Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco
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Coming from Chicago—a place that poet Carl Sandburg once dubbed the “City of the Big Shoulders” and whose character is largely defined by the substantial population of white ethnics that Nixon turned into his silent majority—Dahl’s disco riot was emblematic of the politics of resentment of the white everyman that would enable the 1980s conservative revolution. The disco riot was a weird tangent to the skirmishes—beginning with Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew assailing the liberal media as the “nattering nabobs of negativism” in 1970 and the 1974 battle over the presence of books by black power activist Eldridge Cleaver and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in a school library in West Virginia—that finally escalated into a full-fledged culture war when Reverend Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. That same year, the “pro-God, pro-family” former beauty queen and orange juice shill Anita Bryant fought to have gay rights ordinances repealed in Miami, Florida, St. Paul, Minnesota, Wichita, Kansas, and Eugene, Oregon. She called her campaign “Save Our Children,” and one of her refrains was, “If homosexuality were the normal way, God would have made Adam and Bruce.”104 Despite her efforts, it was Steve Dahl and his foot soldiers—even though they were the ones who desecrated the altar—who managed to have the most visible flowering of gay liberation excommunicated from the church of American popular culture.
It wasn’t just deviant sexuality, though, that rankled the straight white male of the Midwest. It was something far worse: impotence. Detroit had once been the shining industrial beacon of the American economic miracle. Its massive car factories provided high-paid blue-collar jobs to just about everyone, and the images of third-generation Germans, Jews, recent Polish immigrants, and newly arrived African Americans from the Deep South working side by side on the shop floor were enduring symbols of both the might and beneficence of American capitalism. In the face of the gasoline crises of 1973 and 1979, and with a tsunami of cheap Japanese cars flooding the country, Motor City was in deep trouble. In the freezing winter of 1976–77, the electric company was forced to cut voltage throughout the state of Michigan, “dimming lights and darkening moods,” as historian Bruce Schulman put it.105 The beacon was shining no more.
Not only was America overly dependent on foreign oil, but the dollar was now hitting all-time lows against the German mark and Japanese yen. Inflation was running rampant, exacerbated by OPEC price increases, and President Jimmy Carter seemed powerless to do anything about it. As interest rates rose to unprecedented levels, Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, announced that Americans’ standard of living would decline for the first time in living memory. The ultimate humiliation, though, occurred on November 4, 1979, when Fundamentalist Muslim students stormed the American embassy in Tehran, Iran, and took its sixty-six occupants hostage. America’s might had not only been questioned but openly mocked by a country that had escaped feudalism a mere twenty-five years earlier. With its mincing campness, air-brushed superficiality, limp rhythms, flaccid guitars, fey strings, and overproduced sterility, disco seemed emblematic of America’s dwindling power. The high falsettos of disco stars like the Bee Gees and Sylvester sounded the death knell for the virility of the American male. Disco came from New York, “Sodom on the Hudson,” the home of both namby-pamby knee-jerk liberals and Spiro Agnew’s “Northeast liberal media elite.” Viewed in this context, Dahl’s military pomp makes a bit of sense: He was waging a war on the enemy within that was draining America of its life force.
Dahl’s shenanigans wouldn’t be the last we would hear from disco in the sacred confines of the ballpark, though. In fact, that very same year, Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was the theme song of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The song, which quickly became an anthem for feminists and gay rights activists, was put back in the hands of the patriarchy at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. The team was nicknamed “The Family” and its captain was thirty-nine-year-old Willie “Pops” Stargell, who would often lead the fans in singing the song’s chorus during games. Even though the Pirates went on to win the World Series that year with the song as their soundtrack, the sanitization of disco had begun. It was now safe to be used as fodder for car advertisements and highlight reels: The graffiti were on the wall and disco was dead.
