. S/he is tired, full of secrets and it would be worth your while to see what she has to say.
Scott Caruth is an artist based between Glasgow and Berlin. Recent shows include ‘Cazzate Su Cazzate’ at Glasgow International 2018 and Total Leatherette Perform Linda Di Franco’s ‘My Boss’ , Centre Of Contemporary Arts, Glasgow 2018
(Tell Me Why) THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DISCO
1991, 24:00 minutes, colour, English
Distributor: VTape (Toronto) www.vtape.org
(Tell Me Why) THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DISCO is an often humorous, at times poignant look at the role that disco music has played in the formation of contemporary post-Stonewall gay male identity. The video challenges the notion of disco as merely a ‘leisure activity’ by positing disco as an historically significant cultural and political space. It celebrates gay desire and uses it as a thread to draw the historical lineage between gay movement politics of the late 60’s/early 70’s and more recent gay movement politics around AIDS, mourning the generation of gay men who were on the frontline of first wave of the epidemic.
AWARDS
New Vision Award, San Francisco International Film Festival (1991)
Audience Choice Award, Los Angeles International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (1991)
Best Social Critique Award, Atlanta International Film Festival (1993)
SELECTED SCREENINGS
Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Germany (2018)
This is Not a Love Song, Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2016)
London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, British Film Institute, London, UK (2009)
Crossroads: Interfaces between Music & Contemporary Art, Domus Artium Museum, Salamanca, Spain (2008)
Politics, Resistance & Musical Subculture, Barcelona Museum of Modern Art (2002)
Day Without Art, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (1996)
Day Without Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1996)
European Media Art Festival, Osnabruck, Germany (1992)
San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco (1992)
VideoFest/Berlin Film Festival, Germany (1992)
No More Heroes, Cinematheque, San Francisco (1991)
American Film Institute Video Festival, Los Angeles (1991)
JOHN DI STEFANO is a Canadian-born visual artist / filmmaker, writer, educator and curator, based in Sydney, Australia. He has exhibited internationally since 1985. His work is focused primarily in video/film, installation, photo-based and time-based media, but has also included performance, bookwork, site-specific and public art projects.
Friday and Saturday papers
Chelsea Adewunmi (Princeton University)
Make It Last Forever: Boogie and the Afterglow of Disco
As hard as the Disco Demolition might have tried to kill disco (and the embodied freedoms and intersectional identities it exemplified) on July 12, 1979, disco sustained an afterlife around the world in regional iterations, such as Italo disco, Chicago house music, and Nigerian post-disco. In Harlem, disco’s transfiguration took the form of a new subgenre: boogie. Compared to disco, boogie has a slower, yet still very danceable, BPM, and draws explicitly upon African-American musical traditions (R&B, gospel, and funk), re-grounding the music’s cultural lineage. Coined as a genre by British DJs Norman Jay and Dez Parkes, boogie has a rich trans-Atlantic history, linking the dance scenes of NYC to those of London and Lagos. This talk will examine the international triangulation of boogie from Lagos (Mixed Grill, Chris Mba, and Kris Okotie), London (bands like Central Line and selectors like Norman Jay), and New York (Peech Boys, Mtume, and DJs like Larry Levan). We will look at its origins through a hidden figure in dance music — Leroy Burgess, also known as the king of boogie. As a songwriter, arranger, producer, singer, and keyboard virtuoso, Burgess was a one-man recording machine, recording as part of Black Ivory, the Fantastic Aleems, Convertion, El Bee & Tee, Inner Life, Logg, Phreek, and The Universal Robot Band, with songs that spanned the disco-boogie continuum. As a genre whose iterations kept – and keep — popping up into the future, disco is a tempo and temporality, always yearning, as Inner Life would say, to make it last forever.
Chelsea Adewunmi is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University and a graduate of the Performance Studies program at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. Her lecture, “‘This is for the thousand, thousand Black Back-Ups’: Searching for Lisa Fischer and the ‘Discovery’ of Tina Turner,” a lecture written and delivered jointly with Professor Greg Londe (Cornell) was used as source material for the Oscar-winning film 20 Feet from Stardom. She works as a freelance producer and researcher for documentary film, and makes disco music with Darshan Jesrani under the moniker Cylinder.
Marie Josephine Bennett (University of Winchester)
‘I Bet He Looks Good On The Dance Floor’: Queering/Unqueering John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977)
The storyline for Saturday Night Fever was derived from an allegedly true story by British rock critic Nik Cohn. Entitled ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,’ Cohn’s article first appeared in a 1976 issue of the magazine New York. The narrative centres on an eighteen-year-old from Bay Ridge called Vincent, who works in a hardware store by day, and goes with friends to the 2001 Odyssey disco on Saturday nights. Although Cohn originally stated that the article was based on fact, he admitted twenty years later that the work was fiction. Nevertheless, Saturday Night Fever maintains the spirit of Cohn’s storyline. Both the film and the accompanying soundtrack, with many songs composed by the Bee Gees, were extremely successful.
In this paper, I will analyse two scenes from Saturday Night Fever that centre on the main character, Tony Manero, played by John Travolta. The first shows Manero preparing for a night out at the disco, while the second shows him performing solo to the song ‘You Should Be Dancing.’ I will focus on gaze theories, such as the proposals of Laura Mulvey in her influential article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ which was published in 1975, two years prior to Saturday Night Fever’s release, and also disco/anti-disco discourses, to debate the reading of Tony Manero as queer. I will also discuss queer readings of the Bee Gees, both via a sketch in The Kenny Everett Video Show and references to the group during ‘Disco Demolition Night’ on 12th July 1979.
Marie Josephine Bennett is a PhD Student at the University of Winchester, researching readings of queer performance in post-Production Code Hollywood film musicals (1970-1985). Publications include: ‘People Getting Angry’: The Specials’ Ghost Town (1981) as Political Discourse’ in Roberto Illiano (ed.), Protest Music in the Twentieth Century (2015) and ‘Phoenix Rising: Freddie Mercury’s Legacy and the Fight Against AIDS’ in Jackie Raphael and Celia Lam (eds.), Becoming Brands: Celebrity, Activism and Politics (2017)
Gregory D. Booth (University of Auckland)
Disco, Dancing, Globalisation: Indigeneity, and Class in 1980s Hindi Cinema
Disco was somewhat slow to reach the Indian mainstream, but when it finally appeared in its impact caused one journalist to suggest that it might be a new religion rather than just a musical fad (Ali 1981, 8). In the soundtracks and song scenes of Hindi cinema, this fad lasted through much of the latter 1980s, often uncomfortably. India’s ability to project the popular sound and iconography of the West had improved substantially since 1957, when Hindi cinema made its first attempts at conveying aspects of rock’n’roll. However, in a way that hadn’t happened in 1957, disco was part of a demographic shift of the Hindi cinema audience that proved more problematic, a shift that was both enabled and driven by changes in the Indian media scape and the ongoing nature of the global-local debate.
India’s ‘disco era’, which is to say most of the 1980s, is often described as an especially difficult one for the music of the Hindi cinema, for multiple reasons. This study examines those reasons, showing how the film industry’s partial enthusiasm for, and ability to engage with, Western pop also characterised the cultural tensions inherent in 1980s India and its culture industry. My discussion is framed by Hindi cinema’s first disco song, “Aap jaise koi” from the film Qurbani (Khan 1980) and what I will call its last disco song, “Disco bhangara” that appeared in Gangaa, Jamunaa, Saraswathi (Desai 1988).
Gregory D. Booth is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Auckland and has been engaged in the study of Indian music and culture for more than thirty years. He has published numerous articles and chapters on music, film, industry and culture in South Asia, and is the author of Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios (OUP 2008) and Brass Baja: Stories from the World of Indian Wedding Bands (OUP 2005).
