Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  The hip-hop DJs were after a kind of low-end militancy, and the records they chose were full of drum tattoos, black holes of bass, scorched-earth screams, and searing guitars. The two archetypal hip-hop breaks were Jimmy Castor’s “It’s Just Begun,” in which a roiling bass line and insistent flanged guitars built a manic intensity that was brought to boiling point by the Latin percussion and scything guitar solo, and the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache,” which sounded like a drum phalanx marching on the bandits in a spaghetti western flick. It’s not just coincidence that most of the titles of the classic hip-hop breaks are imperatives (“Get Into Something,” “Listen to Me,” “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat”) or filled with warlike images (“Apache,” “Theme From S.W.A.T.”). Marking a break from the gospel-inspired soul continuum, hip-hop wasn’t turning the other cheek; it was staking a claim and asserting itself.

  However ridiculous the imagery may have been, disco was fixated on a romantic vision of the good life—the syrupy strings and lush chorales were the aural equivalent of soft-focus boudoir photography. Hip-hop, on the other hand, was about the here and now and self-determination; there was no time to waste on romance. Just as the DJs didn’t bother with the niceties of buildup, tension, or contextualization and went straight for the climactic break beat, hip-hop culture couldn’t be bothered with foreplay either. Echoing Steve Dahl’s complaints about disco’s alleged superficiality, Grandmaster Flash derided the Trammps, Donna Summer, and the Bee Gees as “sterile music.”119 The sexual metaphor couldn’t have been more apt. While there was some class resentment in both disco critiques, the main focus of the “disco sucks” brigade and the hip-hop crews was disco’s questionable sexuality. In the mass consciousness, hip-hop began with the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 single “Rapper’s Delight,” which featured “Big Bank Hank” Jackson rapping, “She said, ‘I go by the name Lois Lane / And you can be my boyfriend, you surely can / Just let me quit my boyfriend called Superman’ / I said, ‘He’s a fairy I do suppose / Flying through the air in pantyhose / He may be very sexy or even cute / But he looks like a sucker in a blue and red suit … He can’t satisfy you with his little worm / But I can bust you out with my super sperm.’” It may have been fairly harmless, but this was only the beginning of literally hundreds of antigay rhymes in hip-hop, most of which are a lot less funny.

  However, it would take hip-hop several more years before it would become a constant presence in the mainstream. Instead, disco’s hustle to the top of the charts was largely hogtied by hip-hop’s racial inverse, country music. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the American Top 40 was filled with ditties by Dolly Parton, Crystal Gayle, Kenny Rogers, the Oak Ridge Boys, Johnny Paycheck, Alabama, and Eddie Rabbitt. Perhaps the most significant of these hits was “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by the Charlie Daniels Band, which hit #3 in the summer of 1979. Hardly your archetypal country song about Mom and the good old days or crying in your beer because your woman left you, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” told the tale of Satan challenging a cocky good ol’ boy named Johnny to a fiddling duel. The devil was joined by a “band of demons” who played a pretty mean disco-funk vamp over the top of which Beelzebub improvised some evil Psycho-style string gashes. Johnny, on the other hand, played it strictly traditional, like you could hear on any Appalachian back porch. Despite the protests of millions of people who knew nothing about the eternal verities of old-timey string band music and thought that Johnny was cut by Mephistopheles, Johnny won the duel and saved his soul. While the record would never have crossed over to the pop charts without its disco touches, the implicit antidisco message of the song couldn’t have been clearer either. The South’s reaction to disco was perhaps most succinctly summed up by an album by Arizonan Western Swing group Chuck Wagon & the Wheels titled Country Swings, Disco Sucks.

  The Charlie Daniels Band had first come to attention in 1975 with “The South Is Gonna Do It,” a pugnacious assertion of regional pride that fitted neatly alongside songs like Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” Tanya Tucker’s “I Believe the South’s Gonna Rise Again,” and Hank Williams Jr.’s “The South’s Gonna Rattle Again.” This veritable litany of redneck anthems voiced Dixie’s defiance after the shame of segregation and the defeat of Jim Crow by the “second war of Northern aggression.” The good ol’ boys below the Mason-Dixon Line weren’t going to have pencil-necked geeks from up north tell them how to run things anymore; they were going to don their cowboy boots, get into their flatbed Fords, kick some in-tell-ect-chools’ asses, and raise a little hell.

