The worst disco sleeve of all time?

Wandering the streets of Peckham this evening I came across a box of records outside a house, mostly 1970s and 1980s and mostly not very good. I did pick up a 12" Scritti Politti single though (The Word Girl) and Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasure Drome. Oh and 'The Hit Squad - Nightclubbing - over 60 minutes non-stop disco'...

This is a 1983 compilation from the last days of disco, with some decent tracks on it such as Freez's Arthur Baker-produced Brit-funk classic IOU. But that cover, designed so it says by Shoot that Tiger! with an illustration by Paul Cemmick... It's not that it's a bad picture - motorcycle emptiness chic would have been quite acceptable in the period in, say, 2000AD magazine or on a heavy metal sleeve. It's just so not disco. OK obviously there was a whole leather queen gay iconography at the time, but this is more Mad Max than Kenneth Anger. What were they thinking of?

It was released on Ronco records, which I believe focused on TV advertised compilations.

Smash Hits Disco Chart September 1979

Getting totally addicted to Like Punk Never Happened: Brian McCluskey's Smash Hits Archive. Whole issues of the late 1970s/early 1980s UK pop magazine scanned in for you to browse at your leisure. So much stuff in there: photos, lyrics, gig listings, charts. Just the disco chart alone will keep me going for months.

So here's the disco chart from September 20 1979 (click to enlarge), complete with BPM for all you DJs. Looking at it they seemed to define disco rather broadly - reggae gets a look in with Matumbi and Eddie Grant. Could call it a black music chart, though Ian Dury and Roxy Music also feature. Guess it's all music that might be played in a disco, which is fair enough. Anyway The Crusaders' Street Life was number one, with Sister Sledge, Donna Summer, Earth, Wind & Fire and Rose Royce all present and correct, among others.



Have a dig around in Smash Hits and let me know what you find - there's treasure in there of all kinds (post-punk, disco, reggae, pop...)

10 Brit-Funk Greats

At the Salvation Army charity shop on Deptford High Street this week I came across this classic 12" from 1980.
I knew it was a sign that I had to get around to finishing the long delayed post on Brit-funk (or jazz funk as some prefer to call it). I will spare you the analysis now and let the music speak for itself, but suffice it to say that it is incredible to me that so little has been written about the outpouring of UK dance music creativity in the late 70s/early 80s compared with the amount that has been written about punk and post-punk from the same period.

I have chosen ten hit tracks which some true soul boys and girls might slightly turn their nose up at for being a bit obvious - but these were the soundtrack to the weddings and school discos of my childhood so I will try and be true to that.

Real Thing - Can you feel the force? (1979)



The Real Thing were the forerunners. The band started out in Liverpool in 1970 and indeed the title of their 1977 album Four from Eight references the Liverpool 8 area (Toxteth). They had a string of soul hits (notably You to Me are Everything) but had definitely embraced the funk by the time of 1979's Can you Feel the Force? Mention of the Force obviously links this to the wave of Star Wars pop from that time, but really this is a nice slice of disco utopianism: 'You can feel the pressure lifting off your head, People who make war are making love instead, This could be the dawning of another time, Hatred is a stranger we can see the sign... Peace and love forming everywhere, Can you feel the force?'

Loose Ends - Hangin' on a String (1985)  

Real Thing brothers Chris Amoo and Eddie Amoo also wrote songs for others including early material for early 1980s London trio Loose Ends. The band featured vocalist and guitarist Carl McIntosh, vocalist Jane Eugene, and keyboard player and founder Steve Nichol. In 1985, Hangin' on a String became the first British track to top the US R'n'B chart.

Heatwave - Boogie Nights (1977)  

 Heatwave were an international outfit rather than British as such, but they were started in London by ex-US serviceman Johnnie Wilder and his brother Keith. Among the musicians they recruited to the band was keyboardist Rod Temperton who wrote the biggest hit, Boogie Nights (reached number 2 in UK and US charts). Temperton later wrote songs for Michael Jackson - yes the guy who wrote Thriller, Off the Wall and Rock with Me came from Cleethorpes!

Light of the World - Time (1980)



Light of the World were a north London band whose members spawned many other Brit-funk projects (see below). Also check out their great London anthem, London Town.

Central Line - Walking into Sunshine (1982)

A great track by Central Line that was remixed at the time by Larry Levan of Paradise Garage fame. The person who posted this on youtube mentioned that he saw this band at the California Ballroom in Dunstable in the 1970s supporting Heatwave. My mum and dad first met at that place some years before, so I guess I owe everything to that place.

Beggar and Co - Somebody help me out (1981)



Beggar and Co. was formed by three members of Light of the World. They also worked on Spandau Ballet's funk workout Chant No.1 ( Don't Need This Pressure On).

Hi-Tension - Hi-Tension (1978)



North London Brit-funkers founded by brothers David and Kenneth Joseph. See also their British Hustle.

Freeez - Southern Freeez (1981)


Freeez was initiated by John Rocca. Could equally have included their Arthur Baker produced electro classic IOU. Light of the World's Jean Paul Maunick was also in this band for a while, before he went on to form Incognito - the band that carried the torch on to the next generation of British funk bands in the 1990s Acid Jazz scene.

Imagination - Music and Lights (1982)


Formed in 1981, Imagination were and wore the campest of the Brit-funk outfits, headed by lead singer Leee John. I never really forgave him for saying that he voted Conservative at some point in the 1980s, but I guess you could make a case that that was just one of many ways that he refused to conform to other people's expectations of what a Black British man should do.

Linx - You're lying (1980)



So back to Linx, who in my view made some of the greatest tracks from this time. As well as this song, they also had a hit with the outstanding Intuition among others. The band was formed by David Grant and Peter Martin. The former went on to have solo hits, the latter joined post-punk industrial funk band 23 Skidoo.

Well could do a lot more than ten, but that's enough to start with. Will leave you now with a question which I may come back to in another post: 'Soul and funk were a more significant factor in preventing support for racist parties like the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s than punk, reggae and Rock Against Racism. Discuss'.

Loleatta Holloway (1946-2011)

Disco legend Loleatta Holloway died last night at the age of 64. For me, her best tracks were on the great Salsoul label in the 1970s, including Hit and Run, Catch me on the Rebound and my personal favourite Runaway (put out under the name Salsoul Orchestra featuring Loleatta Holloway)



Ironically her voice is probably best known to UK listeners via a track she wasn't even credited with singing on. In 1989, Ride on Time was a massive number one hit for italian piano-house producers Black Box. The track was built around vocal samples from Loleatta Holloway's Love Sensation, but Holloway was unaware of this until she heard it. She took legal action and managed to secure a share of the income.

It has been suggested that Black Box themselves were unaware of the origin of the vocal:

'It is also worth noting that Black Box were just as surprized as Holloway was to find out who actually sang the vocal. The vocal track was in all likelihood lifted from an unlabelled bootleg of a capella mixes on the album 'DJ Essentials Inc. Acappella Anonymous Volume 1' which included more than a dozen instrument-free vocals, among them Loleatta Holloway's 'Love Sensation'. A careful listen to a number of songs around the same period - including German-based duo Snap's UK Number One 'The Power' which features an ad lib from Jocelyn Brown's 1986 single 'Love's Gonna Get You', and Manchester's Happy Mondays' 'Hallelujah', which uses samples from The Southroad Connection's 'In the Mornin' - reveals that the vocals were all taken from this very same album' (Tony Bennett, Rock and popular music: politics, policies, institutions, 1993).

I do find it hard to believe that discophile producers could have been totally unaware of Loleatta Holloway, and to add insult to injury they used a model to mime the vocals in the video. But notwithstanding that, the affair raised some interesting questions in those early days of sampling. On the one hand, sampling seemed to offer a limitless horizon in which the whole of recorded culture was up for grabs. I defended the right of KLF to rip off samples from Abba and others in the same period on the basis that they were subversively detourning popular culture. On the other hand it was notable that sampling was reproducing the earlier pattern of popular musics, whereby mainly white record companies, producers and artists got rich on the backs of the unrewarded and unrecognised creativity and labour of black singers and musicians. In this respect, sampling was just the new face in the ongoing plunder of black musical cultures.

Still Loleatta Holloway made sure she (belatedly) got her dues, and did ultimately benefit from the exposure. As Matthew Collin recalls in his book Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, she was paid to perform at some of the massive acid house raves of the late 1980s, notably in October 1989 at a Helter Skelter party attended by 4,000 people in 'a muddy, ploughed field in Oxfordshire. The incongruity was sweet, seeing these dance music icons climbing up a rickety ladder onto the back of a flat-bed lorry - in open farmland! - to sing and play. There was Loleatta Holloway, the lead singer on scores of classic Salsoul disco anthems, who seemed almost scared of the mob of brightly-coloured lunatics thrashing in front of the stage'. Ce Ce Rogers and KLF also played.



See also Ben Beaumont Thomas in The Guardian: 'Holloway's voice, however, full of strident indignation and volcanic sexuality, is always the dominant force in her songs, going toe to toe with even the most pounding pianos and lushest orchestras. But the key to her appeal is that she doesn't push herself too far to the front. The pleasure of listening to divas like Whitney or Rihanna is that it's an aspirational experience – women want to be them, men want to be with them. Holloway is a different proposition: a collective experience, of mutual understanding and shared joy. She takes the utopian ideals of clubland – sex, community, abandon – and massively amplifies them back at the dancers, singing to each one of them and the club as a whole. As her voice surges onto and fills the dancefloor, it really does feel like we're all getting stronger'.

Bobby Farrell takes the Night Flight

Bobby Farrell of Boney M died yesterday at the age of 61. Born Alfonso Farrell in Aruba, off the north coast of Venezuela, he left home at the age of 15 to become a sailor. He lived in Norway and the Netherlands and then Germany where he worked as a DJ before he was recruited by German singer/songwriter Frank Farian for Boney M. Farian now says that he actually sang on most of Boney M's songs, and that Farrell just mimed to them on stage. But clearly Farrell was the male face of Boney M, and they wouldn't have been Boney M without him.