Michael Castelle (University of Warwick)
If Love is the Message, What is the Transaction? On the Downtown Duality of Disco and Finance
Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s was the site of two types of distinctive social spaces as similar as they were antagonistic: both frenzies of humanity in constant motion, with body techniques necessarily attuned to the technological pulse of the present. In one—the trading floors of the Financial District’s New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and American Stock Exchange (AMEX)—traders, brokers, and securities specialists moved not to the steady beat of an amplified kick drum but to the unpredictable, asynchronous flow of market quotes and reported trades on electronic ticker tape; for the other type of (increasingly numerous) floor, dancers, musicians and recreational partiers gravitated weekly on an assortatively aural and sensual basis. I propose to collide these contemporaneous worlds for a multimodal interrogation of both their expected and unexpected resonances: from their organization—close-knit and often membership oriented communities denoted as ‘clubs’ (Welles 1975; Lawrence 2004); to their corporeality (an embodied and cybernetic orientation towards flow (Knorr Cetina and Preda 2007; Crimp and Baltrop 2008); to their socioeconomic dependencies—whether it be a reliance on parasitic middlemen (Gould 2009, Serres 1982), or a dialectical relationship with municipal and federal regulators (Hae 2011; Seligman 1982). Through multicast telecommunications (whether via DJs on specialized radio stations or the “consolidated tape” transmissions of Wall Street), New York’s dense marketplaces soon replicated elsewhere (e.g. the smaller ‘regional’ stock exchanges in Philadelphia and San Francisco, or the disco clubs iterating on playlists from industry magazines like Record World (Aletti 2009)); however, these increasingly real-time indexical relations between markets only strengthened, via network effects (Economides 1996), the flows of participants to the more dominant trading and/or dance floors in New York or London. Finally, I will explain how by the late 1990s, the intertwining of finance, media, data communications, regulatory change, and the concomitant professionalization of the city would forever privilege only those ‘floors’ which could be made digital.
Michael Castelle is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2017. His research combines the history and philosophy of technology with the economic sociology of markets, with additional influences from social theory and anthropological linguistics. His dissertation, “Transaction and Message: From Database to Marketplace, 1970-2000” traced the conceptual formalization and commercialization of both transaction processing and messaging systems for an increasingly digitized and globally interconnected financial industry.
Leon Clowes (University of Huddersfield)
Got Any Gay Music? London’s ‘Anti-Gay’ Queer Clubs 1995-2000
Writing in ‘Gay Left’ magazine in 1979, Dyer situated disco as an expression of flamboyance and resistance quintessential to male homosexual self-identification. Dyer viewed disco’s African-American origination and female singers such as Grace Jones and Diana Ross as embodying resonance of the repression experienced by gay men. Popular music is a central component of any bar and club culture, but there has been a limited number of academic pieces that examine cultures of consumption and production within predominantly gay male social settings. A few researchers do identify what they term as ‘gay music’ (Amico 2001; Aronoff and Gilboa, 2015; Butler 2003; Dickinson 2001; Dyer, 1979). Countering this, this paper sets out to examine how a time-limited sub-subculture disrupted accepted cultural norms of an over-arching hegemonic subculture (the commercial gay scene of Soho) between 1995 to 2000. In particular, I will examine the music and ethos of emergent ‘Anti-Gay’ queer clubs and assert that a primary actor to these ambitions was the conscious subversion of established stereotypes of gay music. London’s ‘Anti-Gay’ queer clubs of the late nineties are a neglected moment in LGBT social and cultural history. Deliberately adopting a punk DIY ethos, an inclusive approach and radical popular music playlists, these ‘Anti-Gay’ queer clubs were alternative LGBT social spaces, an antagonistic antithesis to the aesthetics and identity positioned by Soho’s newly commercial gay scene. I interviewed five DJs to reflect on the impact and differentiation of the music and ethos of ‘Anti-Gay’ queer clubs of the late nineties to assert that a primary actor of agency to realize these reactionary ambitions was achieved through subversion of established stereotypes and inclusion of gay music.
Leon Clowes is a part-time PhD student at University of Huddersfield with a research topic is ‘Burt Bacharach’s (Un)easy Listening: A Model for Musicians from the Middlebrow’. Two forthcoming book chapters in 2018 are due to be part of popular music academic collections published by Bloomsbury Academic and Palgrave Macmillan. The article ‘How can you sing a song if you have no voice?’ was published in Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music, Volume 1, Issue 2 in October 2017.
Inger Damsholt (University of Copenhagen)
’Let the music take control’ Disco, Choreomusicology and the anxiety of ‘Mickey Mousing’
Departing from the notion of ‘Disco as interdiscipline’, the purpose of this paper is to connect the international disco discourse with the discipline of ‘choreomusicology’ as a field of study concerned with the relationship between music and dance. (In a recent publication ‘Identifying ‘choreomusical research’’ I have presented an overview of this field (Damsholt, 2018).) My primary argument is that disco and clubbing represents a cluster of choreomusical practices that is highly valuable to ‘choreomusicology’ in that it represents a form of resistance to an element of other contemporary choreomusical aesthetics which I refer to as ‘the anxiety of Mickey Mousing’. By means of a reference to Auslander’s classic text on ‘the anxiety of simulation’ (Auslander 2006), I am referring to the idea of dance imitating musical gesture as “mimicry also referred to as ”mickey mousing”” (Zallman in Turner 1971:75). In previous research articles I have addressed this power-relationship inherent in choreomusical discourse on western theatrical dancing: ‘the fear of being controlled by music’, or ‘giving in to music’ (Damsholt 2007a & 2012). In this proposed paper I will focus on the relationship between dance and music in disco and clubbing from a choreomusicological perspective highlighting the practice of ‘giving in to the music’. My paper will refer to previous disco studies of my own (Damsholt 2007b & 2011) as well as other disco and clubbing studies. In reference to Lionel Richie’s classic call in All Night Long, my point is that disco and clubbing is about ‘letting the music take control’: eg. it is about ‘call-and-response’ relationships between the DJ and the dancing crowd (Lawrence 2011) and it is about affect in the relationship between drum ’n’ bass music and clubbers who embody it (Hall 2013). A concluding secondary argument of my paper will be that the international community of disco scholarship might benefit from looking into the resources of ‘choreomusicology’ which offers a wide array of methodological tools useful to the description of choreomusical relationships.
Inger V. Damsholt is Associate Professor of Musicology and Dance Studies, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. From 2002-2006 Damsholt was Chairman of the board of the Nordic Forum for Dance Research and as an extension of this work she contributed to the establishment of the transnational and cross-institutional Nordic MA in Dance Studies programme as well as the international research group Dance in Nordic Spaces. In 2016, she was appointed course coordinator of the international BA programme Modern Nordic Arts and Culture at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her primary areas of research include choreomusicology, popular dance, popular music, dance in Nordic spaces, migration and globalisation.
Eliot D’Silva (University of California, Berkeley) and
Andrew Key (University of California, Berkeley)
Partying in the Provinces
Mark Leckey’s short film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), charts the trajectory of British nightlife subcultures through a distorted series of clips of found footage, beginning with disco and culminating in nineties warehouse raves. The film emphasises that the geographic spread of disco and its cultural afterlives in the United Kingdom was not an exclusively urban phenomenon: (post-) industrial towns, suburban redevelopments and housing estates, semi-rural market towns and farmlands were all adopted, subverted and transformed by party subcultures in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Using Leckey’s film as a starting point, this paper will examine what it means for a subculture to emerge and be sustained away from urban centres of cultural production. Looking at examples from disco, rave and happy hardcore, we will explore the class and race dynamics of British free parties which took place in the countryside, as well as the broader socio-political context of the legislative crackdown against these activities: most notably the Criminal Order and Public Justice Act of 1994, which defined music as “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”.