  Since the end of the Civil War, the South had been the “sick man of America,” the racist, bucktoothed simpleton that the rest of the country tried to hide in its room to spare their embarrassment. But a funny thing happened on the way home from the civil rights march—the South reinvented itself. With the dawn of the 1970s, the South changed almost overnight from the poor, rural backwater presided over by a tobacco-chompin’ cracker sheriff who lynched first and asked questions later to a region that boasted the largest concentration of high-tech industries in the country.120 Much of this growth was at the expense of what was, since the Industrial Revolution, America’s industrial heartland—the Rust Belt, which ran roughly from Duluth, Minnesota, to Boston, Massachusetts. While the Rust Belt was indeed rusting, people and businesses moved down south at a rate that effectively reversed “the great migration” that occurred during the first half of the century. New York governor Hugh Carey warned that the Northern industrial region was in danger of becoming “‘a great national museum’ where tourists would see ‘industrial plants as artifacts’ and visit ‘the great railroad stations where the trains used to run.’”121 The response from the booming Sun Belt, where there was virtually no public transport and everyone drove across the sprawl of the world’s largest metropolitan areas, was a bumper sticker that read, “Let ’Em Shiver in the Dark.”122

  Blackouts, gasoline shortages, a faltering currency—these were striking symbols of the waning of American power. But while the Northern states moaned, the Sun Belt took the bull by the horns and fought back. The South’s newfound pride ran against the prevailing mood of a nation that was facing what Bruce Schulman called a “crisis of confidence.”123 The perilous state of the United States in the ’70s had taught many Americans that they could no longer rely on the government and liberalism, and had to rely on themselves instead. In declaring its self-confidence, the Sun Belt delved deep into the country’s soul and reconfigured America’s most cherished icon, the cowboy. Cowboy chic was everywhere in the late ’70s and early ’80s in an attempt to heal the wounded psyche of the American male. The real American man was not someone who pranced about in a leisure suit (let alone sequined hot pants and makeup) and was a lady killer on the dance floor, but someone who wore jeans and a Resistol hat and could kill his own supper. While the new man of the new South was certainly no rhinestone cowboy, he wasn’t the same man who had conquered the West, nor was he the ign’rant poor white trash who spent his days at the fishing hole and his nights at the whiskey still. The new Southern male still had a gun rack on his pickup truck, but he was an engineer at a company in North Carolina’s Research Triangle; he still attended church every Sunday, but he worked for NASA; he was a banker in Atlanta but rejected the Brooks-Brothers-suit-and-yacht-club conservatism of the Northeast Republicans in favor of a populist brand of conservatism that was first articulated by the Sun Belt’s Barry Goldwater in 1964.124 Instead of lassoing steers and bucking broncos, the cowboy now tamed the market. America’s mythical rugged individualism had been replaced by entrepreneurial zeal.

  The biggest change in the new Southerner, though, was that his views on race had moved into the mainstream. As soon as the most vile aspects of the Jim Crow South had been eliminated by the bus boycotts, voter drives, marches, and
civil rights legislation, the focus of America’s race problem shifted to the Northern metropolitan areas. In cities like Denver and Boston, there was massive resistance to school busing and other court-ordered remedies for de facto segregation, there was widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s welfare program, and efforts at urban renewal were stymied at every level. The South’s distrust of big government and the welfare state, and the racial dynamic of that hatred, had come to dominate America’s political discourse.

  Disco, in a sense, was liberalism’s last hurrah, the final party before the neocon apocalypse. Disco’s own last hurrah was Chic’s “Good Times,” a song that seemed to know exactly what was on the horizon. Here were those George Romero zombies again, only now they were articulating the sense of impending doom that lay behind their death march: “A rumor has it that it’s getting late / Time marches on, just can’t wait / The clock keeps turning, why hesitate? / You silly fool, you can’t change your fate.” Two years later, before Reagan made jingoism fashionable again, country singer Merle Haggard recorded his own eulogy for the good times, “Are the Good Times Really Over? (I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver).” Unlike Chic, Haggard believed that he could turn back the clock. Disco’s fatalism was replaced by nostalgia; its lapsed utopianism replaced by a meanness that was camouflaged by a homespun simplicity: “I wish a buck was still silver / And it was back when the country was strong / Back before Elvis and before the Vietnam War came along / Before The Beatles and ‘Yesterday’ / When a man could still work and still would … / It was back before Nixon lied to us all on TV / Before microwave ovens, when a girl could still cook and still would / Is the best of the free life behind us now? / And are the good times really over for good?” While Haggard believed that if we all “[Stood] up for the flag and [rang] the Liberty Bell, the best of the free life [was] still yet to come,” for disco the good times were really over for good.

  6

  “SO WHY SHOULD I BE ASHAMED?”

  Disco Goes Underground

  In March 1982, Studio 54, once the epicenter of fabulous, was converted into a low-key “salon.” “The music will be soft and classical,” an invitation to an after-work “party” read, “and serve only as a background to encourage lively conversation and business interactions. There will be no dancing music or flashing lights.”1 These quiet gatherings, which took place on Wednesdays between five and ten in the evening, were networking sessions for businessmen and stockbrokers who paid $8 for the privilege. They were so successful that they were soon held on Sunday evenings as well. Presiding over the exchanges of business cards and hush-hush stock tips was former ’60s radical turned free-market apologist Jerry Rubin. The yippie had turned yuppie, and Studio 54 was now awash in the preppies and Upper East Side single guys that Steve Rubell was once so hell-bent on preventing from entering his pleasure dome. The ’80s had definitely arrived.