In 1978, Boney M released a bona fide Disconaut classic, Night Flight to Venus:

Shanghai Roller Disco

Interesting article from Shanghai Daily (10 February 2010) on roller disco dancing in Shanghai:

'The world has moved on from roller-skating disco, that oh-so-1980s fad immortalized in the film "Xanadu," but in China, dancing on wheels is gaining speed thanks to the nation's masses of migrant workers. While wealthy executives in trend-setting Shanghai would never be seen indulging in something so passe, roller disco is the entertainment of choice for the tens of thousands of migrants working in one of China's most expensive cities.

Most of these modern fans are in their 20s, too young to remember the craze that swept the United States some 30 years ago, and their ardor proves that disco is not dead. At Xinxiang roller-skating rink, the city's first and biggest roller disco, hundreds of migrant workers turn up every night to meet friends, listen to music and skate in a rink slightly bigger than a basketball court."When we first started 15 years ago, the people who came here to skate were local youngsters," says Yang Yong, one of the floor managers of the rink. "As the country started its economic reform, a lot of workers from other provinces came to the city, and now some of these migrants are also coming here for recreation and exercise."

... Roller disco started to become popular in China in the 1990s, but largely lost its appeal at the turn of the century, forcing hundreds of rinks across the country to close down. But in Shanghai, the migrant workers have helped keep the Xinxiang rink, and dozens of others, in business. Relocated to Lanxi Road last year from Anyuan Road in Putuo District, the 500-square-meter rink continues to attract a steady flow of migrant workers, who would spend the whole night there rolling to relax and recharge after a tiring day. Opening hours run from 1-5pm and 7 pm-1am. The afternoon hours are mainly for locals and students while the night hours are almost dominated by migrant workers. "More than 80 percent of our patrons at night are low-paid workers, that is about 400 people," says Shanghai-native Wang Hongsheng, the rink's manager. "They can roll to midnight."

One of roller disco's main attractions is affordability: with most workers earning between 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan (US$146-292) a month, having fun isn't easy in Shanghai. Entrance to the skating rinks costs a maximum of 18 yuan and renting four-wheeled skates costs 5 yuan with no time limit, while a normal charge in other roller-skating rinks in Shanghai is about 40 yuan per hour. As a matter of fact, migrants don't have to rent skates and roll. "They can come in, buy some beer, hang around, dance to the music, have some small chat, and make some new friends here," Wang says.

Crowds of migrant workers were speeding in circles skillfully on roller skates, with the ear-deafening pop music pouring from the loudspeakers. On the dance floor some were really shaking it in high spirit .Most of the migrant workers in their 20s come from the country's poor areas and didn't get much education. But they're eager to integrate into the metropolitan life like their urban peers. "I like meeting new friends here. We're young and we can go dancing, clubbing and anything just like other (urban) young people do," says 21-year-old Xiao Fang from Anhui Province. The girl, wearing heavy makeup and dressed to the nines, has been in Shanghai for three years and works in a nearby bathhouse."This place and the people here make me feel quite comfortable," she says as she sways to the music...'

(full article here)

Teddy Pendergrass and the Birth of Disco

Sad to hear of the death of Teddy Pendergrass this week, aged 59. Among his many musical achievements was a critical role in the birth of disco. In 'Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco', Peter Shapiro argues that The Love I Lost by Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes (Philadelphia International records, 1973) - with Pendergrass on lead vocals - was the first disco record proper:

'Along with the Temptations 'Law of the Land', 'The Love I Lost' marks the birth of disco as a genre of music; it is the beginning of the codification of disco as a style rather than the taste of whatever DJ happened to be playing at that time. This was hardly the fault, or the intention, of Gamble, Huff, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. It was just that they had hit upon the epitome of dance music: the hissing hi-hats, the thumping bass sound, the surging momentum, the uplifiting horns, the strings taking flight, lead singer Teddy Pendergrass's over-the-top gospel passion working as sandpaper against the honeyed backing vocals... While drummer Earl Young basically created the next two decades of dance music with his snare pattern and hi-hat work on 'The Love I Lost' it was perhaps Pendergrass taking gospel sermonizing to new levels of excess that really marked disco as a separate entity from soul'.



See also: Guardian Obituary.

World AIDS Day: We Salute the Disco Dead (2)

Following yesterday's World AIDS Day post, here's a few more of the HIV disco fallen remembered (thanks to Disco Delivery's twitter feed for reminders).

Walter Gibbons (1954-1994), Salsoul producer and DJ:



Jacques Morali (1947-1991), the man behind the Village People, he also wrote The Best Disco in Town for The Ritchie Family:



Paul Jabara (1948-1992):

World AIDS Day: We salute the disco dead

Today is World AIDS Day. Let's pause for a moment and remember some of the dance music greats who died from HIV/AIDS.

Sylvester (1947-88):



Mel Cheren and Michael Brody, founders of Paradise Garage:



David Cole, (1963–1995) of C+C Music Factory:


Arthur Russell, (1951–1992):


Sharon Redd, (1945–1992):



Dan Hartman (1950–1995):


Patrick Cowley (1950-1982):



Tony de Vit (1957-1998):



Ofra Haza (1957-2000)



See also: We Salute the Disco Dead 2

Arthur Russell

Thinking about this month's moon landing anniversary, I realized my post on this should have mentioned the sublime Arthur Russell track 'This is how we walk on the moon': 'Each step is moving, it's moving me up, moving, it's moving me up, Every step is moving me up... This is how we walk on the moon'.



There's a conference on Arthur Russell coming up in New York later this year:

'Kiss Me Again: Mapping the Life and Legacy of Arthur Russell
10 October 2009, NYU, New York

The composer and musician Arthur Russell lived and worked in New York between 1973 and 1992. During his time in the city he performed and recorded compositional music, pop music, disco, new wave, songs for the cello, and hip-hop-inflected electronic pop. As any listener of his music will know, he also liked to blur the boundaries of genre as he went about his work. Russell's open-mindedness and antipathy to being marketed contributed to his lack of recognition, and his music went relatively unheard outside of aficionado dance circles after his passing. But beginning with the simultaneous release of Calling Out of Context and The World of Arthur Russell in 2004, and culminating with the release of the documentary film Wild Combination in 2008, Russell's work has gained a new lease of life.

Acknowledging the newfound interest in Arthur Russell, New York University, the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London and Bloomfield College are organising an Arthur Russell conference that will take place at NYU on 10 October. The all-day event will be organised around four panels, two featuring invited speakers, two featuring speakers who respond to this call for papers. The conference will also feature a screening of Wild Combination, with director Matt Wolf answering questions, and (it is hoped) rare Arthur Russell footage shot by Phill Niblock and Alan Abrams. The evening event will feature musicians who worked with Arthur Russell. Tim Lawrence's biography of Arthur Russell, Hold On to Your Dreams, will be launched during the event. Attendance is free'.

The deadline for ideas for papers is 15 July; if you want to take part contact the organisers Sukhdev Sandhu (NYU), Tim Lawrence (UEL) & Peter Gordon (Bloomfield)- details here.

Dancing Questionnaires (10): Onomé Ekeh

From Brooklyn, Onomé Ekeh recalls a life in dance from New York to Switzerland:

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
No. It must have been when I was preverbal. I was always inclined to dance.

2. What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Entering a trance and replicating slash imbibing the moves of dancers far more advanced and superior to me.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…
8 hour jags with a gallon of water, emerging at 10 a.m in the morning in a cloud of baby powder--thanks to the rocksteady crew types who need the stuff to be fluid.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
Crowded. Cokeheads. People bogged down by alchohol, parking on the dancefloor. Insensitive DJs...

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
Early in my NY career, I would go to BoB a bar on Eldridge St. on the lower east side on Wednesdays and Fridays'--this was pre-Giuliani, crowded, free, old school funk till dawn. Then I was introduced to "The Loft" on Avenue A, classic deep house on Saturday nights, shortly thereafter, The AfterLife (Deep House) which started from 3 am in a small theater company space in Tribeca--actually round the corner from what came to be known as "Body and Soul", sort of the last stand- a "Tea Party" from 4 to 10pm on Sundays. Classic house with Danny Krivits, Kim Lightfoot and others. Finally plagued by tourists and people on drugs...

6. When and where did you last dance?
At a cinderella type club in Zurich, Les Halles -which is normally a restaurant but on Christmas Day it turns into a fabulous dance party, straddling the balance of electric disco and paris house...

Sylvester, photo © Clay Geerdes

7. You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
Hmmm. Sylvester (pictured), (You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real? Disco Inferno? Most anything 70s disco would raise me from the dead...

All questionnaires welcome- just answer the same questions and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires)

Guns N' Roses still crap shock

Something for World AIDS Day tomorrow, 1 December:

Simon Reynolds has efficiently scraped off his shoe the 'vigorously polished turd that is "Chinese Democracy"' by Guns N' Roses. Whoever this album was 'eagerly awaited' by, I was not one of them - I would apply Reynolds' diss of the album to their entire career: 'redolent of the 4-hour erections induced by Viagra: engorged but devoid of desire, a meaningless show of strength'.

What I'd forgotten about until today was a row about their political dumbness early in their career, with their 1989 song 'One in a Million' and its lyrics about 'niggers', 'immigrants' and 'faggots' who 'spread some fucking disease'. In London, AIDS activist group ACT UP protested at Virgin Megastore demanding that an AIDS information sheet be added to the album to counter its 'racist and homophobic lyrics'. Axl Rose's later comments that he wasn't homophobic because he liked Elton John were laughable; not so funny is the fact that it was later covered by nazi band Skrewdriver.

The report of the action comes from 'ACT UP Action News' (London, June 1989). Note next to it there is also a report of an ACT UP Sylvester Memorial in May 1989 at the Fridge nightclub in Brixton, featuring Jimi Somerville (Bronski Beat/The Communards) and Andy Bell (Erasure). The great Sylvester died from AIDS in December 1988. Give me Dance (Disco Heat) over anything G N'R have done any day of the week.