Is holding an illegal rave in a privately owned field just an act of anarchic and hedonistic excess, or could it also be a gesture towards a temporary reclamation of the commons? What kinds of collectivity and communalism emerge in the different relations to nature that are experienced in field raves? Can genres of music that have been largely ignored by academic criticism (happy hardcore, gabber) be convincingly described as an authentically popular working class culture with strong cultural ties to Europe? In what ways did free parties assert a resistance to the populist authoritarianism in the conservative heartlands of the Thatcher years?
Jared Gampel (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Modern Funk as Postmodern Disco
Disco has reemerged in popular culture, but not so much the disco hit parade of the 1970s as the revival of disco’s transformation in the early 1980s—that is, the sound of “boogie.” Over the last ten years, subcultural networks of DJ crews, record collectors, labels, musicians, and parties have sprung up across the United States, Britain, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, and beyond. Perhaps now more than ever, there seems to be an international “scene” constellated around boogie, aptly referred to as modern funk.
While modern funk has largely remained subcultural, there have been significant breakthroughs into the mainstream. Los Angeles’s Dâm-Funk, arguably the most widely recognized figure of modern funk, has collaborated with musicians across the spectrum of popular music from Snoop Dogg and Q-Tip (of A Tribe Called Quest) to Flea (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers). Mayer Hawthorne and Jake One’s Tuxedo just released a single with Zapp, one of the biggest boogie bands from the 1980s whose sound would heavily influence the G-Funk of the 1990s.
What is the cultural significance of modern funk? Is it just another instance of nostalgia for the 80s, the latest genre of popular music’s past to get its postmodern revival? Or does boogie’s recycling and reemergence say something more significant about our musical present? How do participants in the modern funk scene relate to and understand the moment of its musical inspiration? Do musicians see themselves as preserving and being faithful to a musical tradition? Or do they see themselves as innovators, pushing against the musical conventions and sonic boundaries of boogie? Who uses it and how? What are the cultural politics of modern funk?
Jared Gampel is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness Dept. at UC Santa Cruz whose research interests include American popular music, Marxism, postmodernism, and cultural memory. He is also the founder of People’s Disco, a revolutionary socialist dance party based in Santa Cruz, California.
Keith Gildart (University of Wolverhampton) and
Rosalind Watkiss (University of Wolverhampton)
The English Civil (Disco) War 1976-81: Northern Soul, Subculture and Saturday Night Fever
This paper explores disco music and its associated club scene in the West Midlands and North West England. The first part examines the schisms created in the Northern Soul subculture and responses to the disco phenomenon epitomised by the rivalries that developed between the Wigan Casino and clubs that were more receptive to the sounds of the disco scene. The mass popularity of disco in the late 1970s led to the opening of the Wigan Pier New York Disco that symbolised a modern, bright, shiny alternative to the visually nostalgic Casino. This entrenched tensions within the Northern Soul scene and its associated magazines and fanzines on the disco phenomenon. This occurred in the context of de-industrialisation in the mining, cotton and predominantly working class towns where Northern Soul had established a significant presence. Disco provided a soundtrack and soundscape to the everyday lives of working class youths in these years, yet in contrast to the rise of punk in the same period it has received little attention in more general histories of popular music. The second part examines the presentation and consumption of disco in the industrial towns of the West Midlands through a selection of interviews with DJs and disco aficionados. The cinematic release of Saturday Night Fever (1977) was the catalyst for mass consumption and engagement with disco and disco-dancing and this is explored along with the transition from the elitist Northern Soul scene to disco as widespread popular recreation. The paper argues that histories of popular music in Britain have marginalised the impact of disco, often relegating it to a footnote in conventional narratives, where in 1976-80 the primacy of punk remains dominant.
Keith Gildart is Professor of Labour and Social History at the University of Wolverhampton. He has published widely on working-class history and popular culture including Images of England through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock ‘n’ Roll 1955-1976 (Palgrave, 2013).
Rosalind Watkiss-Singleton is Lecturer in History at the University of Wolverhampton. She has published articles on working-class consumption, popular music and romance, and mod culture and Quadrophenia.
Mimi Haddon (University of Sussex)
“Death Disco” not “Death to Disco”: Mainstream Music and the Racialised Body in Post-Punk’s Borrowing from Disco
On June 16, 1979 the music journalist Danny Baker heralded the release of Public Image Ltd.’s new single with the following words in the NME:
“The new Public Image single will be ‘Death Disco,’ and not, as somewhat hopefully reported in another paper, ‘Death to Disco.’ In fact, [PiL’s bassist] believes disco music to be the closest sound to what PiL are doing. Certainly, and believe me, I’d have no bones about stating otherwise were it the case, ‘Death Disco’ has one of the most powerful backlines to be heard this side of Chic.”
Baker’s comments highlight some of the most significant issues surrounding post-punk musicians’ decision to borrow disco’s musical idioms. First, his reference to ‘Death to Disco’ portends the anti-disco rally known as Disco Demolition Night that would take place at Chicago’s Comiskey Park almost exactly a month later. Secondly, his assertion that the single’s title was ‘Death Disco’ and was, in fact, comparable to Chic, attempts to absolve PiL—a white, male post-punk act—from association with this rockist disco backlash. And finally, the recurrence of the word ‘death’ in relation to disco suggests multiple semiotic valences.
This paper reads post-punk’s borrowing from disco through the lens of ‘death,’ taking into account the way this word came to function in the music press as a racialised and anti-commerical code. I therefore propose that in the context of post-punk, ‘death disco’ denotes whiteness, bodily awkwardness, sexual inhibition, and an ironic take on disco’s perceived status as a mainstream genre in the UK in the late 1970s.
Mimi Haddon is a Lecturer in Music here at the University of Sussex and one of the DISCO! Conference organisers. Her research focuses on popular music, specifically the genres of punk, post-punk, and the avant-garde. Her methodology combines archival research with musical analysis and cultural studies to interrogate processes of cultural legitimation in popular culture. She is particularly interested in issues of genre and identity, and is currently working on a book about post-punk—soon to be published with University of Michigan Press.
Alex Jeffery (PhD, City, University of London)
Once Upon a Time in Discoland: How Donna Summer’s Transnational Fairy Tale Took the Concept Album to the Dancefloor
In terms of format, disco is usually characterised as music designed for the single, acting as a force to stretch the single from the three minute pop song to the extended 12” form more suited to the needs and tastes of dancers of New York’s nascent disco culture. Disco as an album format, however, is far more overlooked, despite a significant number disco albums going platinum in the Billboard charts at the end of the 1970s. Surprisingly, the only artist to score more than one number one double album in the 70s was not a rock artist, but Donna Summer, who achieved this with three consecutive double albums between 1978 and 1979.
My paper is concerned with Summer’s first double album Once Upon A Time (1977).- a black retelling of the Cinderella story, in the vein of The Wiz. Once Upon A Time is highly unusual within its genre for the mix of fantasy, melancholy and urban dystopia that unfolds within its ambitious storytelling. It is also significant for exemplifying the transnational nature of disco, as a collaboration between, amongst others, an African-American female singer, and the white European male producer Giorgio Moroder. Using disco concept albums by Summer and others produced at the time, I disentangle these transnational forces, concluding that disco produced in Europe, as opposed to America, exerts a pull towards the longer-form narrative. I argue that it does this by choosing to adapt classic texts and highlighting macro structures that, like progressive rock, take their lead from those developed in European art music, like the symphony and song cycle. Finally, I propose an alternative queer reading of Once Upon a Time’s ‘happily ever after’ story, drawing out a strong gay subtext of fantasy that interprets the ending as the delusion of an unreliable fantasist narrator.
Alex’s primary research interest lies in storytelling in popular music, and how this is distinct from that found in film, television, literature and more recent digital media. Having completed a Phd on Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach, which studied both its official and fan-created media through various interdisciplinary lenses, he is now working on a book for Bloomsbury titled Popular Music and Narrativity: A Theory and History of Pop Storyworlds.
