The Other Listening Room: Disco
Published March 01, 2007
Disco may be the most pervasive form of music on this planet. There is no strict definition of what makes disco disco: a 4/4 beat is all you really need. People claim to despise disco, although admitting to liking some disco singles has become acceptable. Listen, fuckers, you always liked it, you only “hated” it because everyone else “hated” it and now you, flippantly, want to admit that you like a few singles? You know what? YOU LIKE DISCO. Don’t bother denying it. Sigh… it’s getting old.
Okay. Here’s the history of disco: Disco bubbled up in the early-70s’ Philly Soul sound, floated over to Europe, came back to NYC fucked up and electro, got all over everything, was loved, hated, died, was reborn a few years later, and has quietly roamed the Earth ever since, sometimes showing itself, sometimes hiding behind such words as “post-punk,” “new wave,” “techno,” “house” or “dance-rock.” Disco wasn’t destroyed in a Chicago baseball stadium. Disco never went underground. Disco got punched in the face, that’s for sure, but disco has no face, so what does it matter?
This week, I want to present you with a few modern-day versions of that glorious, classic disco sound. Some will fit your idea of disco, some may not.
Chromatics’ "In the City" begins with a simple 4/4 bass drum, a sampled, chiming keyboard loop and a two-note ice-pick synth stab. Deadened guitar notes are added with the snare beat, an equally dead female vocal picks up and a squelchy synth cuts through like a lazy razor. The bass is as uncomplicated, both as rhythm and harmony, just adding occasional weight. Chromatics use disco as a foundation, then empty out the space around it until the strength of 4/4 time seems barely enough to hold the song upright. An errant or unnecessary note could topple the construction. From the sound, it is obviously nighttime, and the atmosphere is not euphoric, but paranoid and frightened. Violence and suicide are implied but never confirmed within the lyric. This is disco on ice, and everybody has bare, wet feet.
Like Chromatics, Glass Candy are from Portland, feature a hottie singer, and are produced by Johnny Jewel. Jewel has a way with drum programming, investing bones—if not flesh—into his machines, lending the whole thing a slightly inhuman swing. Unlike Chromatics’ black vision, Glass Candy are all color and emoting. On their cover of Belle Epoque’s 1977 "Miss Broadway", strings, sequenced and echoed synths, pianos, saxes and Siouxsie Sioux battle six or seven minutes for your attention. Glass Candy started as a garage rock band, Chromatics as punk rock, but both have slipped more and more towards disco as they have developed. Chromatics stole Glass Candy’s producer and Glass Candy has stolen some of Chromatics’ cold air, and each have emerged as flipsides of the same tarnished coin, coming off like some coked-out 1979 loft party on the 6 AM down-slope.
(In searching for Glass Candy mp3s, I found another Johnny Jewel production, this time by a Texas native named Farah, who’s bare bones and darkness rivals Chromatics’ stripped corpse of a sound. The “Law of Life” remix [found at the link above] has the patience of a saint, sitting on its bass drum for almost six minutes before developing a backbeat. Chromatics, Glass Candy and Farah are all hard at work on new albums and singles, which should be available soon on the Italians Do It Better label, distributed by Troubleman Unlimited.)
- The Other Listening Room: Disco
- Published: March 01, 2007
- Type: Review
- Section: Music
- Filed Under: Music: Dance, Music: Pop
- Part of a feature: The Other Listening Room
- Writer: zingzing
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- zingzing's personal site
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Comments on this articleComments
He's got 2 columns under his belt. Yup, he's truly a *writer*, now.
Oh, and disco does suck; all your yelling that it doesn't won't change that.
Except for Heatwave, of course.
bah, you fuckers need to realize that all disco is is dance music. any dance music that you appreciate is just disco wrapped up in some foolish fantasy that it's not disco.
and did any of you listen to the tracks? there's links to all of them.
oh, and the problem with mainstream 70s disco was its 70s cheese. the more modern stuff avoids all that. (there was, of course, lots of 70s and 80s disco that avoided all that, but it wasn't popular, so you probably have never heard it. fuckers.)
You forgot my teleportation powers!
And it's Concorde, don't you know French?
I don't like dance music, either, fucker! There is a difference between music you can dance to and dance music- I don't like the latter, including disco.