[click on picture to see enlarged image]

Moon-boots

It's been a while since I posted anything about space music (see here for the original Disconaut text), but I came across this fine piece of 1977 space disco the other day - Moon-boots by ORS (sometimes known as Orlando Riva Sound), a German outfit formed by Anthony Monn. You might still be able to download at Chezlubacov or The Red Room, or you can listen it to it here.

(Miraculi at youtube has put images to this track of women dancing at what looks like a Russian airport, but it's not the original video ).

Songs about dancing (4): Everybody Dance - Chic

Everybody dance it says on the tin, and on the many occasions when I have heard this song in clubs, parties, weddings that's generally what everybody does. If the lyrics urge 'Everybody dance, do-do-do, Clap your hands, clap your hands' they are hardly necessary - the bass alone is surely enough to generate the required response. The dancefloor as the place where the indignities and humiliations of daily life can be put aside: 'Music never lets you down / Puts a smile on your face / Any time, anyplace / Dancing helps relieve the pain / Soothes your mind, makes you happy again / Listen to those dancing feet / Close your eyes and let go'.

This was originally released in 1977 - it is impossible to overestimate the significance of Chic in this period. Just think for instance how many times Good Times was sampled in early hip hop (e.g. Rappers Delight by the Sugarhill Gang or The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel).

See also Disco was the only time we were equal

Dance and Social Fantasy

The following extracts are taken from an article ‘Dance and Social Fantasy’ by the sociologist Angela McRobbie, published in the collection Gender and Generation, edited by McRobbie and Mica Nava (London: Macmillan, 1984). McRobbie has written a number of works about popular dancing and was groundbreaking in taking dancing seriously – a few years later, once academics had started taking ecstasy, they all seemed to be writing about it. I particular like her focus on what goes in people’s heads – the fantasy element - as much as on how their bodies are moving.

Her observations seem to be largely based on late 1970s/early 1980s discos and clubs in Birmingham and London, but much of what she says surely still holds true. The timing of this writing is significant though, as it demonstrates that some of the changes sometimes lazily attributed to some 1988 acid house/ecstasy year zero – such as the increasing participation of men in dancing as a pleasurable end in itself – were already being commented on several years beforehand.

For women and girls, dance has always offered a channel, albeit a limited one for bodily self-expression and control; it has also been a source of pleasure and sensuality. Even though it has often been directed towards men, the spectacle of women dancing has been linked unambiguously with female pleasure...

Dance’s status as a prime vehicle for sexual expression for women... is by no means a simple function of dance. Rather it carries a range of often contradictory strands within it. There is, on the one hand, the social pressures which direct little girls towards dance as a suitably feminine form of leisure. And dancing here is linked with being pretty, graceful, controlled and an object of admiration. But this conformist role does not deny the way dance carries enorm­ously pleasurable qualities for girls and women which frequently seem to suggest a displaced, shared and nebulous eroticism rather than a straightforwardly romantic, heavily heterosexual 'goal-­oriented' drive.

As a purveyor of fantasy, dance has also addressed areas of absolute privacy and personal intimacy, especially impor­tant for women and girls. And there is I think a case which can be made for forms of fantasy, daydreaming, and 'abandon' to be interpreted as part of a strategy of resistance or opposition; that is, as marking out one of those areas which cannot be totally colonised. Dance and music play an important role in these small daily evasions, partly because they are so strongly inscribed, in our culture, within the realms of feeling and emotion. They are associated with being temporarily out of control, or out of the reaches of controlling forces. Thus we have the experience of dance being linked, linguistically, with the onomatopoeia of the letter F: Saturday Night Fever, Fame, Flashdance - as though, with a quick slip of the tongue, to move rapidly to fever, frenzy, feeling.

Dance and fantasy

Dancing seems to retain at its centre a solid resistance to analysis. So deeply have we absorbed its rules and its rituals - the preparation, the mirror, the anticipation, and of course the dancing - that somehow we avoid subjecting all this to the scrutiny of analysis. Even the simplest of conventions have eluded sociological comment. One of the most obvious of these might be the way in which a girl or a woman going to a disco or dance alone is deviant. This does not hold true for men or boys. Where in general they may also go out dancing in groups, to go alone is in no way remarkable. But for girls it means a great deal more. It is a sign either of having no friends, or of being on the look-out and therefore morally out of line.

The second convention which marks out the different experience of dance for men and women lies in the strength of its attraction as a pleasurable activity. Up until very recently dance has been inextric­ably linked with femininity, which has made it either an ordeal or something faintly ridiculous for men to show more than a fleeting interest in. There are a whole string of literary, cinematic, and sociological accounts which offer ample evidence of this. These have shown how men have seen dance as an unfortunate pre-requisite to courtship. Mungham (1976), amongst others, has described how men at the dancehall he studied, would stumble clumsily from the bar towards the end of the evening to strike an often ungainly pose on the floor and to survey the mass of dancing girls.

Recently, as dance has become more popular among men, its connotations of cissiness, triviality or silliness are rapidly disappearing. Men can now demonstrate sophisticated dancing styles with expertise and pleasure without inviting criticism or disdain from their male peers. Black (Afro-Caribbean) culture has done much to bring about this change, with the massive increase in dance technology ('ghetto-blasters’ and walkmen, hi-fi’s and sound systems, 12" singles and pop videos) and dance music style (funk, rap, disco, soul, lovers rock, and pop), advertising its appeal and facilitating its spread. Most new dance styles have come out of black youth culture, with men tending to take up the most spectacular gymnastic and acrobatic variations. Leroy, one of the main charac­ters in Fame, exemplifies this exactly. He started off as a rough street boy who loved to dance. Then, in true Hollywood style, he gradually became the school hero, a kind of hip head boy who will always see justice and goodness prevail. In his dancing, however, he displays a combination of sexy masculinity with controlled half-­balletic, half-gymnastic movements.

There are a few other more general points which can be made about the conventions surrounding dance culture at the present moment. The most important of these is the way in which dance can no longer be reduced simply to the level of promising or providing sexual opportunity. For girls and women it has always been an absorbing and pleasurable activity in its own right. And often, despite the pressures of romance, girls have been content quite simply to dance. The most important shift has been that men are now beginning to participate in dance in a less sexually frantic way; they too have taken up its narcissistic, auto-erotic dimensions, and its features which are predicated more on patterns of friendship than on its possibilities for sex or romance.

But even if it does not have to lead to romance, dance still affords the opportunity for fantasy. Like the cinema, the dancehall or disco offers a darkened space where the dancer can retain some degree of anonymity or absorption. This in turn creates a temporary blotting-out of the self, a suspension of real, daylight consciousness and an aura of dream-like self-reflection. Where the cinema offers a one-way fantasy which is directed solely through the gaze of the spectator towards the screen, the fantasy of dancing is more social, more reciprocated. This is because it allows simultaneously a dramatic display of the self and the body, with an equally dramatic negation of the self and the body. This latter works through the whole structure of the dance-floor. The crowded mass of bodies, the insistent often trance· like disco rhythms and the possibility of being at once there and not there.

Dance evokes fantasy because it sets in motion a dual relationship projecting both internally towards the self and externally towards, the 'other'; which is to say that dance as a leisure activity connects desires for the self with those for somebody else. It articulates adolescence and girlhood with femininity and female sexuality and it does this by and through the body. This is especially important because it is the one pleasurable arena where women have some control and know what is going on in relation to physical sensuality and to their own bodies. Continually bombarded with images and with information about how they should be and how they should feel, dance offers an escape, a positive and vibrant sexual ex­pressiveness and a point of connection with the other pleasures of femininity like gelling dressed up or putting on make-up. But how exactly does fantasy function amidst the semi-darkened space, the mirrors, corners, music and alcohol?... (I should add that since my sources are predominately heterosexual these fantasy scenarios make no claim to represent gay or lesbian experience).

The first is possibly the most obvious and relates to the absence or presence of the object of desire. The presence is awaited, antici­pated, and then acted upon through the use of mirrors, the positioning of the body within his gaze. This allows the dancer to have one partner in fact and another in fantasy. His absence too can generate fantasy-structures based round loss, around what might have been, and of course around a possible future presence, and thus with what it might still be like. Equally, concrete loss of this object of desire can precipitate the fantasy around suffering and pain so familiar in the pages of Jackie. To see him disappear with somebody else! To catch him in an embrace with someone else! To be left alone, to dissolve in tears! And then slowly to plan - to get him back, to find somebody else, to play hard to get, or simply to wait!

It is in terms of these small theatrical tableaux that so much of women’s culture can be made sense of. The last dance, the waltz, dance as memory, dance as sexual expression. Like all fantasies, dance signifies in these contexts as something to be lingered on, referred back to repetitively and imagined as future pleasure. This means remembering precisely minute details or dress and appearance, another seemingly trivial, but nevertheless stubborn and recurrent feature of women's experience. Dance and the excite­ment of going out dancing, retains a special place in the female memory for the very reason of its dispersed, fluid and often ambiguous pleasure.

This is particularly the case for working-class women for whom getting married, settling down and having children marks such a decisive break in their patterns of leisure. Many of the young working-class mothers interviewed by Dorothy Hobson recalled with nostalgia and more than just a hint of regret the days when they were able to go out dancing whenever they felt like it (Hobson, 1978). What they said had a particular poignancy because as married women their desire to go out occasionally to a disco was inevitably destined to be misconstrued by their husbands as a desire to go out on the town with the idea of picking someone up. Neither did the husbands welcome the notion of their wives being the object of other men's gaze.

From getting down to getting home

While the private aspects of dance, the self absorption and the fantasy might have a special place in the rituals of dance culture, it would be quite wrong to pay less than equal attention to its more explicitly social dimensions. And the observations I offer here focus on precisely those more material and concrete actions which characterise dance. Generally I am restricting these comments so that they refer, not to all kinds of discos, but rather to two fairly typical 'scenes'. These are 'respectable' city discos frequented by young single people usually under twenty-five-years-old and for whom Saturday night dancing, though extremely pleasurable in its own right, is still nevertheless a stop-gap between youth and settling down. My other area of interest is what could be described as the subcultural alternative. Here I argue that what this 'scene' offers is a suspension of categories, there is not such a rigid demarcation along age, class, ethnic terms. Gender is blurred and sexual preference less homogenously heterosexual, but I'll expand on this later.