Craig Jennex (McMaster University, Ontario)
Cruising the Historical Dance Floor: Temporal Drag and the Promise of Queer Collectivity
In this paper, I reflect on an afternoon tea dance at the Blue Whale—a bar in the Pines district of Fire Island—to articulate the political potential in queer re-articulations of historical 1970s disco culture. This paper is animated by interviews I have conducted with Josh Appelbaum, Ru Bhatt, and Tad Haes, the three members of Occupy the Disco (OXD), a Manhattan-based DJ collective that formed to celebrate disco music’s “rich cultural history and connection to the gay community” and performed as DJs that afternoon at Blue Whale.
On that dance floor, I learned that disco affords a compelling sense of plurality across time because of the way disco music works: in its sound and in the way it is rendered audible in dance spaces, disco privileges a presentness—the genre embraces repetitive grooves and cyclical rhythms that eschew most ideals of linearity and musical progression—that encourages us to be in the (musical) moment.
The music’s presentness is what makes our collective return on disco dance floors so profound: to return to this music and participate wholeheartedly, we disrupt normative, progressive, linear temporality. Moving to this music, we are in the moment and profoundly out-of-time. But, importantly, it is not only that we are out of time, but that we are out of time together. Disco’s experience of queer temporality—and the brief moments of togetherness that participation in the music allows—is transformative.
At the risk of overstating: my participation in the dance floor community changed my sense of the world and its history, and enabled me to recognize the political power in a dance floor community—one that spans across generations, space, and time—however ephemeral that communal bond may be.
Craig Jennex is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Regina and a Sessional Instructor at McMaster University. He is currently working on two solo-authored book projects: an academic monograph on queer practices of musical listening and a coffee table book entitled Queer Canadiana for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. He is co-editor (with Susan Fast) of Hearing the Political: Queer and Feminist Interventions in Popular Music, forthcoming from Routledge.
Daniel Kane (University of Sussex)
‘Let’s Go Down Where the Love Is’: Arthur Russell, Allen Ginsberg and the Making of Hippie Disco
Daniel Kane is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Sussex. Kane’s books include All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (2003), We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (2009), and, most recently, Do You Have a Band? Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (2017).
Caroline Kennedy (Melbourne Polytechnic)
Rain, Glitter – The Disco Song as a Conceptual Space in Song-based Music Composition
Disco song composition did not deviate radically from traditional rock and pop structures of song, yet disco songs contain a number of crucial elements that always make them disco. These songs often play at a tempo of around 100 beats per minute, meaning disco songs literally beat to the tune of a human heart. Disco saw new irrepressible grooves, new fusions of synth and guitars, and new approaches to melodicism and lyric writing. Yet, disco moved around the conceptual and thematic as much as the technical or musical; it was an imaginary space as much as anything else. In the galaxy of disco songs, the declaratory subject is forever dreaming, dancing and moving towards the horizon as an individuated force. Even now, in the twenty-first century imagining of song, disco looms large as a space to create, full of motifs both poetic and musical. In this world, song-based music artists from Frank Ocean to The Space Lady draw upon a starry universe of possibility. Ocean is a contemporary hip-hop and RnB artist who, arguably, uses disco as an ongoing reference and who, in some sense, is part of a lived musical continuum of disco. Susan Schneider, aka The Space Lady, is a 60’s folk artist who, in the nineties, found a new world of productivity via a predetermined disco synth beat. The era of disco re-described how song could reveal individual empowerment and agency. This paper explores the disco song as a conceptual space for making, beyond conceptions of a discrete era and genre of disco.
Kennedy is a trans-disciplinary artist and academic working in the fields of music and art. Her work explores ideas of individualism and romanticism through the critical prisms of feminism and post-capitalism. Her work traverses song-based composition and performance, painting, installation, film and theoretical writing. She is currently Head Of Program for The Bachelor Of Songwriting And Music Production at Melbourne Polytechnic, a degree she designed and wrote, for artists working in music.
Jaap Kooijman (University of Amsterdam)
Hotter than Hell: Heaven as Metaphor in Pre- and Post-AIDS Disco
The 1977 song “Shut Out/Heaven is a Disco” by Paul Jabara features disco diva Donna Summer as heaven’s gatekeeper, similar to the bouncer at the disco who guards the velvet rope. The song presents the disco as a utopian space of freedom and escapism where disco dancers—on roller skates—can escape the realities of everyday life. Like many songs of the 1970s disco era, including Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” and Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” Jabara’s “Shut Out/Heaven is a Disco” acquired a new meaning with the coming of the AIDS epidemic. No longer did these songs just represent the pleasure of bodily eroticism and romanticism (Dyer 1979), but also became expressions of grief and mourning (Burston 1995). Disco songs released in the 1990s made the connection between heaven and AIDS explicit, such as Holly Johnson’s “Disco Heaven,” Janet Jackson’s “Together Again,” and the Pet Shop Boys’ remake of the Village People’s “Go West.” Short films such as The Dead Boys’ Club (Mark Christopher, 1992) and Paradisco (Stéphane Ly-Cuong, 2002) revisited 1970s disco as a heavenly and escapist space of pre-AIDS innocence and remembrance. One could argue that the AIDS epidemic made disco political, moving from frivolous pleasure to sober contemplation. In this paper, however, I will take the “heaven as disco” metaphor as starting point to argue that AIDS has not made disco political, but merely rendered visible the political potential that was there within disco all along.
Jaap Kooijman is Associate Professor in Media Studies and American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His articles on American pop culture have been published in journals such as The Velvet Light Trap, The Journal of American Culture, Post Script, GLQ, Celebrity Studies, and [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, as well as various edited collections, including Revisiting Star Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2017) and Music/Video (Bloomsbury, 2017). Kooijman is the author of Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture (AUP, 2013), editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and co-founding editor of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies.
Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex)
Burn, Baby, Burn: Disco Dancing and Aerobic Exercise, or Working It and Working Out
This paper will address the relationship between disco dance culture and the aerobic exercise phenomenon, focusing on the critical late-1970s/early-1980s period in the United States. I will consider ways aerobic dance exercise, commonly known as “aerobics”, popularised as an easy, effective and fun exercise regimen for women in 1978 by Jacki Sorensen (“the work out that’s all play”), overlapped and intersected with the ‘governance’ of dancers on the disco dance floor (by both DJs and the lyrics of disco music). Aerobics books, albums and classes recommended or repurposed disco music and dance moves; DJs devised playlists for both disco dance-floors and exercise studios; and health clubs were becoming “the nightclubs of the 80s” (according to the 1983 Rolling Stone article that was the basis for the 1985 aerobics film Perfect). This paper will examine how the concept of “working” functions across the disco/exercise regimen via the injunctions to “work the body” that recur in disco music and aerobic dance. Acknowledging that the call to “work it” has multiple and shifting meanings (for example in songs by Rose Royce [1984], Ru Paul [1993] and Missy Elliott [2002]) this paper focuses specifically on the ways “working it” merges with “working out.”
Aerobics combines dance and exercise (as the longer name “aerobic dance exercise” suggests) but how might we understand the more specific relationship between disco and aerobics and their overlapping injunctions that we move our bodies in specific ways and/or for particular purposes? I will argue that disco dance-floors and aerobics classes are spaces in which (continuous) music and vocal instruction is organised so as to inspire and to some extent compel groups of people to move together for various reasons and with a range of potential and possible results. In aerobic exercise classes and at discos the beat manipulated to support and structure movements designed or destined to raise the heart rate and increase cardiovascular circulation (“get your blood pumping”), releasing endorphins that produce euphoria. While aerobic exercise regimes promise to help your body “burn” off calories and carbohydrates, “burning” on the disco dance-floor involved male dancers competing to execute increasingly athletically demanding moves. This paper will explore the correspondences that characterize “working” the body while burning at the disco (working it) or at the aerobics class (working out). While injunctions to “work” feature in hip-hop and breakdance music of the same period (for example The Sugar Hill Gang’s ‘Work Work the Body’ [1979] and Hot Streak’s ‘Body Work’ [1984]), this paper is specifically interested in how female singers used this term in disco music and focuses on Taana Gardner and Diana Ross who both released tracks called ‘Work That Body’ in 1981.
