Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  UTOPIA—ME GIORGIO

  The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.

  —Oscar Wilde

  And these ideas the writers are having about us using machines and becoming like machines—they must be making a joke. I know for sure that we are and maybe, as I think you say in English, we are having the last, longest laugh.

  —Giorgio Moroder

  About five months after T-Connection’s “Do What You Wanna Do” provided the basis for Hi-NRG’s shell, this barely nascent genre would receive its brains, bolts, and electric charge. With its dentist drill synths, perforator tom-toms, scalpel edits, and oscillator bass line (created with a digital delay), Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” seemingly had more to do with a hospital operating room than one of disco’s pleasure palaces. Nevertheless, it topped Billboard’s disco chart for three weeks and reached #6 and #9 on the the pop and R&B charts respectively in the summer of 1977. Synthesizer-based records were hardly shocking by 1977, but where records by Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Tonto’s Expanding Head Band had used Moogs and Arps to imagine the whooshing speed and gurgling weirdness of a possible future, and kitschy novelty records by Jean-Jacques Perrey and Hot Butter had poked fun at this brave new world, “I Feel Love” was probably the first record to consider what implications the machine would have on the human body.

  Motion, escape, and fantasy had all been ascribed to the synthesizer before “I Feel Love,” but never corporeal pleasure or sexual gratification. With Summer’s mock-operatic fake-orgasm vocals set against an entirely synthesized background of syn-drums, stereo-panned percussion effects, and a Moog playing that galloping bass line from “Do What You Wanna Do,” “I Feel Love” was a masterpiece of mechanoeroticism. Set loose in this baco-foil hall of mirrors, Summer sings about the pleasures of the flesh as if she were disembodied, or at least lying back and thinking of Munich. The epitome of the cocaine chill and metal gloss (your teeth hurt after listening to it) of the ’70s, “I Feel Love” could have better encapsulated the decade’s obsession with the detachment of anonymous sex only if the record was sheathed in latex. On the other hand, though, never before had a record throbbed so tremulously, so basely, yet at the same time been so rapturous that there was almost a holy purity about it. Producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte surrounded Summer in a crystal and steel synth cathedral, and she responded by sounding far more like Aled Jones than any sexy soul vixen. Summer is frosty and distant, but she also has a beatific serenity that approaches the angelic.

  “I Feel Love” was in many ways a perfect soul record. Its conflation of God and sex is surely as powerful and complex as anything by Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, or Al Green; it’s just that it’s not informed by the Baptist church but by something more akin to the Carmelite order. However, it was also the record that effectively set disco adrift from the soul continuum. The gospel tradition is almost a “faith to power,” if you will—do right by God and He will take you over—and this transferred over to soul. Summer’s was an ecstasy of surrender. While the Holy Rollers and Pentecostals often found themselves possessed by the spirit, it was only temporary. Summer, on the other hand, sounded like an Eastern mystic completely submitting her will to the glories she had just experienced.

  Compare this to the third great electronic record of 1977 (after “I Feel Love” and Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express”), Parliament’s Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, a comic book funk fantasy that pits Star Child (“the protector of the pleasure principle”) in a battle to the death with Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk. The album is densely populated with all manner of synth squiggles and, on “Flash Light,” a preposterously funky Moog bass line that was made by stacking notes on top of each other, creating a springy sound of profound depth. Star Child’s principal weapon in this battle in the “zone of zero funkativity” is the “Bop Gun,” which features the lyric, “Turn me loose, we shall overcome.” The reference to the civil rights struggle was unmissable: The “Bop Gun” was Parliament mastermind George Clinton’s metaphor for the life-affirming power of dancing in the face of the pleasure-denying, sexless Puritans and the charlatan “urge overkill” peddlers who ran America. In Clinton’s hands, the machine and gospel tradition not only marched hand in hand, but the two fused to become a weapon—anything but Summer’s submission. The album’s textures and scenario screamed “science fiction,” but the album was all about “realness”—dig that title!—where true black music struggled against joyless funk poseurs.

  “I Feel Love,” conversely, relished its “unreality”; its denial of the human element meant that it was that much closer to the surrender, oblivion, nirvana that the song is about. Inevitably, the keepers of black music deemed it too robotic, too sterile, too unnatural; James Brown might have sung about being a sex machine, but actually embodying one was a step too far. Whether it was intentional or not, here was a record that challenged (if not directly confronted) almost every stereotype of blackness there was. Yes, Summer sounded thoroughly oversexed, but she was not the dirty blues mama or sensuous soul sista of old. Nor was she after Miles Davis’s “cool” or the poise of Jerry “The Iceman” Butler—this wasn’t detachment as mastery but something far more ethereal. The music may have throbbed and had a pulse like a racing heartbeat, but “I Feel Love” was almost devoid of the physicality so often attributed to black people. There was no athleticism, no bump and grind, no sweat, no blood.

