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06/20/2005: "disco."
I recently finished reading Peter Shapiro's new book Turn the Beat Around: A Secret History of Disco, which got me thinking about my own secret history of disco. I'm 25 years old, so I didn't exactly experience disco when it was a raging concern. Disco for me was always a nostalgia act. It was also the first genre I got really psyched about, at a time when it was totally uncool to be into disco--during the heyday of grunge.
I remember sitting in ninth grade geometry class and suddenly realizing that everyone in the classroom except me was wearing unbuttoned flannel shirts, T-shirts and baggy jeans that were intentionally ripped at the knees. I despised the aesthetic of grunge at the time (still do), and I guess I just didn't understand it. Why rip your jeans on purpose, I remember thinking to myself at the time. My grandfather was a tailor, and instilled a certain reverence in me for clothing. I used to watch him sit patiently each day with his sewing machine, as he crafted custom-made suits and shirts and dresses, and saw how much painstaking work it was. Even a little later, as I got more into punk and subjected myself to various bodily modifications--dyed red hair, multiple piercings--I would always hesitate to rip up my clothes.
And I despised the music of grunge; I never liked Nirvana, aside from being able to appreciate a few of the poppier singles, and I didn't like the people who were into it, either. I guess part of the magic of Kurt Cobain's angst was that it was so one-size-fits-all; it appealed to everyone--even the popular kids, the football jocks, the cheerleaders. I hated the other bands even more, like Alice in Chains and whatever else was going at the time. Mostly I felt gypped by the decade. The '90s at that time--with its attendant trappings of heroin, AIDS scares, and waif chic--just seemed so utterly drab compared to the '70s and '80s, which I had experienced mostly through television. I wasn't cool enough, or old enough (at age 13), to go up to New York's clubs on weekends, or clued-in enough about raves. So the prevailing zeitgeist was grunge, and it all just seemed like dreary, tuneless slop to me. Even the word "grunge" seemed sort of grey and mangy and unappetizing. I remember going to a few straightedge hardcore shows, which fared even worse in the "dreary, tuneless slop" department. My friend had subscriptions to some British music papers at the time, and we lived for each issue, for the colorful pages with jokes in 'em, the goofy stories about the misadventures of the Happy Mondays, the stories of clubs we'd never been to, and the tunes we'd probably never hear. From what I could gather, Bez was having a better time than Kurt Cobain was.
A year or so after this, when I was about fourteen, I remember sitting in my friend's car (she was a little older than me) and listening to an album she'd just bought--Screamadelica by Primal Scream. The album had come out a year or two ago, but it was new to us. I wasn't really into what was playing until "Loaded" came on, with that stoopid Peter Fonda sample: "We wanna be free to do what we wanna do! We wanna have a good time!" The lines rang in my head as I stared out the window of her car into the empty, rolling suburb-scape. I bought the album about a week later. That's exactly what grunge was missing, for me--a good time! Nirvana would've been way better, I thought, if they'd sounded more like...I dunno...Chic. "Good Times"! Which brings the story back to disco.
The first film to affect me deeply and emotionally was Saturday Night Fever, which I saw for the first time on a borrowed VHS tape while the whole grunge thing was unfolding at school. The soundtrack was also one of the only LPs in my parents' house, along with Ravi Shankar and "The Beatles, 1967-70." I memorized both sides of both LPs of Saturday Night Fever, front to back. The Tavares, the Bee Gees, the Trammps, Yvonne Elliman. I even developed a perverse fascination with the almost completely intolerable "A Fifth of Beethoven." I didn't get why my classmates didn't idolize Tony Manero the way they idolized Kurt Cobain. Tony had cool clothes! He could dance! And the bit at the end of the movie always broke my heart. Tony was as much of a tragic Jesus figure for me as Kurt was for my classmates.
Flash-forward to a decade or so later, and I'm standing in a hip Brooklyn bar and the floor is freaking out to Thelma Houston's "Don't Leave Me This Way." Even though the song is an age-old disco chestnut almost on par with "I Will Survive," the hipster contingent still goes berserk. And how could you not freak out? The whole song is radiant, openhearted bliss. Every note uplifting, every note perfect.