  The ’80s may have been dreadfully drab and frightfully conservative compared to the rhinestone radiance of the ’70s, but disco’s eclipse by Reagan’s “morning in America” wasn’t just the result of Steve Dahl’s pogrom or the South rising again. Like all subcultures and artistic movements, disco sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Not in the sense that disco gorged itself to death on its own decadence, but that sprouting within its very essence was the kernel of the generation that followed. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the celebrities who abandoned the discotheque as their clubhouse when the next big thing appeared on the horizon. And at the dawn of the ’80s that big thing was a return to “American values”—no more European extravagance and social welfare programs, just plain, homespun truths, hard work, and John Wayne riding in on his white horse.

  While the look of the Reagan era did away with the polyester, wide ties, and even wider lapels of the ’70s, much of its sensibility was born in the disco era. Along with Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein was the prime mover of ’80s fashion in America; his minimally elegant clothing set the tone for a country that was going back to basics and pursuing the American dream with a renewed vigor. While Klein cannily rode the zeitgeist, what was really remarkable about him was not his clothes but his marketing, which was an outgrowth of the style of the clubs he used to hang out in during the ’70s. As journalist Michael Gross suggested, Klein was obsessed with attaining the mystique of fellow Studio 54 habitué Halston and pulled no punches when it came to pursuing celebrity—even if that meant putting your name on the ass of every woman in America.2 More important, though, Klein’s advertisements, with the help of photographer Bruce Weber, promulgated a style that had its roots in the Fire Island Pines (where Klein shared a house with fellow designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo) and in his favorite haunts: 12 West, the Flamingo, and Studio 54.

  Klein’s ads utilized sexual innuendo and fetishized the male body in a way never seen before in mainstream American culture. Of course, if you had ever seen a Flamingo flyer or cruised the busboys at Studio, the ads were nothing new. As Frank Rich wrote of the Calvin Klein aesthetic, “The Klein style excluded unpretty men, zaftig women, the imperfect, the overweight, the square … As had also been true of the discos that restricted entry to the gay and the pretty, there was a scent of fascistic decadence to the Klein ads.”3 What was strange, though, was how this taboo iconography, this imagery from a group that was damned to hell by most of Reagan’s main constituency, fit in so well with the prevailing culture. As Rich concluded about Klein’s gay-derived ads, “The new body worship was nothing if not in tune with the moneyed, selfish culture of the Reagan years.”4

  Sure, most of disco’s celebs, hucksters, and lucky chancers cut their hair, put on some jeans and penny loafers, and slid easily into the Brie and chardonnay parties ushered in by Reaganomics. But what rose from disco’s ashes wasn’t a glorious phoenix, but a two-headed beast that was just as contradictory as disco during its heyday. While disco was never about anything other than sensual gratification of the most extreme kind, it was never simply mindless escapism either. As journalist Vince Aletti wrote, “A good case could be made for it as a tribal rite, an affirmation of high spirits and shared delight, a coming together to let loose that in no way ignores the problems of everyday life … but relieves them.”5 Although disco helped define the narcissism and rapaciousness of the Reagan-era mainstream, the other side of disco—its communitarian spirit and challenge to puritan constrictions—was kept alive by both revelers and theorists in the underground.

  Drugs brought money back and Reagan was elected president and shit went on. In fact that’s the sad part: hippies survived Nixon, but punk caved in to Ronald Reagan, know what I’m saying? Punk couldn’t actually take a good challenge.

  —Mick Farren

  When punk rock exploded out of the dingy clubs of New York and London in the mid-1970s, it was hailed as the most exciting thing to happen to popular music since the Beatles. Punk’s champions praised the new sound as a kick in the butt to a stagnating, self-important music scene and as a burst of liberating energy that cut through the Valium haze of the ’70s. As the liner notes to Streets, a compilation of punk singles, declared, “1977 was the year that the music came out of the concert halls and onto the streets; when independent labels sprang out of the woodwork to feed new tastes; when rock music once again became about energy and fun; when the majors’ boardrooms lost control. Suddenly we could do anything.”6

  Although punk and disco were often seen as sworn enemies, the truth was that, despite John Holmstrom’s editorial in the inaugural issue of Punk magazine (see Chapter 5), in many ways they were actually allies. Both the mainstream white rock community and the black community alienated, and were alienated by, disco and punk. In different ways, both genres celebrated and openly mocked the spectacle of rock’s bloated, rotting corpse. “I never really cared much for rock music of that time,” says engineer/producer Bob Blank, who worked with both disco divas Musique and punk priestess Lydia Lunch, reflecting punk’s critique of the rock scene. “It was very self-important. Dance music
seemed a lot earthier and fun.”7 Disco’s questioning of the sanctity of the work of art with DJ mixes and making the clubbers themselves the stars was essentially the same strategy, and just as much of a challenge to rock’s cult of personality, as that of punk. As punk chronicler Jon Savage said, “Many of the qualities of Disco that were so derided were mirror images of those qualities that were celebrated in Punk: an annihilating insistence on sex as opposed to puritan disgust; a delight in a technology as opposed to a Luddite reliance on the standard Rock group format; acceptance of mass production as opposed to individuality. It was the difference between 1984 and Brave New World, between a social realist dystopia, and a nightmare all the more realistic because accomplished through seduction.”8