There are a number of features which recurred so frequently during the time I was researching these mainstream discos that they seem worthy of comment. The first of these hinged around the problem of how to combine the enjoyment of dancing with the real prospect of romance, and two features here seemed to take on a special significance. These were the maintenance of some notion of 'respectability', and the minimising of the danger of sexual violence. Each of these were grounded in a real fear of assault by a stranger (i.e. a dance partner) on the way home from the disco and this fear resulted in a set of codes relating to 'getting home'. Basically this meant not accepting the offer of being 'seen home' by someone unknown, no matter how 'juicy' he was. In the discos I visited it was customary instead to suggest a mid-week date as though to prove his 'real' rather than fleeting interest. This was a practice adhered to by the majority of girls attending city discos regularly. To ignore this code or to break the rules not only put oneself at risk but also the other girl or best friend who would have to find her way home herself. This was seen as a kind of betrayal of trust and could result in the end of a friendship. Indeed, the city late at night, and the lonely suburban streets held great fears for these respectable girls and also for their parents who would frequently give them the taxi fare home rather than have them walk the streets. Even then the evening frequently ended with one girl 'stopping over' with her friends. In every way this meant that a Saturday night's dancing was more expensive and more perilous than it was for their male peers. And whilst in one sense their mothers' advice about taking care and not accepting a lift home in a strange young man's car is an excellent example of feminine good-sense, often its other side was offered implicitly as a solution and was actively advocated as such by the mother. This was simply to find a reliable steady boyfriend whose company would make unnecessary these costly and time-consuming practices. And such a partnership would also mark the end of dangerous jaunts into the city centre dancehalls. But these mothers too regretted the loss of their own dancing days, and so their advice was also tinged with sadness, and offered, if not reluctantly, with some cynicism.

Still, if in contrast to the fun and excitement of the earlier part of the evening, these difficulties seemed more like a headache, they certainly were not sufficient to keep anybody at home. Apart from the dancing itself, these straighter, more ‘respectable' discos provided a forum for a number of other games and rituals. Many of these were played by the girls at the expense of the boys. First they would set out to chat up a couple of lads and get them to buy, or 'con' them into buying, a round of drinks, then disappear rapidly with the gin and tonics, into the ladies. Some minutes later they would slink off in the opposite direction. The next strategy was a little more demanding. Here two friends would pretend that they were French and working as au pairs in Birmingham to improve their English. This allowed them the pleasure of masquerade; their temporary identities as French or Spanish returned them to the narratives of schoolgirl fiction where the 'Mam'zelle' was allowed to be extravagant and extrovert in all kinds of ways. These games also entertained a fantasy of travel and a desire for something else, somewhere else. And following this it is not surprising that the other favoured fantasy was to pretend to be either a model or an actress, or to be terribly 'posh', living in a large house in Sutton Coldfield with horses and a swimming pool.

In subcultural, or more specifically, punk discos, the rules were quite different. Ideas of being cool and of being seen 'posing' were internalised to the point of becoming automatic response. Yet strangely this was balanced out by the girls in fact being allowed to act much more extravagantly without being penalised. Thus where respectable girls fearful of losing their reputation or of losing their way home would restrict their alcohol to a couple of drinks early in the evening, punk girls would frequently go out with the objective of 'getting smashed'. In every way they were more fearless than their straighter peers. Less time would be spent here on traditionally 'chatting up' boys and more emphasis was placed on dancing, drinking or simply hanging around talking. Frequently there would be, in discos like these, large groups of people who all knew each other. This minimised the problem of getting home, and anyway having chosen to take up a subcultural identity implicitly meant also being deviant enough to gladly wander through the streets at all hours, drunk or sober, in groups or in pairs; as though to be punk was to refuse to be intimidated into submissive femininity. This did not make dancing unromantic or lacking in fantasy. It is more that the nature of fantasy was displaced into all those precious gestures of sub-cultural lifestyle: into style (wearing the right clothes at the right moment); into the pleasure of being illicit or deviant, or at least of entertaining this self-image; into dancing in the right way to the right kind of music.

Punk, new wave or 'alternative' clubs do not preclude the idea of romance. It could even be argued that the 'alternative' dance circuits are more romantic, certainly more utopian, than their more respectable equivalents. This stems from the core desire at the heart of the subcultural discourse, that it will not stop. It may get boring but nonetheless the choice has been made and the associated lifestyle has become rooted. It is not that subcultures seek to prolong adolescence or singleness but rather that they seek to overturn the relations marking out singleness as a short period of excitement before real life, hard work and settling down sets in. Which is to say that what a subculture like punk expresses is a breaking with such normative definitions and expectations altogether. This has a definite effect on the aura of the 'alternative' or punk disco. It takes out all the edge, the slightly desperate quality which Mungham (1976) describes in his study. Gender in his Mecca halls is tantamount, where in The Tincan, The Duma, The Hacienda, The Camden Palace, or wherever, it is either parodied through perversity, taking up the earlier shock effects of punk and parading them (as in leather-night at The Batcave or The Mudd Club), or else it is simply subordinated to the music. One way or another it is nothing to get frantic about - class, race, and sexual preference are all at once there but not there. Punk might be risky. it might represent a stepping out of line, but on the dance floor and on the road home it inoculates the girls both against some danger by giving them a sense of confidence, and against the excesses of sexual discrimination by giving them a lifestyle which adamantly refuses the strictures of traditional femininity.

Photo from The Batcave (early London goth club in Meard Street, Soho, opened 1982)

Crackers 1976: daytime soul sessions in London

The Way We Wore by Robert Elms recalls the soul/funk sessions at Crackers in London in the mid 70s. This was by all accounts a very influential club - at DJHistory, Norman Jay, Fabio, Terry Farley and Jazzie B all mention its impact on them. There are a couple of other interesting points here. Crackers was another example of how in the 70s and 80s gay clubs provided a haven not just for lesbians and gay men but for all kinds of musical sub-cultures (see for instance the role of Louise's as hang out central for first generation punks). And what of day time clubbing? - Crackers had a packed session on Friday lunchtime, and there seem to have been day time sessions in London from the 1940s to the 1970s - hard to imagine now that people could get away with skipping work for a few hours in this way. Anyway here's Robert's account:

'1976, that legendary summer just heating up, we were on our way to small, hardcore clubs in Soho and Covent Garden. Two or three times a week heading into town, unknow­ingly beginning the process of trendification which would alter the fortunes of inner London. Dedicated groups of young, over­dressed soul-searchers headed through the often deserted streets of an unloved and unlovely city as the daytime temperatures kept climbing and the air became dense with heat and expectation. The Lyceum on a Monday night, Sombreros in Kensington on Thursdays: the Global Village, where Heaven now is, on Fridays, the 100 Club on Oxford Street on Saturdays. Most notable and most potent of them all was Crackers on Dean Street, on the edge of Soho itself and at the very centre of a world. Crackers, little more than another dodgy disco to look at, was one of the most influential venues of any year, and by late 1975, into the fabled summer of '76, it was at the core of this still largely secretive inner London scene. 

We, for me, meant two or three of the boys from Burnt Oak, who had really got into it and wanted to push on. And as soon as you got to places like Crackers, where the best dancers were, the most righteous young black kiddies from Tottenham and Brixton, the best-looking girls, the most knowl­edgeable music buffs, the most daring dressers, you just knew you were in the inner sanctum. The licensing laws at the time were so puritanical and arcane that this small gay club had to provide food. So all punters were handed a slice of Mother's Pride and spam as they entered and you could see these sandwiches littered round the dance floor at the end of the night. 

 Amazingly the hottest session at Crackers was on Friday after­noon, twelve until two-thirty. This was a direct revival of an old sixties tradition, when Friday lunch-hour had been a prime-time slot at Tiles, a late mod club. The idea was that nobody does too much work on Friday afternoons anyway, so who's going to notice if somebody is not at their desk or behind the counter for a couple of hours, and they're dancing or preening instead. Indeed half the crowd at Crackers on Friday were in their work-wear, office suits with the ties tucked in the pocket, hairdressers' smocks or even schoolboy blazers abandoned at the door. Others who somehow had avoided the pressure to work or study, and could make a performance of it, were attired to the nines. A young crowd, predominantly aged from sixteen to twenty-one, gathered from all corners of London to duck into this doorway amid the tacky shops and kiosks of the wrong end of Oxford Street, down the stairs and into a packed, darkened room, pounding with tough, black American tunes and throbbing with that almost tangible confidence which says this is the place to be. 

The dance floor itself, a small sprung wooden square, was strictly for dancers, and by that I mean dancers. Anyone who ventured on to the square at Crackers had to have steps, and the bottle to produce them under the gaze of the unforgiving throng. Some of the top guys at Crackers are legendary still: Horace, Tommy Mac, Jaba, and the daddy of them all, Clive Clark, a charming black guy who went on to become a professional chore­ographer, but started out scorching the opposition on Friday afternoons in Dean Street. When these boys were on the floor, a circle would form to give them an amphitheatre in which to per­form. They would then pull out moves and steps with a wickedly competitive edge, legs flying like lasers, some new twist or turn eliciting spontaneous applause from the closely watching circle. Unlike northern soul, with its dervish spins and flailing kicks, its wild amphetamine abandon, the southern style was tight and precise: feet made rapid tap movements, knees were bent, hips sashayed, shoulders rolled, heads bobbed. The whole effect was somewhere between boxing and bopping. And if you couldn't cut it, you didn't go anywhere near the floor. 