Michael Lawrence is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex and one of the organisers of the DISCO! conference. He is the author of Sabu (BFI, 2014) and the co-editor, with Laura McMahon, of Animal Life and the Moving Image (BFI, 2015) and, with Karen Lury, of The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of Exhibition and Encounter (Palgrave, 2016). He is completing a book on animal movement in the cinema, but is currently become distracted by aerobic dance exercise.
Adrian Loving (artist, DJ/ Entrepreneur and Instructor at Georgetown Day School)
Making of a DJ: Memoirs by Ron Trent of Chicago’s Early Club Scene
This visual reflection and oral history begins by illustrating Chicago’s underground club scene in the early eighties – as seen through legendary Chicago DJ Ron Trent’s eyes. This journey reveals how Trent becomes aware of the burgeoning house music scene and processes the complexities of club culture and its homosexual alternative communities beginning in the late 70’s. Trent’s memoir takes us through his musical mind and the formation of a lifelong philosophy, amidst the harsh conditions of Chicago’s south side and the racism of Disco Demolition.
Adrian Loving is a noted contemporary art- and music historian, visual artist and DJ entrepreneur. Over the course of his 20-year career Loving has curated art exhibitions and public programming at various museums and cultural institutions including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art NMAFA and The National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery of Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, amongst many others. Loving currently maintains a full-time faculty position as an Instructor of Visual Art, Film and Video at Georgetown Day School in Washington, DC.
Jakub Machek (Metropolitan University Prague)
From Disco-games to Disco-story. The Role of the Disco in the Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
The role of disco music in late Socialism is very different to that of other genres of popular music. In general, the Soviet bloc considered all kinds of cultural and especially musical Western influences to be suspicious if not dangerous. Any new popular genre faced outright refusal, frequent prohibition and even persecution of its respective fan-base. (Bugge 2011, Vaněk 2011) The denial of contemporary forms of popular music was not only a political and ideological manoeuvre (as it represented the music of the rival regime), but was also due to the conservative cultural policy of the Communist regime.
Following the brief political and cultural liberalisation movements in 1960s Czechoslovakia, the new post-invasion regime returned to its previous practice of restricting popular music (Rock music in particular). Following the suppression of the so called ‘underground music scene’ in the late 1970s, a new wave of more moderate repression started in the early 1980s turning against punk and new wave musicians. Disco music, on the other hand, was welcomed by socialist culture and the media industry in particular. The genre, described in its original form (Dyer 1979) as combining of romanticism, eroticism and materialism, was openly accepted by authorities and society alike and utilised by almost all popular singers of the period.
My paper shall try to find the reasons behind this uncharacteristic alignment of disco-culture with official socialist culture. I shall be arguing, that the key parallel lies in both disco and Czech late socialist society (Bren, 2010) being open to a culture of materialism. My research is based on content analysis of the most popular disco song’s lyrics (e.g. Disco-games from 1980) as well as the late Communist popular film musical Disco-story (1987) as accompanied by a thorough discourse analysis of music magazines and official cultural periodicals.
Jakub Machek lectures in the Department of Media Studies at the Metropolitan University Prague, and is a research fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University, Prague. In 2012 he obtained a PhD in social history at Charles University in Prague. His research projects deals with Czech popular culture from the end of the 19th century through socialism era till nowadays. He is author of monograph The Emergence of Popular Culture in the Czech Lands (2017) and he co-edited several collections of essays.
Lesley Model (University of the Arts, London and London Metropolitan University)
Countering Copyright: The Disco-Edit
The recent appetite for the disco edit is palpable. Though we trace the crate-digging and re-working of classic and cult disco tracks back to 1970s New York; over the past decade and a half, there is an observable trend of this style moving from the niche to the popular. Indicators of this genre’s growth can be seen in its attachment to big-named disc jockeys who specialise in producing and performing this style (Greg Wilson, Bill Brewster, Alkalino …), but also with the increased demand and distribution of the disco edit on vinyl and digital download – a large proportion of these tracks are available to stream (and download, often free of charge) via music sharing websites such as SoundCloud, Mix Cloud and the Artist Union; and increasingly available to purchase on vinyl via sites such as Discogs and Juno Records. The one true testament of the disco edit’s arrival, however, is likely revealed through its most contentious feature; its heavy use of samples, which has only recently set off copyright alarms.
My research will closely examine the misalignment between copyright law and the creative labour involved in the disco-edit. It will interrogate the way goals intended for proprietary protection invoke antiquated ideas about musical creativity and authorship, by way of copyright. The edit struggles to speak to a system of copyright fixated on melodic and harmonic features, especially when re-editing is primarily occupied with the adaptation of a musical track, in which innovation is mainly concerned with devising new rhythmic arrangements that pay homage to and represent the original work. A significant amount of research has investigated the way hip hop’s use of sampling confronts the European musical traditions imbued in copyright law. My work will examine how, like hip hop, the disco-edit foregrounds its use of the sample, designating its novelty to the arrangement and rhythmic presentation of these works. The recent measures taken by Discogs – the world’s largest and most comprehensive music database and marketplace – to prohibit the sale of unofficial releases, including bootlegs and edits will be put forward as a case in point in assessing copyright’s leverage over definitions of creative musical practice.
Lesley Model is a lecturer in the Humanities and Social Sciences at University of the Arts London and London Met. Her interests include: musical creativity, remix culture, cultural identity and intellectual property law. Her PhD research, which she hopes to pursue here at Sussex, will be looking into the creative labour that goes into disco edit and its unfortunate misalignment with copyright law. Lesley is also a DJ.
Claudia Lisa Moeller (Università Vita Salute San Raffaele)
Raffaella Carrà, the Sexual Disco Revolution for the Whole Family
In a country such as Italy in the 70s where the sex revolution was still ignored, Raffaella Carrà changed Italian television. Her saucy and cheeky songs, her naked belly, and her dancing choreographies made her a big star in the Italian (and not only) television. Her disco music became normal in Italian television and she raised to popularity in South American thanks to her disco sound. Her songs were the introduction jingles of many famous and important shows in RAI (the national Italian television). Her songs introduced family programs and nobody seemed to be fine with her texts and dances. In RAI, the biggest channel controlled by DC (the Christian party), Raffaella Carrà sang about love, promiscuous relationships, and sex. Her songs present always a woman who is independent, wants to have sexual intercourses with multiple partners and enjoy carefree her life.
Her body, her clothes, and the lyrics were a little and very curious revolution in the Italian television and music. She was modern, single, and praises physical love. Her disco aesthetic and music style invaded Italian homes and proposed a new typology of music, lifestyle, and values. Her songs, her look, her lyrics made her a sexual symbol, a disco music legend, and a gay icon.
I will like to analyze the texts and the dances of three songs by Raffaella Carrà. “Tuca Tuca” (1971): the ballet of this song sees a young Raffaella Carrà touching her dancers. “A far l‘amore comincia tu” (1977) a song that has also been translated in German and its text is less malicious. “Tanti Auguri” (1978) is a hymn to make love in all the country. Rafaella Carrà’s disco music production embodied a new world, whose values were completely revolutionary for Italy.
Claudia Lisa Moeller was born in 1992 in Milano (Italy). She studied Philosophy at Unviersità Vita Salute San Raffaele, where she got both her BA and MA degrees. She is currently studying Kierkegaard and hermeneutics of television.
Ivan L. Munuera (Princeton University)
Discotecture: The Bodily Regime of Archi-Social Exploration
In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, New York was in crisis. The large factories, which at one time had formed part of the landscape of Manhattan, lay abandoned. The view was desolate and alarming, yet suggestive of somewhere potentially habitable. The New York Daily News published its infamous cover with the headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”, a phrase attributed to the President, who had declared that he would veto any bill calling for “a federal bail-out of New York City” and instead supported legislation that would make it easier for the city to file for bankruptcy.