  Of course, as both a mongrel genre that was pieced together from disparate styles and impulses and the expression of an outlaw minority throwing off the shackles of repression that were forged in the immutable steel of Nature, disco was skeptical of the “certainties” of the material world. “I Feel Love” once and for all banished the naturalism ascribed to dance music. Pissing on the concept of biology from a great height, Moroder and Bellotte had the African-American Summer playing a Teutonic ice queen with a machine heart singing about biology’s most fundamental act while surrounded by the most synthetic textures ever heard on a record. With songs like this and those of Sylvester (and the entire Hi-NRG genre), disco fostered an identification with the machine that can be read as an attempt to free gay men from the tyranny that dismisses homosexuality as an aberration, as a freak of nature.

  From the Imaginary Landscapes of John Cage through Walter/Wendy Carlos, Throbbing Gristle, Sylvester, and Patrick Cowley to the contemporary transgendered interventions of Terre Thaemlitz and Matmos’s digital reshaping of the world, electronic music has been used as a vehicle to express sexual transgression, as a way of transforming society. As the most visible aspect of this largely invisible history, disco used the fantastic sounds of the new machinery to imagine a brave new world of sexuality. The hypnotic, otherworldly quality of the timbres and the rigidly insistent mechanistic throbs of the Moog and Arp synthesizers used by disco producers like Moroder, Cowley, and Bobby O summed up an aesthetic that sought to upset the “natural” order of things. As the outgrowth of both electronic experimentation and James Brown’s rhythmic dictum, disco was also very much a search for perfection. The metronomes, synths, sequencers, and drum machines created a music of delicious absolutism—the aural parallel to gay culture’s eroticization of discipline and its sole focus on process rather than result (procreation). Disco is the ultimate cyborg music, the ultimate coupling of organism and machine. In this way disco is a parallel to academic Donna Haraway’s championing of the cyborg as a way to undermine the “biological-determinist ideology” that stands in violent opposition to both the women’s and gay rights movements. “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world,” Haraway writes. “It has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense … The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and peversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely
without innocence … Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden.”

  There is a ghost in disco’s cyborg machine, though: camp. “I Feel Love” was as camp as a pink poodle wandering onto the set of a Busby Berkeley musical. Never before, with the possible exception of Eartha Kitt, some of the French yé-yé girls, or the most over-the-top Dionne Warwick production, had a record so reveled in its own artifice. Summer swoons like the woman in Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix or Millais’s The Crown of Love, utterly rapt by some power greater than herself. Summer is hardly the epicene figure so venerated in the camp aesthetic, but her femininity is so exaggerated (as it was on the back cover of the Love to Love You Baby album, where she’s decked out in white Victorian/Southern belle finery, on a swing covered with pink flowers in a pastiche of Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing or Jeanette MacDonald sitting on the same swing being wooed by Nelson Eddy in Naughty Marietta) that her gender is dissolved into the sexless synths.

  Although she supposedly learned to sing in church, Summer’s extreme stylization owes more to the Great White Way than to gospel’s “Milky White Way”—there’s a reason that she had to travel to Europe to make it on the schlager circuit. Disco’s naysayers criticize disco singers for having more in common with Broadway vocalists than with soul’s more “authentic” expressionists. With Summer they’ve got a point—her phrasing wasn’t all that different from Ethel Merman’s or Barbra Streisand’s—but this is the very reason she was crowned “the queen of disco.” The fact is, with one or two exceptions (1982’s “State of Independence,” where Quincy Jones’s West Side Story–style production suited her to a T, and 1983’s “She Works Hard for the Money,” in which the brittle synth stabs and guitar runs paralleled Summer’s eggshell vocals), Summer ain’t a good singer—listen to her version of “Could It Be Magic,” where she gets cut by both Barry Manilow and, umm, Take That. What kept Summer out of both the canon of camp and the soul pantheon was that none of her records (particularly “I Feel Love”) had the anguish, the torture, the wrestling match between guilt and desire that mark out the greatest divas.

  However, with apologies to Loleatta Holloway and Grace Jones, disco wasn’t about divas; disco was producer’s music par excellence, and with Donna Summer disco found its ultimate blank canvas. As Summer told Anthony Haden-Guest, “That was Marilyn Monroe singing [‘Love to Love You Baby’], not me. I’m an actress. That’s why my songs are diverse.”14 Summer was an unknown singer from Boston, Massachusetts, who was in the Munich production of Godspell in 1973 when she met Giorgio Moroder. Their first record together, 1974’s “The Hostage,” was a big hit in both France and the Netherlands, but it had nothing to do with disco and sounded like something you might find on the Kids from Fame soundtrack. Moroder’s first attempt at disco was on his kung fu craze cash-in effort, Roberta Kelly’s “Kung Fu’s Back Again” in late 1974, but it was when he decided to imitate the Philly soul sound with that German backbeat you just can’t lose on, an answer record to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus,” that this pop hack was transformed into the prophet of dance floor automation.