Around the square stood contenders and pretenders, who rated their chances but hadn't yet stepped into the ring. Some enrolled themselves at Pineapple, the dance studio which had recently opened up round the corner in Covent Garden. They pulled on sweat-tops and legwarmers to learn moves from ballet, jazz and tap, provoking the craze for dancewear which would result in dodgy thick socks around ankles a few years later. Others simply spent hours on council estate carpets, honing their footwork, their dips and turns while avoiding the furniture. Behind the dancers, at the bar, at the back, the rest of the club grooved and swayed, perpetual motion. My place, as a young suburban boy, was way at the back, bobbing and watching and noting and loving every super-saturated, hyped-up little minute of it. And then, come half two, the last strains of Dexter Wansel or Charles Earland still swirling around your brain, it was out. Blink­ing against the light, the sweat freezing on your face as you hit cool air, into the rushing maelstrom of Oxford Street. Leg it over the road to Hanway Street, a charismatic, piss-smelling dogleg alley, where up the stairs of an unmarked doorway was Contempo. Contempo Records was the epicentre of the London black music world in 1976, entirely contained in a room about eight feet square above a Spanish bar with an Irish name, in a forgotten street. On Friday afternoons it was the only place to buy the records the DJs had been spinning over the road at Crackers. So punters literally queued up the stairs, shouting out names of songs and artists, or listening intently to the sides which had arrived in crates from the States that day, deciding whether that was the one to invest in'.

[Robert says Crackers was in Dean Street, but as commenters have pointed out, it was actually at 203 Wardour Street]

In Defence of Disco - Richard Dyer

In Defence of Disco by Richard Dyer was first published in the magazine Gay Left, Issue 8, in 1979. It has been republished in academic contexts, but doesn't seem to be available online (except embedded in the pdf archive of Gay Left magazine). This was a groundbreaking work in taking disco seriously, and many of its conclusions can equally be applied to the later dance music scenes dismissed as politically unsound by those who like a strong dose of didacticism with their music.

All my life I've liked the wrong music. I never liked Elvis and rock 'n' roll; I always preferred Rosemary Clooney. And since I became a socialist, I've often felt virtually terrorized by the prestige of rock and folk on the Left. How could I admit to two Petula Clark LPs in the face of miners' songs from the North East and the Rolling Stones? I recovered my nerve partially when I came to see show-biz music as a key part of gay culture, which, whatever its limitations, was a culture to defend. And I thought I'd really made it when I turned on to Tamla Motown, sweet soul sounds, disco. Chartbusters already, and I like them! Yet the prestige of folk and rock, and now punk and (rather patronizingly, I think) reggae, still holds sway. It's not just that people whose politics I broadly share don’t like disco; they manage to imply that it is politically beyond the pale to like it. It's against this attitude that I want to defend disco (which otherwise, of course, hardly needs any defence).

I'm going to talk mainly about disco music, but there are two preliminary points I'd like to make. The first is that disco is more than just a form of music, although certainly the music is at the heart of it. Disco is also kinds of dancing, club, fashion, film- in a word, a certain sensibility, manifest in music, clubs, and so forth, historically and culturally specific, economically, technologically, ideo­logically, and aesthetically determined- and worth thinking about. Second, as a sensibility in music it seems to me to encompass more than what we would perhaps strictly call disco music, and include a lot of soul, Tamla, and even the later work of mainstream and jazz artists like Peggy Lee and Johnny Mathis.

My defence is in two parts: first, a discussion of the arguments against disco in terms of its being ‘capitalist’ music and, second, an attempt to think through the- ambivalently, ambiguously, contradictorily- positive qualities of disco.

Disco and Capital

Much of the hostility to disco stems from the equation of it with capitalism. Both in how it is produced and in what it expresses, disco is held to be irredeemably capitalistic.

Now it is unambiguously the case that disco is produced by capitalist industry, and since capitalism is an irrational and inhuman mode of production, the disco industry is as bad as all the rest. Of course. However, this argument has assump­tions behind it that are more problematic. These are of two kinds. One assump­tion concerns music as a mode of production, and has to do with the belief that it is possible in a capitalist society to produce things (e.g., music, such as rock and folk) that are outside of the capitalist mode of production. Yet quite apart from the general point that such a position seeks to elevate activity outside of existing structures rather than struggles against them, the two kinds of music most often set against disco as a mode of production are not really convincing.

One is folk music - in the United Kingdom, people might point to Gaelic songs and industrial ballads - the kind of music often used, or reworked, in Left fringe theatre. These, it is argued, are not, like disco (and pop music in general), produced for the people, but by them. They are ‘authentic’ people's music. So they are -or rather were. The problem is that we don't live in a society of small, technologically simple communities such as produce such art. Preserving such music at best gives us a historical perspective on peasant and working-class struggle, at worst leads to nostalgia for a simple, harmonious communal existence that never even existed. More bluntly, songs in Gaelic or dealing with nineteenth-century factory conditions, beautiful as they are, don't mean much to most English-speaking people today.

The other kind of music most often posed against disco, and ‘pap pop’ at the level of how it is produced, is rock (including Dylan-type folk and everything from early rock 'n' roll to progressive concept albums). The argument here is that rock is easily produced by non-professionals- all that is needed are a few instruments and somewhere to play - whereas disco music requires the whole panoply of recording studio technology, which makes it impossible for non-professionals (the kid on the streets) to produce. The factual accuracy of this observation needs supplementing with some other observations. Quite apart from the very rapid - but then bemoaned by some purists - move of rock into elaborate recording studios, even when it is simple and producible by non-professionals, the fact is that rock is still quite expensive, and remains in practice largely the preserve of the middle class who can afford electric guitars, music lessons, and the like. (You have only to look at the biographies of those now professional rock musicians who started out in a simple non-professional way - the preponderance of public school and university-educated young men in the field is rivalled only by their preponderance in the Labour party cabinet.) More important, this kind of production is wrongly thought of as being generated from the grassroots when, except perhaps at certain key historical moments, non­-professional music making, in rock as elsewhere, bases itself, inevitably, on pro­fessional music. Any notion that rock emanates from ‘the people’ is soon con­founded by the recognition that what ‘the people’ are doing is trying to be as much like professionals as possible.

The second kind of argument based on the fact that disco is produced by capitalism concerns music as an ideological expression. Here it is assumed that capitalism as a mode of production necessarily and simply produces ‘capitalist’ ideology. The theory of the relation between the mode of production and the ideologies of a particular society is too complicated and unresolved to be gone into here, but we can begin by remembering that capitalism is about profit. In the language of classical economics, capitalism produces commodities, and its inter­est in commodities is their exchange value (how much profit they can realize) rather than their use value (their social or human worth). This becomes partic­ularly problematic for capitalism when dealing with an expressive commodity­ such as disco - since a major problem for capitalism is that there is no necessary or guaranteed connection between exchange value and use value. In other words, capitalism as productive relations can just as well make a profit from something that is ideologically opposed to bourgeois society as something that supports it. As long as a commodity makes a profit, what does it matter?

Indeed, it is because of this dangerous, anarchic tendency of capitalism that ideological institutions - the church, the state, education, the family - are necessary. It is their job to make sure that what capitalism produces is in capitalism's longer-term interests. How­ever, since they often don't know that that is their job, they don't always perform it. Cultural production within capitalist society is, then, founded on two pro­found contradictions - the first between production for profit and production for use; the second, within these institutions whose job it is to regulate the first contradiction. What all this boils down to, in terms of disco, is that the fact that disco is produced by capitalism does not mean that it is automatically, neces­sarily, simply supportive of capitalism. Capitalism constructs the disco experi­ence, but it does not necessarily know what it is doing, apart from making money.

I am not now about to launch into a defence of disco music as some great subversive art form. What the arguments above lead me to is, first, a basic point of departure in the recognition that cultural production under capitalism is necessarily contradictory, and, second, that it may well be the case that capitalist cultural products are most likely to be contradictory at just those points - such as disco - where they are most commercial and professional, where the urge to profit is at its strongest. Third, this mode of cultural production has produced a commodity, disco, that has been taken up by gays in ways that may well not have been intended by its producers. The anarchy of capitalism throws up commodities that an oppressed group can take up and use to cobble together its own culture. In this respect, disco is very much like another profoundly ambiguous aspect of male gay culture, camp. It is a ‘contrary’ use of what the dominant culture provides, it is important in forming a gay identity, and it has subversive potential as well as reactionary implications.

The Characteristics of Disco

Let me turn now to what I consider to be the three important characteristics of disco - eroticism, romanticism, and materialism. I'm going to talk about them in terms of what it seems to me they mean within the context of gay culture. These three characteristics are not in themselves good or bad (any more than disco music as a whole is), and they need specifying more precisely. What is interesting is how they take us to qualities that are not only key ambiguities within gay male culture, but have also traditionally proved stumbling blocks to socialists.

Eroticism

It can be argued that all popular music is erotic. What we need to define is the specific way of thinking and feeling erotically in disco. I'd like to call it ‘whole body’ eroticism, and to define it by comparing it with the eroticism of the two kinds of music to which disco is closest- popular song (i.e., the Gershwin, Cole Porter, Burt Bacharach type of song) and rock.

Popular song's eroticism is ‘disembodied’: it succeeds in expressing a sense of the erotic that yet denies eroticism's physicality. This can be shown by the nature of tunes in popular songs and the way they are handled.

Popular song's tunes are rounded off, closed, self-contained. They achieve this by adopting a strict musical structure (AA BA) in which the opening melodic phrases are returned to and, most important, the tonic note of the song is also the last note of the tune. (The tonic note is the note that forms the basis for the key in which the song is written; it is therefore the harmonic 'anchor’ of the tune, and closing on it gives precisely a feeling of ‘anchoring,’ coming to a settled stop.) Thus although popular songs often depart from their melodic and harmonic beginnings - especially in the middle section (B) - they also always return to them. This gives them- even at their most passionate, as in Cole Porter's ‘Night and Day’- a sense of security and containment. The tune is not allowed to invade the whole of one's body. Compare the typical disco tune, which is often little more than an endlessly repeated phrase that drives beyond itself, is not ‘closed off.’ Even when disco music uses a popular song standard, it often turns it into a simple phrase. Gloria Gaynor’s version of Porter’s ‘I’ve got you under my skin’, for instance, is in large part a chanted repetition of 'I've got you.’