Amidst this landscape, nightclubs and discos became the epicentre of an architectural revolution. They included the Palladium in New York, a nightclub designed by Arata Isozaki and described as “an urban apocalypse” in keeping with the city’s decayed status. Located at 126 East Fourteenth Street, between Irving Place and Third Avenue the building’s history as a movie palace, concert hall, and club dates back to 1926 when the structure was built to serve as a movie theatre.
Its incarnation as a nightclub lasted from 1985 to 1997, a short time for architecture but a good innings for a nightclub. In little more than a decade the Palladium came to define an epoch. It contained, shaped, and propagated a very specific architecture—discotecture, the architecture of the disco. Discotecture is an understanding of the architecture of these nightclubs that goes deeper than merely appreciating their spatial configurations, an understanding that explores them more as the creation of events where the politics and social constructions of the period, relating to architecture and urban planning, were enacted.
Ivan L. Munuera is a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture, Princeton University. Ivan is a contemporary art/architecture critic and curator based in New York, working on the specific forms of politics embedded at the intersection of art and architecture with musical practices. His published work has appeared in Log, El País, El Mundo, Arquitectura Viva and Arte y Parte.
Laura Nash (Fairfield University) and
Andrew Virdin (Independent Scholar)
No Sneakers: Disco’s Influence on Early Hip-hop
The early 1970s were not kind to New York City, which was embroiled in political corruption, economic collapse, and rampant crime. Some say the early 1970s were a musical wasteland: Hendrix and Joplin were dead, the Beatles had split up, and Dylan had moved to LA. But in New York, in the cultural fissures and cracks, people who were not in the mainstream created music that resonated out to impact the world: disco, punk, salsa, and hip-hop were redefining not just out music, but our culture.
Hip-hop did not, musically, create something from nothing and in this presentation, we will trace several of the tangible connections between disco and early hip-hop, as well as explore the importance, and definition, of community within these genres. Common themes include the cultural influences and social acceptance of a young and multicultural group of people, most of whom were disenfranchised from “traditional” society; the role of black music and records and the changes in radio and live performances; the playlists of disco and hip-hop’s cartons of albums as musical instruments; and especially on the increasingly important role of the DJs, who were the stars of disco and early hip-hop. The dance connection is also there: early hip-hop was party music and often DJs would compete to win, which meant getting the most people to dance. By examining flyers for hip-hop gatherings, we will demonstrate how the best of the DJs raised the stakes by glamming up the gatherings, which they called a disco.
Disco has several accepted descendants – House music was developing in Chicago, GoGo music was emerging in Washington DC, and Californians were getting deep into the funk. Contrary to many, we contend that disco is foundational to the formative years of hip-hop.
Laura Nash is an associate professor of music and co-director of the Honors program at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT. She received her BA from Wellesley College and PhD in music theory from Yale University. She was an inaugural National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching Fellow.
Andrew Virdin is a high school English teacher at Mountain Valley School in Saguache, Colorado. He is an independent scholar in Ethnic Studies, with an emphasis on 20th-century African-American literature. He is the Society for American Music’s Paul Charosh Fellow for 2018.
Louis Niebur (University of Nevada, Reno)
“The National Tea Dance: The Forging of a Unified Gay Musical Identity”
Disco, as an empoweringly gay musical style, was adopted as the dominant musical force in the newly-legalized public meeting places of American gay communities in the early 1970s. For gay people, dancing together was largely illegal before the mid-1970s, and with the gradual loosening of anti-gay laws after the Stonewall uprising of 1969, it took on a significance that is difficult to overstate. By 1972 gay discoteques in American cities began replacing the seedy jukebox bar, representing a profound shift in the community’s self-perception. The act of dancing to disco signaled a new kind of public declaration of sexuality. In September 1976, responding to the Supreme Court’s recent refusal to challenge persistent anti-gay state laws, a group of gay liberationists established a fundraising “National Tea Dance.” (NTD) Inspired by the long-running Sunday afternoon Fire Island gay tea dances, the weekly NTD occurred simultaneously in bars and nightclubs around the country, playing a disco set assembled by prominent New York DJ Roy Thode. Participating venues received kits containing instructions, tambourines, and Thode’s tape of the week. The NTD created, through disco and the communal act of dancing, a united American gay identity. In the words of the dance’s founder, Bruce Voeller, “as the lights and music around the country flash on in harmony…and as our numbers grow, so too will our power…and all we have to do is dance.” Events like the forgotten NTD were one of the gay community’s most distinctly musical attempts to celebrate a new and hard-won freedom.
Louis Niebur is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research explores popular music of the post-war era, including the significance of music to LGBTQ communities, particularly as it has shifted between live music, the jukebox, and the disc jockey in the context of queer spaces. His book, Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was published in 2010 by Oxford University Press. He has also delivered and published papers on such topics as San Francisco’s electronic “post-disco” dance music culture of the early 1980s, the role of women in early electronic music studios, and the gendered role of electronic sound production, as manifested in gay electronic dance music. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Jack Parlett (University of Cambridge)
The First Days of Disco: Queer Nostalgia on Andrew Holleran’s Fire Island
At the Fire Island beach party that ends Andrew Holleran’s iconic 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance, the narrator tells us that the ‘discaire was mixing old songs with the new’. Unlike the ‘mediocre’ discotheques back ‘in town’ in New York, neglecting to play the hits that ‘brought back the magic of whole summers to people there’, a song re-emerges on this night whose ‘first few notes’ had been known to make dancers ‘holler in a communal shout of ecstasy’, a ‘curious song’ that was never the ‘most popular’ and yet had the ‘power to change the tenor of the place’. This song, the 1975 disco remix of Patti Jo’s funk hit ‘Make Me Believe in You’ by producer Tom Moulton, is mentioned throughout the novel and comes to take on a revealing and anthemic resonance at the moment of its dramatic denouement, a hymn to a queer way of being in the world, an ecstatic dance laced with the melancholy of evanescence.
In focussing closely on one disco song and its interpolation in Holleran’s novel, where it is rendered as a relic, this paper will explore the capacities of this musical form to soundtrack and illuminate the ambivalences of the gay discotheque as a resistant space, a site at once fickle – where quickly you can become clapped out and ‘curious’, no longer ‘popular’ – and free, an ecstatic reprieve from the dominant culture. In this sense disco amounts to a belief system in itself, the hope that in reclaiming the ‘magic’ of the rapidly obsolescent from the generational divide of a place like Fire Island, where characters of different ages ‘faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion’, the music may be efficacious in itself: make me believe in you.
Jack Parlett is a third-year PhD student in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. His doctoral project focusses on gay cruising in New York, in particular its representations in the work of Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara and David Wojnarowicz. In October 2018 he will take up a Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford to work on a queer literary history of Fire Island.
Flora Pitrolo (University of Kent)
I Wanna Be Fantastic World: The Mass Fantasy of Italo Disco
Italo Disco – a term first used to sell Italian records in Germany in the early 1980s – is a genre which sparks increasing curiosity: the past decade has seen a proliferation of fan materials, specialised reissues and club nights, and scholars such as Kai Fikentscher (2009) and Dario Martinelli (2013) have analysed the genre’s sonorities and its local and ‘glocal’ characteristics.
My paper focuses on traits of the genre that are frequently acknowledged yet hitherto unexplored, namely Italo Disco’s escapist aesthetics and the mass appeal and mass production of those aesthetics. On the one hand, my intervention investigates the ideological and aesthetic dimensions of the world Italo Disco evokes: a glamorous imaginary world that is loosely ‘American’ for Italians and ‘Italian’ for foreigners. On the other, it studies the mass appeal and ‘industrial’ means of production of this Italo fantasy, reflecting on how and why the genre’s capacity to always sound like a copy has paradoxically become its trademark.
