On Disco Nostalgia

I wasn’t going to write anything on disco but I kept seeing hot takes about the genre circulating and decided that I may as well throw my two cents in. 

Disco is a style of dance music with roots in the 1970s club scene. At the same time, the word “disco” also refers to a set of decontextualized, toothless tropes that signal back not to the 1970s club scene but to the 1990s disco revival in mainstream American pop culture epitomized by television sitcom That 70s Show. 

The disco of the 1970s club scene was the raw, carnal pleasure of Donna Summer singing “I feel love” in pure ecstasy over the trance-like 5+ minute (album cut) or 8+ minute (12” cut) Giorgio Morodor moog-masterpiece backing track and it was the 8+ minutes of the driving bass lines and relentless drum beats of Nile Rodgers and Chic that even now make it difficult to sit still when you listen. The original disco music was transcendental, lifting you up and out of everyday life into a futuristic soundscape crafted by some of the best musicians and songwriters of the day. 

This is the music and the era referenced in the Weverse Magazine feature by Seo Seongduk titled, “BTS & TOMORROW X TOGETHER’s Disco: Big Hit + Disco spawns a new meaning”. In that piece Seo writes, “To the genre’s pioneers disco is a paean to diversity and minority rights and a means of resistance. In the early 1970s, DJs were mixing American funk, Latin groove, and European electronica, while flooding the dance floor with the message urging love for one another.” Except not quite. To the genre’s pioneer’s disco was dance music. The alleged messages of “diversity and minority rights and a means of resistance” were a narrative imposed on the era by post-modern academics and critics looking back. Disco, at the time, was the story of a subculture gone mainstream, commodified, and then discarded.

The first “disco” songs (or rather songs that we now remember as “disco”) were light dance floor R&B and funk tracks like the O’Jay’s “Love Train” which began creeping onto the Billboard Charts and into mainstream consciousness in the early 1970s. But by the late 1970s, this sound, the sound of “Love Train” would come to dominate the Hot 100 thanks to the (white) Australian lads Andy Gibb and the BeeGees absolutely crushing the competition with their earwormy tunes and iconic falsetto voices made inescapable with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and the (white) Swedes of ABBA. Disco music was trendy and it was everywhere. 

(1979 gave us Kermit in the “Disco Frog” among other parodies.)

(A 1979 “disco” McDonald’s commercial; please tell me what about this signals minority rights and resistance)

Disco Demolition Night and anti-disco sentiment in general has been re-written in recent years as some kind of white supremacist backlash and it’s just not true. While there were certainly racists who participated in bashing disco (it was the 1970s after all), the feeling among cool teens at the time (source: my dad, not a racist) was that disco just… sucked. Disco was mainstream, corporate bullshit forced on everybody by elite cocaine-sniffing Studio 54 attending advertising executives through McDonald’s commercials and the sheeple who liked whatever was on Top 40 AM radio. The “Disco Sucks” guy is the same guy who was writing on forums in 2011 that LMFAO sucked and who was telling Mozart he used too many notes back in the 18th century. 

And the Disco Sucks guys weren’t completely wrong. A lot of the disco music that made it to Top 40 radio did kind of suck because “disco” for mainstream audiences meant Trevor Lawrence producing a disco version of the I Love Lucy theme song, not Giorgio Morodor’s futuristic moogs or Nile Rodgers innovative rhythms. And this split remains today.

When disco has been revived, as it is every so often, sometimes it’s Giorgio and Nile who are brought back (as Daft Punk did in 2013 or Jamiroquai with Diana Ross in 1997) but usually when disco makes a return it’s the disco of the disco McDonald’s commercial, cynical and written to push product and play on nostalgia for a “simpler time” that never existed except for in that McDonald’s commercial. 

But that doesn’t mean that the Disco Frog or Disco Duck or Disco Night on Bald Mountain are worthless. Disco camp, done with pure silliness and enjoyment, can be a lot of fun whether it’s Arashi’s Aiba Masaki in a pink fringed top and purple bell bottoms flashing his abs as the “Disco Star” or BigBang’s T.O.P. in his Mondrian suit with Uhm Jung Hwa in “D.I.S.C.O.” or Xiao Zhan’s goofy dance moves in a cover of an Abba classic on Our Song. Besides, I have it on good authority (source: my dad) that once the Disco Sucks grew up and gained some perspective, some of them realized that songs like “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)” were Good Actually and it was possible to just let go and have a good time on the dance floor without worrying about what was “cool”. 

Still, I’d be extremely hesitant to read into this modern disco camp the message that Seo gives in that Weverse post, saying of BTS’s “Dynamite” that, “its lively fun holds a much fresher and richer meaning than the older K-POP. This disco harks back to the night 30 years ago, when ‘white men’ set disco in flames to reclaim their dominance.” 
Leaving aside the claims about “older K-Pop”, for one thing, the disco demolition night was 40 years ago, not 30, and, as I laid about above, plenty of straight white men (like the Bee Gees) were involved in the creation of and marketing of disco music to the mainstream populace. Tying the milquetoast (or rather, “milk toast”) disco references of “Dynamite” to the subversive disco dance hall subculture is just too far of a reach. For better or worse, “Dynamite” is in the tradition of the disco I Love Lucy theme song and in the subsequent revivals of the campy imagery of the disco McDonald’s. 

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.