Popular song's lyrics place its tunes within a conceptualization of love and passion as emanating from ‘inside,’ the heart or the soul. Thus the yearning cadences of popular song express an erotic yearning of the inner person, not the body. Once again, disco refuses this. Not only are the lyrics often more directly physical and the delivery more raunchy (e.g., Grace Jones's ‘I Need a Man’), but, most important, disco is insistently rhythmic in a way that popular song is not.

Rhythm, in Western music, is traditionally felt as being more physical than other musical elements such as melody, harmony, and instrumentation. This is why Western music is traditionally so dull rhythmically - nothing expresses our' Puritan heritage more vividly. It is to other cultures that we have had to turn - ­above all to Afro-American culture - to learn about rhythm. The history of pop­ular songs since the late nineteenth century is largely the history of the white in­corporation (or ripping off) of black music - ragtime, the Charleston, the tango, swing, rock 'n' roll, rock. Now what is interesting about this incorporation or ripping off is what it meant and means. Typically, black music was thought of by the white culture as being more primitive and more ‘authentically’ erotic. Infusions of black music were always seen as (and often condemned as) sexual and physical. The use of insistent black rhythms in disco music, recognizable by the closeness of the style to soul and reinforced by such characteristic features of black music as the repeated chanted phrase and the use of various African percussion instruments, means that it inescapably signifies (in this white context) physicality.

However, rock is as influenced by black music as disco is. This then leads me to the second area of comparison between the eroticism of disco and rock. The difference between them lies in what each ‘hears’ in black music. Rock's eroti­cism is thrusting, grinding - it is not whole body, but phallic. Hence it takes from black music the insistent beat and makes it even more driving; rock's repeated phrases trap you in their relentless push, rather than releasing you in an open-ended succession of repetitions as disco does. Most revealing perhaps is rock's instrumentation. Black music has more percussion instruments than white, and it knows how to use them to create all sorts of effects - light, soft, lively, as well as heavy, hard, and grinding. Rock, however, hears only the latter and develops the percussive qualities of essentially non-percussive instruments to increase this, hence the twanging electric guitar and the nasal vocal delivery.

One can see how, when rock 'n' roll first came in, this must have been a tremendous liberation from popular song's disembodied eroticism - here was a really physical music, and not just mealy-mouthed physical, but quite clear what it was about - cock. But rock confines sexuality to cock (and this is why, no matter how progressive the lyrics and even when performed by women, rock remains indelibly phallocentric mu­sic). Disco music, on the other hand, hears the physicality in black music and its range. It achieves this by a number of features, including the sheer amount going on rhythmically in even quite simple disco music (for rhythmic clarity with complexity, listen to the full-length version of the Temptations' ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’); the willingness to play with rhythm, delaying it, jumping it, countering it rather than simply driving on and on (e.g., Patti Labelle, Isaac Hayes); the range of percussion instruments used and their different effect (e.g. the spiky violins in Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock's ‘Tell Me a Bedtime Story’; the gentle pulsations of George Benson). This never stops being erotic, but it restores eroticism to the whole of the body and for both sexes, not just confining it to the penis. It leads to the expressive, sinuous movement of disco dancing, not just that mixture of awkwardness and thrust so dismally charac­teristic of dancing to rock.

Gay men do not intrinsically have any prerogative over whole-body eroticism. ­We are often even more cock oriented than non-gays of either sex, and it depresses me that such phallic forms of disco as Village People should be so gay identified. Nonetheless, partly because many of us have traditionally not thought of ourselves as being ‘real men' and partly because gay ghetto culture is also a space where alternative definitions, including those of sexuality, can be devel­oped, it seems to me that the importance of disco in scene culture indicates an openness to a sexuality that is not defined in terms of cock. Although one cannot easily move from musical values to personal ones, or from personal ones to politically effective ones, it is at any rate suggestive that gay culture should promote a form of music that denies the centrality of the phallus while at the same time refusing the nonphysicality that such a denial has hitherto implied.

Romanticism

Not all disco music is romantic. The lyrics of many disco hits are either straightforwardly sexual - not to say sexist - or else broadly social (e.g., Detroit Spinners' ‘Ghetto Child,’ Stevie Wonder's ‘Living in the City’), and the hard drive of Village People or Labelle is positively antiromantic. Yet there is nonetheless a strong strain of romanticism in disco. This can be seen in the lyrics, which often differ little from popular song standards, and indeed often are standards (e.g., ‘What a Difference a Day Made’ by Esther Phillips, ‘La vie en rose’ by Grace Jones). More impressively, it is the instrumentation and arrangements of disco music that are so romantic.

The use of massed violins takes us straight back, via Hollywood, to Tchaikovsky, to surging, outpouring emotions. A brilliant example is Gloria Gaynor's ‘I've Got You under My Skin,’ where in the middle section the violins take a hint from one of Porter's melodic phrases and develop it away from this tune in an ecstatic, soaring movement. This ‘escape’ from the confines of popular song into ecstasy is very characteristic of disco music, and nowhere more consistently than in such Diana Ross classics as ‘Reach Out’ and ‘Ain't No Mountain High Enough.’ This latter, with its lyrics of total surrender to love, its heavenly choir, and sweeping violins, is perhaps one of the most extravagant reaches of disco’s romanticism. But Ross is also a key figure in the gay appropriation of disco.

What Ross's records do - and I'm thinking basically of her work up to ‘Greatest Hits volume 1’ and the 'Touch Me in the Morning' albums - is express the intensity of fleeting emotional contacts. They are all-out expressions of adoration that yet have built on to them the recognition of the (inevitably) temporary quality of the experience. This can be a straightforward lament for having been let down by a man, but more often it is both a celebration of a relationship and the almost willing recognition of its passing and the exquisite pain of its passing - ‘Remem­ber me / As a sunny day / That you once had / Along the way’; ‘If I've got to be strong / Don't you know I need to have tonight when you're gone / When you go I'll lie here / And think about / the last time that you / Touch me in the morning.' This last number, with Ross's ‘unreally’ sweet, porcelain fragile voice and the string backing, concentrates that sense of celebrating the intensity of the passing relationship that haunts so much of her work. No wonder Ross is (was?) so important in gay male scene culture, for she both reflects what that culture takes to be an inevitable reality (that relationships don't last) and at the same time celebrates it, validates it.

Not all disco music works in this vein, yet in both some of the more sweetly melancholy orchestrations (even in lively numbers, like ‘You Should Be Danc­ing’ from ‘Saturday Night Fever’) and some of the lyrics and general tone (e.g., Donna Summer's 'Four Seasons of Love' album), there is a carryover of this emo­tional timbre. At a minimum, then, disco's romanticism provides an embodi­ment and validation of an aspect of gay culture.

But romanticism is a particularly paradoxical quality of art to come to terms with. Its passion and intensity embody or create an experience that negates the dreariness of the mundane and everyday. It gives us a glimpse of what it means to live at the height of our emotional and experiential capacities - not dragged down by the banality of organized routine life. Given that everyday banality, work, domesticity, ordinary sexism, and racism are rooted in the structures of class and gender or this society, the flight from that banality can be seen as a flight from capitalism and patriarchy as lived experiences.

What make's this more complicated is the actual situation within which disco occurs. Disco is part of the wider to and fro between work and leisure, alienation and escape, boredom and enjoyment that we are so accustomed to (and that ‘Saturday Night Fever’ plugs into so effectively). Now this to and fro is partly the mechanism by which we keep going, at work, at home- the respite of leisure gives us the energy to work, and anyway we are still largely brought up to think of leisure as a ‘reward’ for work. This circle locks us into it. But what happens in that space of leisure can be profoundly significant; it is there that we may learn about an alternative to work and to society as it is. Romanticism is one of the major modes of leisure in which this sense of an alternative is kept alive. Roman­ticism asserts that the limits of work and domesticity are not the limits of experience.

I don't say that romanticism, with its passion and intensity, is a political ideal we could strive for - l doubt it is humanly possible to live permanently at that pitch. What I do believe is that the movement between banality and something ‘other’ than banality is an essential dialectic of society, a constant: keeping open of a gap between what is and what could or should be. Herbert Marcuse in the currently unfashionable ‘One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society’ argues that our society tries to close that gap, to assert that what is is all that there could be, is what should be. For all its commercialism and containment within the to and fro between work and leisure, I think disco romanticism is one of the things that can keep the gap open, that can allow the experience of contradiction to continue. Since I also believe that political struggle is rooted in experience (though utterly doomed if left at it), I find this dimension of disco potentially positive. (A further romantic/utopian aspect of disco is realized in the non-commercial discos organized by gay and women's groups. Here a moment of community can be achieved, often in circle dances or simply in the sense of knowing people as people, not anonymous bodies. Fashion is less impor­tant, and sociability correspondingly more so. This can be achieved in smaller clubs, perhaps especially outside the centre of London, which, when not just grotty monuments to self-oppression, can function as supportive expressions of something like a gay community.)

Materialism

Disco is characteristic of advanced capitalist societies simply in terms of the scale of money squandered on it. It is a riot of consumerism, dazzling in its technology (echo chambers, double and more tracking, electric instruments), overwhelming in its scale (banks of violins, massed choirs, the limitless range of percussion instruments), lavishly gaudy in the mirrors and tat of discotheques, the glitter and denim flash of its costumes. Its tacky sumptuous­ness is well evoked in ‘Thank God it’s Friday’. Gone are the restraint of popular song, the sparseness of rock and reggae, the simplicity of folk. How can a socialist, or someone trying to be a feminist, defend it?

In certain respects, it is doubtless not defensible. Yet socialism and feminism are both forms of materialism - why is disco, a celebration of materialism if ever there was one, not therefore the appropriate art form of materialist politics?

Partly, obviously, because materialism in politics is not to be confused with mere matter. Materialism seeks to understand how things are in terms of how they have been produced and constructed in history, and how they can be better produced and constructed. This certainly does not mean immersing oneself in­ the material world - indeed, it includes deliberately stepping back from the mate­rial world to see what makes it the way it is and how to change it. But materialism is also based on the profound conviction that politics is about the material world, and indeed that human life and the material world are all there is; there is no God, there are no magic forces. One of the dangers of materialist politics is that it is in constant danger of spiritualizing itself, partly because of the historical legacy of the religious forms that brought materialism into existence, partly because materialists have to work so hard not to take matter at face value that they often end up not treating it as matter at all. Disco's celebration of materialism is only a celebration of the world we are necessarily and always immersed in. Disco's materialism, in technological modernity, is resolutely historical and cultural - it can never be, as most art claims for itself, an ‘emanation’ outside of history and of human production.