Treating the genre as a ‘fantastic world’, in this paper I concentrate on the spatial paradigm of the heterotopia to investigate Italo Disco’s real and imaginary spaces, establishing a relation between the geographical space of the Italian Adriatic coast, the inhabitable space of the discoteca in architectural terms, and the desiring space of the Italo lyric in the very specific breed of faux-English it deploys. My aim is to dissect the cultural, ideological and emotional traits of Italo Disco as the music of a time and place that constantly attempts to escape its time and its place.
Flora received her PhD in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in 2014. She has since worked as a Research Associate at University of Kent and has lectured at Roehampton University, Queen Mary, Goldsmiths, and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her work investigates alternative European performances and music cultures of the 1980s, with a special focus on Italy. She has published both as a scholar and as a journalist, and her radio-programme A Colder Consciousness has broadcast since 2011 on London’s Resonance FM. She is active in London as a DJ and runs ACC Records, a record label specialising in reissues of 1980s electronica. Her most recent project is the archive book Syxty Sorriso & Altre Storie (Rome: Yard Press, 2017) on performance art in early 1980s Milan.
Mark E. Perry (Oklahoma State University)
“Disco Sucks”: The Decline and fall of Disco Music
In the 1970s, the underground and urban dance music known as disco increasingly entered mainstream radio in the United States, challenging rock music in both radio airplay and record sales. The radio deejay served as tastemaker and radio stations functioned as an institution, mediating which music made it to the airwaves. The influential medium of radio led to the mainstreaming and ever more popularity of disco, but also led in part to its decline and fall. In 1979, one event in particular, Disco Demolition Night, embodied the drop in popularity of the dance genre. Shock jock Steve Dahl of 97.9 WLUP-FM sponsored a baseball game promotion, involving a climatic explosion of vinyl disco records on the playing field in-between a double header of the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers. For 98¢ and a donation of a disco record, the public could attend the game and observe a fiery destruction of vinyl disco records—their donated records! Scholars have also recognized that issues of race and homophobia played a role in the declining popularity of the dance genre. In my paper, I will examine how both radio deejays and radio stations served as musical institutions, exerting power of influence on the musical tastes of their listeners, ultimately leading to the chants and banners claiming that “disco sucks”—the indelible dance genre returned once again to the underground.
Mark E. Perry serves as assistant professor of ethnomusicology and historical musicology at Oklahoma State University. He holds a Ph.D. in music from the University of Kansas, and his dissertation explores Catalan nationalism in relation to the early works of Roberto Gerhard. His research interests include Spanish music, Roberto Gerhard, minimalism in music, and Electronic Dance Music. Active as a scholar, he has presented papers at national and international conferences. He has contributed to the Roberto Gerhard Companion (Ashgate, 2013) and many articles to such important music dictionaries as Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and the Grove Dictionary of American Music. He has also served as the recording review editor for the journal American Music. Under the moniker thund3rbunny, he deejays and produces electronic dance music.
John E Richardson (Loughborough University) & Stephen Woodward (Independent scholar)
‘Life in the city can be so hard’: Disco and Anomie
Since Durkheim (1893/1960), anomie has been taken to refer “to societal instability resulting from a breakdown in broadly accepted values, as well as widespread personal feelings of uncertainty and alienation” (Garfield 1987: 272). As society becomes more complex, individuals play more specialized roles and become ever more dissimilar in their social experiences, material interests, values and beliefs. Individuals in such a sociocultural system have less in common and so feel less social integration. Such feelings are especially pronounced in cities, leading to the paradox that, with urbanisation and increasing numbers of people living in close proximity to each other, feelings of loneliness and isolation also increase.
Musical, or subcultural, movements can be viewed as a response to, and a partial (temporary) solution to, feelings of isolation. However, unlike other ‘dance music’ subcultures (widely defined), disco doesn’t only provide a (temporary) solution to issues of urban loneliness and anomie, it also explicitly orientates to these issues.
In this presentation we will examine the ways that anxiety with modern urban life is invoked in the themes, characters and narratives of the lyrics of some disco songs. We will also examine the ways that these feelings are evoked in the melody and chord progressions of some disco songs, contributing to a sonic mood that we call happy/sad – a sense of urban melancholia, of being isolated and adrift. Our analysis will focus on lists of songs curated by the prominent DJ collective Horse Meat Disco, in the form of DJ sets, radio shows, mix CDs and their recommended lists of ‘essential tracks’. This sampling rationale has two advantages: quantitative (it allows a significant downsizing of the number of songs to analyse) and qualitative (it helps ensure the sampled songs are not outliers, since their selection is ratified by connoisseurs).
John E. Richardson is a Reader in Critical Discourse Studies, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. His research interests include critical discourse studies, rhetoric and argumentation, multimodality, British fascism, and commemorative discourse. His recent publications include: the books, Cultures of Post-War British Fascism (2015, co-edited with Nigel Copsey), British Fascism: A Discourse-Historic Analysis (2017, ibidem-Verlag) the Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (2018, co-edited with John Flowerdew); and academic articles on critical discourse studies, commemorative discourse, argumentation, political communications, multi-modality and the politics of music. He is Editor of the international journal Critical Discourse Studies, co-editor of Bloomsbury book series Advances in Critical Discourse Studies and is on the editorial boards of various journals. From February 2017-January 2018 he was a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow, researching the ways that Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK has changed since 2002.
Stephen Woodward is an independent scholar and has been a performing musician for over 30 years. He home recorded and released five albums with his band Johnny Domino and has appeared on all full-length releases by singer-songwriter Frankie Machine. He received his undergraduate degree in Music & English by writing a dissertation on the semiotics of American alternative guitar music.
Alexin Tenefrancia (New York University)
Queer Nightlife as Art, Community and Practice
Nightlife has the potential to shift ideas of normality and introduce new norms. Historically, the dance floor has always been an important part of queer culture offering a space for reinvention and solidarity. From ballrooms in Harlem, to Stonewall and to the origins of disco as credited to David Mancuso’s the Loft, nightlife is central to socialization and community building on the dance floor.
By merely existing, spaces in celebration of queer and trans people of color are a form of resistance and remain central to community strengthening. Rooted in oppression and marginalization, the history of queer nightlife is political by nature, rendering nightlife a space of resistance to dominant values. As arts institutions increasingly partner with queer nightlife, they make visible these communities while also subsuming their practices into institutional and market acceptance. This increased visibility under capitalism further complicates queer nightlife as it becomes subject to commodification, city regulation, and gentrification.
This presentation aims to identify nightlife as a catalyst for transformation within the self, community, and society. This presentation will highlight case studies of contemporary queer collectives based in Brooklyn, New York and discuss the challenges of sustaining nightlife practices through community organizing, partnering with institutions, and other collective and creative endeavours.
Alexin Tenefrancia is a project manager at by day and “party girl” by night. Growing up, her mom scolded her for “partying too much”… which later inspired Alexin to study nightlife in NYU’s Arts Administration Master’s program. Her Master’s thesis, Nightlife as Art Form, explores contemporary underground nightlife culture, identifying the ways in which nightlife can be understood as performance art, social practice, and activism—and how nightlife operates as a foil to mainstream cultural institutions. She was also a founding board member and early fundraiser for the Filipino American Museum. More recently, she was invited by Performa to moderate a panel on QTPOC performance and nightlife for their biennial and has given talks at the Brooklyn Historical Society and New York University. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Tamara Tomić-Vajagić (University of Roehampton)
Disco-OR-not-disco?