  In its own way, Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” is just as robotic as “I Feel Love.” Quite aside from the relentless dull thud of its machine-assisted drumbeat, there’s a distinctly pushbutton (pun not entirely intended) quality to Summer’s vocals. Meanwhile, those icy keyboard fills in the background are strangely reminiscent of the ghostly antisepticity of the Jupiter probe sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Moroder claims that Philly soul was his inspiration for the arrangement, but it sounds like a dead ringer for the Temptations’ “Masterpiece,” which is from the same album as (and features similar production to) “Law of the Land.”

  Summer quickly grew tired of playing the sex machine, however, as her born-again Christian values increasingly conflicted with her status as disco’s queen. She retreated into standard pop fare like “Love’s Unkind,” “I Love You” (though both of these had a certain German overlord quality about their rhythms), “Last Dance,” and, gasp, “MacArthur Park.” As Moroder told journalist Vince Aletti, “She wouldn’t sing about this, she wouldn’t sing about that. Having her biggest hit with a sexy song, she was suddenly saying that she wouldn’t sing that type of song any more, and then she insisted on having a song about Jesus on her album.”15 As an Italian from Val Gardena in the Dolomites, whose culture has more in common with Germany than the red-sauce-and-pasta stereotype of Italy, and as a musician whose first big hit was a German-language bubblegum-style cover of Sir Douglas Quintet’s roots-rock standard “Mendocino,” Giorgio Moroder had his own history of ambivalence and culture clash. Being stranded between cultures meant that Moroder was not only an excellent mimic, but that electronic music’s quality of erasing “roots” and classification held a particular allure for him, and when Summer decided to play it safe, Moroder kept the electronics for himself.

  Of course, Moroder had a history with the synthesizer well before he met Summer. His 1972 album, Giorgio, featured a song called “Son of My Father” that would be covered a few months later by slumming English glam rockers Chicory Tip and become the first pop #1 to feature a Moog. Intriguingly, the album also had a song called “Automation,” but he reserved the true robot schtick for his 1975 album, Einzelganger, which was composed almost entirely of hopelessly corny vocodered vocals. During this time he also worked with Agnetha Fältskog and Bonnie Tyler, and musing on what might have happened had he not met Donna Summer is just too awful to bear. You might get an idea from his extraordinary 1976 solo album, Knights in White Satin. His version of the Moody Blues song (part of a fourteen-minute suite that takes up side one) does feature some of the most preposterous, unbearably kitschy, just god-awful vocals this side of Richard Harris, but the music was definitive Munich sound—clockwork cowbell kick drum from Keith Forsey, bouncy bass doubled by the Moog, blocky piano chords, and utterly transporting strings—and became a hit on the campest dance floors. The album also included the single entendre of “I Wanna Funk With You Tonite”—easy listening as Hi-NRG, and possibly the most Motown of all of his bass lines.

  More letter-perfect Munich sound came in the form of two albums released, with tongue firmly in cheek, under the name Munich Machine. The real machine music, though, came with his 1977 album, From Here to Eternity, whose back cover boasted, “Only electronic keyboards were used on this recording.” On the title track he combined the bass pulse of “I Feel Love” with Kraftwerk’s synth vapor trails, while on the suite of “Faster Than the Speed of Love” / “Lost Angeles” / “Utopia—Me Giorgio” he again reinvented synthesized rhythm by volleying the solid drum machine pattern with what sounded like pins and needles ricocheting around a cake tin, presaging both the android descarga (a salsa jam session) called Latin freestyle and techno’s drum machine calculus. Unlike “I Feel Love,” though, there was no tension at all, not even a hint of ambivalence. From Here to Eternity was a headlong rush into computer hyperspace, Tron without the dystopian urge, shiny, happy music for the shiny, happy people of the health-and-efficiency-crazed 1980s. Of course, there was something a bit Stepford Wives about it all, but like a cat or a baby you couldn’t help but be transfixed by the sheer radiance of the synth effects.

  As journalist Angus MacKinnon ponted out in a 1978 profile, “This affable and amiable man is not, I surmise, a conceptual metaphysician. He is a producer and, above all,
a businessman.”16 Perhaps this is why he was so eminently qualified to define the sound and gloss of ’80s pop with From Here to Eternity and 1979’s E=MC2. Moroder’s last great record was “Chase” from his soundtrack to Alan Parker’s film Midnight Express. “Chase” used the same materials and virtually the same sounds as “I Feel Love” to conjure the adrenaline rush of terror and loss of control as the film’s protagonist was arrested by Turkish police for drug smuggling. Strangely, it was a big disco hit, and Moroder created the template for that peculiar strain of dance music based on the dark side of nightlife, on fear, on bad drugs, on worse sex. Away from the dance floor, Moroder’s music becomes like Tangerine Dream’s score for Risky Business—there’s a hint of alienation, but it’s the alienation of privilege and not giving a fuck. It’s the alienation of the salesman. Of course, there’s something vital about electrobubblegum music giving the finger to the pretense and portent of rock, something liberating about its utter detachment from meaning and the discrimination of “value.” But without the community of the dance floor, it all rings rather hollow. The machine needs social interaction just as much as humans do.