Disco's combination of romanticism and materialism effectively tells us - lets us experience - that we live in a world of materials, that we can enjoy them but that the experience of materialism is not necessarily what the everyday world assures us it is. Its eroticism allows us to rediscover our bodies as part or this experience of materialism and the possibility of change.

If this sounds over the top, let one thing be clear - disco can't change the world or make the revolution. No art can do that, and it is pointless to expect it to. But partly by opening up experience, partly by changing definitions, art and disco can be used. To which one might risk adding the refrain, if it feels good, use it.

The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music

Expect to read a lot this year about the 20th anniversary of acid house in the UK. There’s a new Danny Rampling '20 years of house' mix CD and a linked facebook group with 13,000+ members (worth a look if you’re on facebook as people have uploaded lots of great flyers). There’s also a planned flash mob event based around the premise of getting lots of people together to dance to acid house classics – on their headphones. Clearly 1988 was the year when house music really exploded in the UK, but house music itself goes back a few years further. The following article was originally published in the US magazine Out/Look in 1989, and looks at house music’s origins in the black gay clubs of Chicago in the 1980s:

The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music - Anthony Thomas

America’s critical establishment has yet to acknowledge the contributions made by gay Afro-Americans. Yet black (and often white) society continues to adopt cultural and social patterns from the gay black subculture. In terms of language, turns of phrase that were once used exclusively by gay Afro-Americans have crept into the vocabulary of the larger black society; singer Gladys Knight preaches about unrequited love to her "girlfriend" in the hit "Love Overboard"'; and college rivals toss around "Miss Thing" in Spike Lee's film "School Daze."

What's also continued to emerge from the underground is the dance music of gay black America. More energetic and polyrhythmic than the sensibility of straight African-Americans, and simply more African than the sensibility of white gays, the musical sensibility of today's ‘house’ music- like that of disco and club music before it- has spread beyond the gay black subculture to influence broader musical tastes.

What exactly is house music? At a recording session for DJ International, a leading label of house music, British journalist Sheryl Garratt posed that question to the assembled artists. A veritable barrage of answers followed: "I couldn't begin to tell you what house is. You have to go to the clubs and see how people react when they hear it. It's more like a feeling that runs through, like old time religion in the way that people jus' get happy and screamin'… It's happening! ... It's Chicago's own sound.... It's rock till you drop… You might go and seek religion afterwards! It's gonna be hot, it's gonna be sweaty, and it's gonna be great, It's honest-ta-goodness, get down, low down gutsy, grabbin' type music." (1).

Like the blues and gospel, house is very Chicago. Like rap out, of New York and go-go out of D.C., house is evidence of the regionalization of black American music. Like its predecessors, disco and club, house is a scene as well as a music, black as well as gay.

But as house music goes pop, so slams the closet door that keeps the facts about its roots from public view. House, disco, and dub are not the only black music that gays have been involved in producing, nor is everyone involved in this music gay. Still, the sound, the beat, and the rhythm have risen up from the dancing sensibilities of urban gay Afro-Americans.

The music, in turn, has provided one of the underpinnings of the gay black subculture. Dance clubs are the only popular institutions of the gay black community that are separate and distinct from the institutions of the straight black majority. Unlike their white counterparts, gay black Americans, for the most part, have not redefined themselves- politically or culturally- apart from their majority community. Although political and cultural organizations of gay Afro-Americans have formed in recent years, membership in these groups remains very small and represents only a tiny minority of the gay black population. Lesbian and gay Afro-Americans still attend black churches, join black fraternities and sororities, and belong to the NAACP.

Gay black dance clubs, like New York's Paradise Garage and Chicago's Warehouse (the birthplace of house music) have staked out a social space where gay black men don't have to deal with the racist door policies at predominantly white gay clubs or the homophobia of black straight clubs. Over the last twenty years the soundtrack to this dancing revolution has been provided by disco, club, and now-house music.

Playback: The Roots of House

Although disco is most often associated with gay while men, the roots of the music actually go back to the small underground gay black clubs of New York City. During the sixties and early seventies, these clubs offered inexpensive all-night entertainment where DJs, in order to accommodate the dancing urgencies of their gay black clientele, overlapped soul and Philly (Philadelphia International) records, phasing them in and out, to form uninterrupted soundtracks for non-stop dancing. The Temptations’ 1969 hit “I Can't Get Next To You" and the O'Jays' "Back Stabbers" are classic examples of the genre of songs that were manipulated by gay black DJs. The songs' up-tempo, polyrhythmic, Latin percussion-backed grooves were well suited for the high energy, emotional, and physical dancing sensibility of the urban gay black audience.

In African and African-American music, new styles are almost always built from simple modifications of existing and respected musical styles and forms. By mixing together the best dance elements of soul and Philly records, DJs in gay black clubs had taken the first steps in the creative process that music critic Iain Chambers interprets as a marker of disco's continuity with the rhythm and blues tradition: "[In disco] the musical pulse is freed from the claustrophobic interiors of the blues and the tight scaffolding of R&B and early soul music. A looser) explicitly polyrhythmic attack pushes the blues, gospel and soul heritage into an apparently endless cycle where there is no beginning or end, just an ever-present 'now.' Disco music does not come to a halt… restricted to a three-minute single, the music would be rendered senseless. The power of disco… lay in saturating dancers and the dance floor in the continual explosion of its presence.' (2)

Although the disco pulse was born in the small gay black clubs of New York, disco music only began to gain commercial attention when it was exposed to the dance floor public of the large, predominantly white gay discos. Billboard only introduced the term disco-hit in 1973, years after disco was a staple among gay Afro-Americans, but- as music historian Tony Cummings noted- only one year after black and while gay men began to intermingle on the dance floor.

By the mid-seventies disco music production was in high gear, and many soul performers (such as Johnny Taylor with his 1976 hit "Disco Lady") had switched camps to take advantage of disco's larger market. Records were now being recorded to accomplish what DJs in gay black clubs had done earlier. Gloria Gaynor scored a breakthrough in disco technique with her 1974 album, Never Can Say Goodbye. The album treated the three songs on side one ("Honey Bee," "Never Call Say Goodbye," and "Reach Out, I'll Be There") as one long suite delivered without interrupting the dance beat- a ploy that would become a standard disco format and the basis of house music's energy level.

As the decade progressed, disco music spread far beyond its gay black origins and went on to affect the sound of pop. In its journey from this underground scene, however, disco was whitewashed. The massive success of the 1978 film Saturday Night Fever convinced mainstream America that disco was a new fad),the likes and sound of which had never been seen before. While gay men latched onto the ‘Hi NRG’ Eurodisco beat of Donna Summer's post-‘Love to Love You’ recordings and the camp stylings of Bette Midler.

Indeed, the dance floor proved to be an accurate barometer of the racial differences in the musical tastes of white and black gays and the variation in dancing sensibilities between gay and straight Afro-Americans. Quick to recognize and exploit the profit-making potential of this phenomenon, independent producers began to put out more and more records reflecting a gay black sound.

Starting in 1977, there was an upsurge in the production of disco-like records with a soul, rhythm and blues, and gospel feel: club music was born. The most significant difference between disco and club was rhythm. Club rhythms were more complex and more Africanized. With club music, the gay black subculture reappropriated the disco impulse, as demonstrated by the evolution in disco superstar Sylvester's music.

In 1978 Sylvester had a big hit with "Disco Heat"; in 1980 he released another smash, "Fever." "Disco Heat" was a classic example of the type of disco popular among gay Afro-Americans. At 136 beats per minute it combined the high energy aspect of white gay disco with the orchestral flourishes of contemporary soul. The song also contained the metronomic bass drum that characterized all disco. It was only the gospel and soul-influenced vocals of Sylvester and his back-up singers, Two Tons o’Fun, that distinguished the music from whiter genres of disco.

"Fever," on the other hand, more dearly reflects a black/African sensibility. To begin with, the song starts with the rhythmic beating of cow bells. Sylvester also slowed the beat down to a funkier 116 beats per minute and added polyrhythmic conga and bongo drumming. The drumming is constant throughout the song and is as dominant as any other sound in it. Just as significant, in terms of Africanizing the music, was the removal of the metronomic bass drum that served to beat time in disco. In African music there is no single main beat; the beat emerges from the relation of cross-rhythms and is provided by the listener or dancer, not the musician. By removing the explicit time-keeping bass of disco, Sylvester had reintroduced the African concept of the "hidden rhythm."

While most black pop emphasizes vocals and instrumental sounds, club music tends to place more emphasis on a wide array of percussive sounds (many of which are electronically produced) to create complex patterns of cross-rhythms. In the best of club music, these patterns change very slowly; some remain stable throughout the song. It is this characteristic of club music, above all, that makes it an African-American dance music par excellence. Like disco, club also moved beyond the gay black underground scene. Gay clubs helped spread the music to a "straight" black audience on ostensibly "straight" Friday nights. And some club artists, like Grace Jones, Colonel Abrams, and Gwen Guthrie, achieved limited success in the black pop market.

For most of its history, though, club music largely has been ignored by black-oriented radio stations. Those in New York, for instance, were slow to start playing club music with any regularity; finally WBLS and WRKS began airing dance mixes at various intervals during the day. In the early eighties, the two black-oriented FM radio outlets in Chicago, WBMX and WGCI, began a similar programming format that helped give rise to the most recent variation of gay black music: house.

Pumping Up the Volume

The house scene began, and derived its name from Chicago's now defunct dance club The Warehouse. At the time of its debut in 1977, the club was the only after-hours dance venue in the city, opening at midnight Saturday and closing after the last dancers left on Sunday afternoon. On a typical Saturday night, two to five thousand patrons passed through its doors.