However, for those really paying attention, the first alarm bell that signaled disco’s death—and the birth of something new—in the mainstream was set off in October 1977 during the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Yankee Stadium is situated at 161st Street and River Avenue on the west end of the South Bronx, at the time probably the most notorious urban area on earth. During game one of the series, which took place in the evening, the sky surrounding the stadium was noticeably orange, and ABC, the network televising the game, frequently cut to aerial shots provided by the ever-present Goodyear blimp of buildings on Charlotte Street, a couple of miles to the northeast of the stadium, burning to the ground. During one of these shots, the sportscaster Howard Cosell announced to the nation, “There it is again, ladies and gentlemen. The Bronx is burning.”
During the mid-1970s, the South Bronx had an average of twelve thousand fires a year; it lost 40 percent of its housing stock and 57 percent of its population.106 The infant mortality rate in this twelve-square-mile area was twenty-nine per one thousand births (the national average was thirteen per one thousand), and 25 percent of the city’s malnutrition cases occurred here.107 The reasons for this degeneration were numerous: the building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, completed in 1963, had destroyed many previously tight-knit, middle-class neighborhoods, creating “instant slums”108 in their place; high city taxes had forced many of the borough’s manufacturing businesses to relocate to the suburbs or out of state altogether; in the late 1950s, the city began a policy whereby a substantial number of welfare recipients were essentially “dumped” in the South Bronx by offering landlords above-market rents to house them; Housing Preservation and Development Administrator Roger Starr’s policy of “planned shrinkage,” which advocated that many essential services be removed from “sick” neighborhoods in order to concentrate diminishing resources elsewhere;109 and, most crucially of all, building owners realized that they could recoup some of their failing investments through fire insurance payments. “Some of the fires were accidents, the inevitable result of decaying electrical systems,” wrote journalist Robert Worth. “Many were set by landlords who would then collect the insurance money. Often they would sell the building—whether it was still inhabited or not—to ‘finishers’ who would strip out the electrical wiring, plumbing fixtures, and anything else that could be sold for a profit before torching it. ‘Sometimes there’d be a note delivered telling you the place would burn that night,’ one man who lived through the period told me. ‘Sometimes not.’ People got used to sleeping with their shoes on, so that they could escape if the building began to burn.”110
While the residents of “Fort Apache” were suffering with a median income of $5,200 (around half the New York City average), the absentee landlords were making out like bandits: In 1975 alone, they earned $10 million in insurance payouts.111 Decimated by such neglect and horrible planning decisions, faced with a crime rate spiraling out of control, and with no reason for civic pride, the Bronx became a brutal place to live. The first generation of 1970s children and teenagers in the Bronx was the first group to try to piece together bits from this urban scrap heap. Like carrion crows and hunter-gatherers, they picked through the debris to create their own sense of community, finding vehicles for self-expression from cultural ready-mades, throw-aways, and aerosol cans. If disco’s clubgoers, DJs, musicians, and producers were fiddling while New York burned, these kids from the Bronx were trying to make sculptures from the cinders. What rose from the ashes was hip-hop, and mainstream America first caught sight of its milieu in the fires outside of Yankee Stadium on that crisp October night in 1977.