When dance philosopher Erin Mannning writes ‘[t]he dance floor moves the dancers’ (2009, 21) she visualises dance parlours of incipient Argentine tango. Her image also reminds of Saturday Night Fever’s (1978) rainbow-lit dance floor, later translated into an irresistible draw of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR)-type of arcade games. If discotheque spatial metaphors are extended further, we may note similarly clever visual analogies. For instance, TATE Modern’s staged museum takeover by dance used a giant disco ball suspended over the Turbine Hall as a choreographic object (Forsythe, 2011) which marked the pop-up event ‘Adrénaline: a dance floor for everyone’ by the choreographer Boris Charmatz (If TATE was Musee de la danse?, May 2015). How much these visuals may act as powerful ontological metaphors for ‘disco’ becomes clear if one types the word into a Tumblr search, and receives a myriad of ‘poor’ images (Steyerl, 2009) of disco balls, many Photoshopped into various colourful settings. If spatial elements of discotheque thus are its choreographic objects which both invite to dance and mark its ontological parameters, what happens to ‘disco’ if its glittery elements are removed? This paper will look into the gestures of abstraction that still refer to the genre, and explore the remaining ’ingredients’ that imply the constituent elements of ‘disco’ present and absent. My examples will include Rineke Dijkstra’s video portrait series The Crazy House (2009) and music video ‘Pluie Fine’ by Corine (Polo&Pan remix) (2018). To wonder about the relative loose definition of the term ‘disco’ as encountered in the internet search engines and taxonomical tools (including Oxford English Living Dictionaries), I will closely refer also to electronic music sub-genres such as ‘nu disco’, and those represented in Disco-not-Disco compilation series (2000-onward). Drawing upon Hito Steyerl’s provocation about the broad political appeal of the term ‘disco’ (Steyerl, 2017), I will wonder whether the present-absent dichotomy found in these examples may lead us to finding particular ‘virtual environments [which] are able to elicit in the user an intense feeling of “being there”, namely of being embodied in an independent and self-referential world’ (Pinotti, 2017).
Tamara Tomić-Vajagić is a dance historian with background in fine arts. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Dance Department at the University of Roehampton, London, where she received her doctorate. She researches cross sections between visual culture and dance. Her upcoming book chapters include the study of spectator’s fomo in William Forsythe’s theatre dance (Palgrave Macmillan), and parallel aesthetic structures found in Issey Miyake’s fashion and Forsythe’s choreography (Oxford University Press). Her long-term research explores the notion of abstraction in dance and consider modes of the ballet dancer’s agency in various institutional settings.
Qian Wang (Sichuan University)
Dancing the Desire, Dancing the Revolution: Sexuality and Politics of Disco in 1980s’ and 2010s’ China
Disco is a music style related to gay and race subcultures back to the late 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S. Disco became a global phenomenon since the mid-1970s, and entered into China after the “open-door” policy of the economic reform in 1979. Disco music, dance, and culture generated a big impact on ordinary people’s daily life after they had lived in the social environment of sexual repression and gender distortion for decades. The rhythm and beat of Disco music unstoppably awoken their bodies. The intimate, seductive, and erotic body movement burned up their sexual desire, which became an invisible undercurrent to accelerate the sexual revolution in the 1980s (e.g. the divorce upsurge and the reemergence of feminism). Although Disco ballrooms were also employed as a social sphere for gay men in some cities, Disco had been essentially transformed into a heterosexual culture. The Disco Fever reached the peak between 1985 and 1989, and faded away in the 1990s. It, however, has reemerged in recent years. Under the influence of queer social movement and popular cultures in the new millennium, Disco has unsurprisingly returned to its queer root, and became an exciting approach of queer performativity in metropolitan areas, where another sexual revolution has clearly started. In China’s case, Disco is never a music or dance simply for personal joy, but a fiery battlefield where politics, cultures, and sexuality fight against and intertwine with each other profoundly.
Qian Wang earned his PhD from the Institute of Popular Music, the University of Liverpool. He is currently a visiting scholar at the College of Literature and Journalism, Sichuan University. His research is focused on Chinese popular music and scenes in mainland China. He co-produced a modern dance programme <Disco-TECA>, which reflects the transformation of Disco culture from 1985 to 2015 in China. The programme debuted at the Gender Bender festival in Italy in 2015, won the “Best Dancing Programme” at the Beijing Nanluoguxiang Arts Festival in 2016 and the “Expect the Unexpected Awards” at the Stockholm Fringe Arts Festival in 2017.
Çağrı Yılmaz (Anadolu University)
Not Gay in the Disco: Amusing Themselves to Death
As an imported cultural venue with occidental music and dance figures, discos have stood side by side with traditional places of entertainment for more than four decades in Turkey. Introduced to Turks as the western way of enjoying oneself, discos were significantly shown in a good many of Turkish films from 70s to 90s so as, to a certain extent, to reflect the tension between the orient and the occident, to display dichotomies between a culture blended with patriarchy, conservatism and traditionalism versus Kemalist ideals, that is to say secularism and Westernization, and to depict clashes between classes. Considered to be popular hangouts where people gather for drinking, dancing, making friends, relaxation and simply having fun today, discos are places that people are accustomed to in Turkey. However, it is doubtful if controversies mentioned above have yet to be ended, and there is a shift in the paradigm of discos in today’s Turkish films. To examine these, two films from 2000’s Turkish cinema Güneşi Gördüm (2009-I Saw the Sun) and Zenne (2012-Zenne Dancer) in which two Kurdish gay characters are murdered for honour are sampled for this study. The study aims to discuss (i) what discos mean to characters, (ii) what motives lead them to go to discos, (iii) in what ways discos contribute to characters’ development, choices and narrative in films from a sociological perspective.
Çağrı Yılmaz, a PhD candidate and Research Assistant, works at Anadolu University’s Department of Cinema and Television. He holds a B.A in English Language and Literature from Hacettepe University, Ankara and an M.A in Cinema and Television with his dissertation entitled “Turkish Cinema in 2000’s Political Environment” from Anadolu University, Eskisehir. His main interests include—but are not limited to—film, new media, literature, cultural studies and gender studies. He currently resides in Eskisehir, Turkey.
Marko Zubak (Croatian Institute for History, Zagreb)
Disco in Eastern Europe: Mainstreaming Socialist Decadence
My paper explores socialist disco that spread throughout the Eastern Europe and Soviet Union from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s via several cross-cutting themes. I will analyze disco’s emergence as a musical niche which drew from Western music styles such as funk or synth-pop, while affecting much of the mainstream estrada. This complex trajectory of sources and influences contributed to the disco’s exclusion from the Eastern European pop-musical cannon, until its recent rediscovery by local ‘crate diggers’ who searched through used records for forgotten tracks only to frame them in a new way, putting to use labels like ‘socialist groove.ʼ
I will highlight disco’s glossy visual language from cheesy records covers to tinselled outfits that tapped well into the established code of estrada, yet with its input of kitsch and camp showed potential for transgressions, mostly through transparent sexualization. Finally, a new lifestyle evolved around disco, centred around practice of dancing. Socialist discotheques ranged from state run youth clubs to semi-private business enterprises. The same is true for the crowds they catered for: next to the new affluent strata, clubs gave unprecedented visibility to the disenfranchised social groups who came to dominate local dance floors.
While the accent is on Yugoslavia, the paper will cover the whole socialist Europe showing how disco acquired different functions across the region. Somewhere, as in Hungary, it became a manifestation of market socialism; elsewhere, like in the Soviet Baltics, it turned into a nucleus of alternative scenes. While contradicting original egalitarian communist ideals, disco’s escapism displayed nuances which evade dated Cold War dichotomies of dissent and official culture, used for so long in the historical explanations of late socialism. These binaries simply cannot account for disco’s eclecticism, in terms of musical background, aesthetic preferences and cultural status which all point to the gray zones in between, presenting disco as an emblem of the era at large.
Marko Zubak received his PhD in History at the Central European University in Budapest and worked at the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb. His work combines scholarly and curatorial approaches, and his interests and publications focus on Yugoslav social movements, popular culture and late socialism at large. He just published a monograph Yugoslav Youth Press (1968-1980): Student movements, Subcultures and Communist Alternative Media (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2018) and his other publications deal with (Yugoslav) socialist club cultures.
Disco! An Interdisciplinary Conference 