The Warehouse was a small three-story building- literally an abandoned warehouse with a seating area upstairs, free juice, water, and munchies in the basement, and a dimly lit, steamy dance floor in between. You only could reach the dance floor through a trap door from the level above, adding to the underground feeling of the club.

A mixed crowd (predominately gay- male and female) in various stages of undress (with athletic wear and bare flesh predominating) was packed into the dance space, wall to wall. Many actually danced hanging from water pipes that extended on a diagonal from the walls to the ceiling. The heat generated by the dancers would rise to greet you as you descended, confirming your initial impression that you were going down into something very funky and "low."

What set the Warehouse apart from comparable clubs in other cities was its economically democratic admission policy. Its bargain admission price of four dollars made it possible for almost anyone to attend. The Paradise Garage in New York, on the other hand, was a private club that charged a yearly membership fee of seventy-five dollars, plus a door price of eight dollars. The economic barriers in New York clubs resulted in a less "low" crowd and atmosphere, and the scene there was more about who you saw and what you looked like than in Chicago.

For the Warehouse’s opening night in 1977, its owners lured one of New York's hottest DJS, Frankie Knuckles, to spin for the "kids" (as gay Afro-Americans refer to each other). Knuckles found out that these Chicagoans would bring the roof down if the number of beats per minute weren't sky high: "That fast beat [had] been missing for a long time. All the records out of New York the last three years (had] been mid- or down-tempo, and thee kids here in Chicago] won't do that all night long, they need more energy."(3)

Responding to the needs of their audience, the DJs in Chicago's gay black clubs, led by Knuckles, supplied that energy in two ways: by playing club tunes and old Philly songs (like MFSB’s "Love Is the Message") with a faster, boosted rhythm track, and by mixing in the best of up-tempo avant-garde electronic dance music from Europe. Both ploys were well received by the kids in Chicago; the same was not true of the kids in New York.

As Knuckles points out, many of the popular songs in Chicago were big in New York City, "but one of the biggest cult hits, 'Los Ninos' by Liaisons Dangereuses, only got played in the punk clubs there." Dance Music Report noted that for most of the eighties, Chicago has been the most receptive American market for avant-garde dance music. The Windy City's gay black clubs have a penchant for futuristic music, and its black radio stations were the first in the United States to give airplay to Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express" and Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes." The Art of Noise, Depeche Mode, David Byrne and the Talking Heads, and Brian Eno were all popular in Chicago's gay black circles.

What's also popular in Chicago is the art of mixing. In an interview with Sheryl Garratt, Farley Keith Williams (a.k.a. "Farley Jackmaster Funk"), one of house music's best known DJ/producers, says: "Chicago is a DJ city .... If there's a hot record out, in Chicago they'll all buy two copies so they can mix it, we have a talent for mixing. When we first started on the radio there weren't many [DJS], but then every kid wanted two turntables and a mixer for Christmas... And if a DJ can't mix, they'll boo him in a minute because half of them probably known [sic] how to do it themselves."

What was fresh about house music in its early days was that folks did it themselves; it was "homemade." Chicago DJs began recording rhythm tracks, using inexpensive synthesizers and drum machines. Very soon, a booming trade developed in records consisting solely of a bassline and drum patterns. As music critic Carol Cooper notes, "basement and home studios sprang up all over Chicago."

DJs were now able to create and record music and then expose it to a dance floor public all their own, completely circumventing the usual process of music production and distribution. These homespun DJs-cum-artists/producers synthesized the best of the avant-garde electronic dance music (Trilogy's "Not Love," Capricorn's "I Need Love," and Telex's "Brain Washed") with the best loved elements of classic African-American dance cuts, and wove it all through the cross-rhythms of the percussion tracks, creating something unique to the character of gay black Chicago.

There are so many variants of house that it is difficult to describe the music in general terms. Still, there are two common traits that hold for all of house: the music is always a brisk 120 bpm or faster; and percussion is everything. Drums and percussion are brought to the fore, and instrumental elements are electronically reproduced. In Western music, rhythm is secondary in emphasis and complexity to harmony and melody. In house music, as in African music, this sensibility is reversed.

Chip E., producer of the stuttering, stripped-down dance tracks "Like This" and "Godfather of House" characterizes house's beat as "a lot of bottom, real heavy kick drum, snappy snare, bright hi-hat and a real driving bassline to keep the groove. Not a lot of lyrics- just a sample of some sort, a melody [just] to remind you of the name of the record."(4).

That's all you can remember- the song's title- if you're working the groove of house music, because house is pure dance music. Don't dismiss the simple chord changes, the echoing percussion lines, and the minimalist melody: in African music the repetition of well-chosen rhythms is crucial to the dynamism of the music. In the classic African Rhythm and African Sensibility, John Chernoff remarks that "repetition continually re-affirms the power of the music by locking that rhythm, and the people listening or dancing to it, into a dynamic and open structure." It is precisely the recycling of well-chosen rhythmic patterns in house that gives the music a hypnotic and powerfully kinetic thrusting, permitting dancers to extract the full tension from the music's beat.

Chernoff argues that the power and dynamic potential of African music is in the gaps between the notes, and that it is there that a creative participant will place his contribution. By focusing on the gaps rather than the beats, the dancers at the Warehouse found much more freedom in terms of dancing possibilities, a freedom that permitted total improvisation.

The result was a style of dancing dubbed "jacking" that more closely resembled the spasmodic up and down movements of people possessed than it did the more choreographed and fluid "vogueing" movement of the dancers at other dubs like New York's Paradise Garage. Dancers at The Warehouse tended to move faster, quirkier, more individualistically, and deliberately off-beat. It's not that the kids had difficulty getting the beat; they simply had decided to move beyond it-around, above, and below it. Dancing on the beat was considered too normal. To dance at the Warehouse was to participate in a type of mass possession: hundreds of young black kids packed into the heat and darkness of an abandoned warehouse in the heart of Chicago during the twilight hours of Sunday morning, jacking as if there would be no tomorrow, It was a dancing orgy of unrivalled intensity, as Frankie Knuckles recalls: "It was absolutely the only club in the city to got to… it wasn't a polished atmosphere - the lighting was real simplistic, but the sound system was intense and it was about what you heard as opposed to what you saw." (5)

No Way Back: House Crosses Over

Like disco and club, house music is rapidly moving beyond the gay black underground scene, thanks in part to a boost from radio play. As early as 1980, Chicago's black-oriented radio stations WBMX and WGCI rotated house music into their programming by airing dance mixes. WBMX signed on a group pf street DJS, the ‘Hot Mix 5’, whose ranks included two of the most prolific and important house producers/artists- Ralph Rosario and Farley Jackmaster Funk. When the Hot Mix crew look to the air on Saturday nights, their five-hour show drew an estimated audience of 250,000 to 1,000,000 Chicagoans.

Now in Chicago, five-year-olds are listening to house and jacking. Rocky Jones, president of the DJ International recording label, points out that ‘[in Chicago, house] appeals to kids, teenagers, blacks, whites, hispanics, straights, gays. When McDonald's HQ throws a party for its employees, they hire house DJs."

Outside of Chicago, house sells mainly in New York, Detroit, D.C., and other large urban/black markets in the Northeast and Midwest. As in Chicago, the music has moved beyond the gay black market and is now very popular in the predominantly white downtown scene in New York, where it regularly is featured in clubs like Boy Bar and the World. But the sound also has travelled uptown, into the boroughs (and even into New Jersey) by way of increased airplay on New York's black radio stations; house can now be heard blasting forth from the boom boxes of b-boys and b-girls throughout the metropolitan area. It has also spread south and west to gay clubs like the Marquette in Atlanta and Catch One in Los Angeles. Even Detroit is manufacturing its own line, tagged "techno-house."

House music has a significant public in England as well, especially in London. In reporting on the house scene in Chicago, the British music press scooped most of its American counterparts (with the notable exception of Dance Music Report) by more than a year. So enthusiastic has been the British response to house that English DJs and musicians (both black and white) are now producing their own variety of house music, known as "acid" house.

House music, however, is not without its critics. Like disco and club, it has been either ignored or libelled by most in the American music press. In a recent Village Voice article hailing the popularity of rap music, Nelson George perfunctorily dismisses the music as "retro-disco." Other detractors of house have labelled the music "repetitive" and "unoriginal." (6)

Because of its complex rhythmic framework, though, house should not be judged by Western music standards but by criteria similar to those used to judge African music. House is retro-disco in the same way and to the same extent that rap is "retro-funk."

The criticism that this music is unoriginal stems from the fact that many house records are actually house versions of rhythms found in old soul and Philly songs. Anyone familiar with African-American musical idioms is aware that the remaking of songs is a time-honored tradition. As John Chernoff has documented, truly original style in African and African-American music often consists in subtle modifications of perfected and strictly respected forms. Thus, Africans remain "curiously" indifferent to what is an important concern of Western culture: the issue of artistic origins.

Each time a DJ plays at a club, it is a different music-making situation. The kids in the club are basically familiar with the music and follow the DJ'S mixing with informed interest. So, when a master DJ flawlessly mixes bits and pieces of classic soul, Philly, disco, and club tunes with the best of more recent house fare to form an evenly pumping groove, or layers the speeches of political heroes (Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, or Jesse Jackson) or funky Americana (a telephone operator's voice or jingles from old television programs) over well known rhythm tracks, the variations stand out clearly to the kids and can make a night at the club a special affair.

To be properly appreciated, house must be experienced in a gay black club. As is true of other African music, it is a mistake "to listen" to house because it is not set apart from its social and cultural context. "You have to go to the clubs and see how people react when they hear it ‘... people jus’ get happy and screamin’”. When house really jacks, it is about the most intense dance music around. Wallflowers beware: you have to move to understand the power of house.

Notes

1. Sheryl Garratt, "Let's Play House," The Face (September 1986), 18-23.
2. lain Chambers, Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), 187-188.
3. Simon Wiffer, "House Music," i-d (September 1986),
4. Garratt, "Let's Play House," 23•
5. Wiffer, "House Music."
6. Nelson George, "Nationwide: America Raps Back," VillageVoice 4,19 January 1988, p.32-33.