Autumn couldn’t come soon enough for most New Yorkers that year. It was one of the hottest
summers on record: In the middle of July, it was over 100° for eight straight days. The Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional) continued its three-year-old terrorist campaign by exploding bombs in the Chrysler Building, the Manhattan offices of Gulf & Western and Mobil Oil, the American Bank Note Company, the New York headquarters of the FBI, a Madison Avenue building used by the Defense Department, and three Manhattan department stores. The city was further terrorized by David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” serial killer, who had murdered his tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth victims in June and July after several months of inactivity. And right in the middle of that July heatwave, on July 13, lightning struck an electrical transmission line in upstate New York, and by 9:35 p.m. the entire city was plunged into darkness. Unlike the blackout of November 1965 (or, indeed, that of August 2003) which saw quiet and orderly streets and a solidarity among complete strangers who helped each other out, looting and arson broke out all over the city within minutes of the 1977 power failure. By the time power was restored the next evening, there had been 1,037 fires, the city had suffered $300 million worth of damage, and the police had arrested more than three thousand people.112
The looters were variously described by commentators as “urban insect life,” “vultures,” and “a jackal pack.”113 Historian Herbert Gutman wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times decrying such characterizations and comparing them to the way Jewish women had been described as “animals” and “beasts” during a meat riot in 1902.114 The reaction to Gutman’s article was just as fierce as the reaction to the looters themselves. Historian Joshua Freeman described the outpouring of hostility in the Letters to the Editor section of The Times: “Over and over, the letter writers proclaimed how different their impoverished forebearers had been from the current poor, how the 1902 rioters were engaged in legitimate protest, while the blackout looters ‘sought only selfish gain.’ A Times editorial characterized the letters as raising ‘the “my grandfather” question: “My grandfather pushed a pushcart all over the Lower East Side to earn enough to feed and raise his family. He worked to make it. Why can’t they?”’ It left unaddressed the utter lack of empathy among the letter writers for New York’s poor, the meanness and self-satisfaction that pervaded their outrage at Gutman’s linkage of their ancestors with contemporary rioters in his effort to show that the animal metaphor always ‘separates the behavior of the discontented poor from the conditions that shape their discontent.’”115
New Yorkers may have lampooned the tax revolts of California and the born-again morality of the Bible Belt, but the failure of liberalism had instilled its own version of that mind-set in what was once liberalism’s capital city. “Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” had turned into “Round up the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses and get ’em off the streets—they’re stinking up the joint.” Even though it was never explicitly stated, the root of this shifting attitude was race: The looters were by and large black, the shopkeepers were mostly white. The dehumanized pack animals roared back by wallowing in the “go for yourself” greed and smoldering spite and projected it right back at white society.
If the dream of the 1960s was finally incinerated with the 1977 blackout, a new dream, a new set of values, a new way of seeing the world was born on that same day. Hip-hop had been slowly gaining popularity across the Bronx since Kool DJ Herc unwittingly created the aesthetic at his parties at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in 1973. Crews centered on a new breed of DJs like Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Grand Wizard Theodore, and DJ Breakout were proliferating throughout the borough. Two of these DJs, DJ Disco Wiz and DJ Casanova Fly (soon to become known as Grandmaster Caz), had brought their sound system to the park on 183rd Street and Valentine Avenue on July 13, 1977. Caz had just dropped the needle on DC LaRue’s “Indiscreet” (a disco record that appealed to him because of the long break highlighting the kick drum pattern, making it perfect to rap over) when two lights in the park blew out. “And then the streetlights started goin’ out one at a time, all the way up the block, like ‘poof, poof, poof, poof, poof,’” Caz told filmmaker Charlie Ahearn. “We looked at each other. I go, ‘Oh shit,’ ’cause we’re plugged into one of the streetlights, and I thought we blew out the whole street! The whole neighborhood went dark … People are like, ‘What’s happening?’ Then one person screams, ‘Blackout! Hit the stores!’… Everybody stole turntables and stuff. Every electronic store imaginable got hit for stuff. Every record store. Everything. That sprung a whole new set of DJs. It’s funny, ’cause I have a theory,” Wiz continues. “You know what? Before that blackout, you had maybe five legitimate crews of DJs. After the blackout, you had a DJ on every block … That blackout made a big spark in the hip-hop revolution.”116
While the nascent hip-hop nation was going for itself by any means necessary, disco’s revelers kept the party going by any means necessary and evoked a rather different “nation.” “The night of the blackout, people stayed over all night,” the Loft’s David Mancuso told journalist Vince Aletti. “We had candles and played radios and people were sleeping over, camping out. It was very peaceful, a little Woodstockish. The party still went on.”117 Disco may have traded the campfire sing-along of the ’60s counterculture for glitterballs and strobe lights, but underneath all the medallion-clad bravado and feathered airheadedness was a longing for community, a desire to belong. Disco may have had a hard gloss and an icy, metallic sheen, but it could still be warm and fuzzy when it needed to.