I haven't checked out the links yet, but I will.
very nice zing! i can't say that i love disco, thought back in the day when i said that i hated it, there was more than a little "going along with the pack" there.
i can't agree that everything in steady 4/4 qualifies as disco. in your examples, "Glass Candy" sounds much more disco than "In The City". i guess what i'm saying is that i don't consider all techno-ish stuff to be disco.
a good example is stuff like Photek, which is just plain electronic and weird.
still, good stuff here.
Prompted by DJ Radiohead's remark above, I was wondering, have there been any new rock dances recently? The last one I remember is The Pogo...
djr--you are in denial. i am a qualified psychologist, and you are in denial. frankly, it's silly.
mark--the glass candy song is undeniably more traditional "disco" than the chromatics song. but! all the chromatics song certainly has a disco beat, and put in the context of their other songs, there isn't anything there (or not there) that you could use to differentiate it from their more obviously "disco" stuff. it's a strange thing.
photek often doesn't employ a beat at all. so, no, not all techno is disco. not all new wave and post-punk was disco either, but some of it certainly was. (when i referred to "techno" in the essay, i was referring more to the specific detroit and chicago "techno" scenes in the mid to late 80s.) looking at the more dance-oriented techno does lead one to the conclusion that most of it is warmed-over or suped-up disco.
i'm not saying that disco is the only worthy dance music, or that it is necessarily better than other forms of techno, etc. all i am saying is that techno, even photek, is what disco became. just like rock came out of many different things, and you can trace radiohead back to elvis, you can very easily trace autechre back to aphex twin, back to hardcore trance, back to house, back to techno, back to electro, back to disco, back to funk, back to soul... it's part of the line, except disco represents a break, the bit where pure electronic elements came into play and the whole thing went off on a tangent.
Everything came from fucking somewhere, but that doesn't make bluegrass and hip hop the same thing or even all that closely related.
Denial is the least of my many psychological disorders, Zing.
i know you more than enough about music to clearly see the connection between various forms of club techno and disco.
bluegrass and hip hop... who said any such thing?
that's "i know you know more than enough..."
what the dj is saying is that a carrot is as close as a rabbit gets to a diamond.
ok, not really. i have a terrible headache at the moment and i'm trying to amuse myself.
Damnation, Zing! I'll not explain the methods to my madness- OK, I will.
I'm not in denial about dance and disco music and what they mean to me.
hip hop/bluegrass: you started talking about how you can trace Radiohead back to Elvis, etc. I understand that if you break things down far enough you can find common elements among all sorts of musical genres. I am sure there are elements common to both bluegrass and hip hop, but they are not real closely related. Sure, techno and disco share elements. I don't like most techno. I don't like disco. But I do like your column.
heh. okay, okay. the radiohead/elvis thing is just different versions of "rock" music, whatever that is. bluegrass/hip-hop... the connections are very sparse. (although i would say that bluegrass is probably the most rhythmic "white" music... and that says something.)
i'm glad you like the column. really, i'm just biding my time... trying to pull together something special. but it's hard sometimes when the music is so obscure that i can't even find track lists... not to mention actual music. actually i did find an album by the act i'm going to talk about... but i don't know which one it is, which is a bit of a bother.
anyway! disco lives! and you're all too fucking homophobic to admit you love it! hahahaha. i kid, i kid. fucking bigots. make me sick. i kid! sheesh. get over y'all selves. haters. i. can't. stop.
No, a 4/4 beat IS NOT all you really need.Otherwise,Sousa Marches qualify as Disco.I like Drum-n-Bass.It has a 4/4 beat. Is it Disco? Try to do the hustle to it. Yeah I like Dance music, but NOT Disco! Disco Still Sucks.
dude. i'm not saying that all music with a 4/4 beat is disco. that would be incredibly stupid. but, i am saying that pretty much all disco is in 4/4 time.
you silly man.
and yeah, if you think that you can separate disco from dance music, you are sadly mistaken, or delusional. go listen to any moroder production and tell me you can't see the direct connection.
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A fellow member of the brotherhood of the bozo. This is brilliant- except for the fact I don't fucking like disco. I guess it's because I got the penicillin shot and everything was cleared up in a matter of a few weeks.
You do make a good point about the "disco" influence showing up in a lot of different places under different monikers. I have been on a major Pulp kick these past few weeks and they certainly employ some hooks that could be considered to have a disco influence, although I would not argue the songs are "pure disco," whatever that is.
I'm glad you're writing for the site. We need more foul-mouthed music enthusiasts.