You could never say that about hip-hop. Hip-hop’s raison d’être was the “battle”—a ferocious display of one-upmanship among DJs, MCs, b-boys, and graffiti artists where each participant would try to come up with the most outlandish flourish, the most original stylization, or the most damning insult. Its fierce competitive nature—its echoes of Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef meeting face to face at the big gundown—was precisely why it appealed to kids left to fend for themselves in the lawlessness of the ghost towns of the Bronx. The outlaw vibe was reinforced by the only community that hip-hop seemed to recognize, the “posse”: a group of DJs, MCs, bodyguards, friends from the block, and hangers-on affiliated to one another by bonds of loyalty, honor, and money. Hip-hop’s only pleasure principle seemed to be the art of survival. The musicians who were (and are) celebrated were the ones left standing after the microphone wars and turntable crossfire. Listen to tapes of the early parties and it’s all shout-outs to people in the crowd, “All the Scorpios in the house, make some noise!”; “Everyone from the boogie-down Bronx, I wanna hear you scream!”—as if acknowledging one’s very existence was reason enough to have a party.
Disco, too, was “born to be alive.” Like hip-hop, it was originally a sort of naming ritual: the declaration of the existence, rights, and pleasures of a group of pariahs. Through their use of much the same techniques, disco and hip-hop were in many ways the flip side of the same coin: one keeping the groove going in order to foster a communitarian, celebratory spirit, the other splitting and chopping the beat to highlight the virtuosic abilities of its participants. Both were after a sense of empowerment: one by the force of numbers, the other by individual heroics. It’s little wonder, then, that at the very beginnings of hip-hop, it and disco were hard to separate: DC LaRue and disco obscurity “Pussy Footer” by Jackie Robinson at the park jams; according to legend, Afrika Bambaataa attended some of the Loft parties; Grandmaster Flash was an original member of the Record Pool; the Sugarhill Gang rapping over Chic’s “Good Times”; the bulk of the Sugarhill house band being made up of members of Wood, Brass & Steel, a jazz fusion group that had a disco hit with “Funkanova”; early rap star Kurtis Blow opening up for Chic on one of its tours and playing at the legendary disco club Paradise Garage shortly after his first single, “Christmas Rappin’,” was released.
Of course, both disco and hip-hop were originally figments of the DJs’ imaginations and fingertips: In the early days, it was the respective DJs’ taste that dete
rmined what was or wasn’t a disco or hip-hop record. Like all twins (it’s up to you which one sports the pencil mustache and wears the black leather jumpsuit à la Michael Knight’s evil twin in everyone’s favorite episode of Knight Rider), hip-hop and disco share the same DNA—the break, the short section of a record where most of the instrumentalists drop out to “give the drummer some.” The archetypal disco breaks are the ones on Titanic’s “Sultana” and Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl You Need a Change of Mind.” The Norwegian rock group’s “Sultana” is the blueprint for Eurodisco: cod-Latin percussion to connote summertime on a beach in Ibiza and an unchanging “groove” that resides in some strange netherworld between rock and funk where uptight librarians thrust and shake their hips in an unconvincing manner. Spacious and spacey, with congas twisting around Kendricks’s short vocal interjections like a reggae dub mix, the break on “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” was like an old-fashioned gospel breakdown, slowing the pace, giving the dancers or worshippers time to relax, put their hands in the air, whoop and shout hosannas to the DJ or the Lord before the main thrust of the record comes back in for a rousing finale. The hip-hop break was just the opposite: It was the most intense part of the record, the part that the dancers waited for to showcase their most devastating moves. As Danny Krivit, one of the few DJs who spun for both crowds in the ’70s and ’80s, says, “A lot of that [hip-hop] stuff was a lot livelier. If you played Titanic and Tribe [another early disco prototype] next to that, it came off very straight and disco. They really had a consistency and straightness to it, and the style of dancing didn’t lend itself to that, they didn’t explode on records like that. These other records that they focused on were a lot harder, and when you saw the style that they danced, you could tell right away that something like Titanic was too straightforward.”118