Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s: Disco Heterotopias (Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music) 3030919943, 9783030919948

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF SUBCULTURES AND POPULAR MUSIC

Marko Zuba Edited by Flora Pitrolo ·

PALGRAVE STU HISTORY O DIES IN THE F SUBCULT URES AND POPU LAR MUSIC

Global Dance C ultures in the 1970s a nd 1980 s Disco Heteroto

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Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music Series Editors

Keith Gildart University of Wolverhampton Wolverhampton, UK Anna Gough-Yates University of Roehampton London, UK Sian Lincoln Liverpool John Moores University Liverpool, UK Bill Osgerby London Metropolitan University London, UK Lucy Robinson University of Sussex Brighton, UK John Street University of East Anglia Norwich, UK Peter Webb University of the West of England Bristol, UK Matthew Worley University of Reading Reading, UK

From 1940s zoot-suiters and hepcats through 1950s rock ‘n’ rollers, ­beatniks and Teddy boys; 1960s surfers, rude boys, mods, hippies and ­bikers; 1970s skinheads, soul boys, rastas, glam rockers, funksters and punks; on to the heavy metal, hip-hop, casual, goth, rave and clubber styles of the 1980s, 90s, noughties and beyond, distinctive blends of fashion and music have become a defining feature of the cultural landscape. The Subcultures Network series is international in scope and designed to explore the social and political implications of subcultural forms. Youth and subcultures will be located in their historical, socio-economic and cultural context; the motivations and meanings applied to the aesthetics, actions and manifestations of youth and subculture will be assessed. The objective is to facilitate a genuinely cross-disciplinary and transnational outlet for a burgeoning area of academic study. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14579

Flora Pitrolo  •  Marko Zubak Editors

Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s Disco Heterotopias

Editors Flora Pitrolo Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing Birkbeck, University of London London, UK

Marko Zubak Department of Contemporary History Croatian Institute of History Zagreb, Croatia

ISSN 2730-9517     ISSN 2730-9525 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music ISBN 978-3-030-91994-8    ISBN 978-3-030-91995-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Roman Stetsyk / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making and has acquired the support of friends and allies through stratified conversations, debates, listening sessions and parties with more people than we can thank here. We would like to thank our colleagues from the disciplines and institutions we work within, and Marko Zubak expressly wishes to thank the Croatian Institute of History and Cost Action NEP4DISSENT for giving him the freedom to research. Some of the people who have helped us shape ideas related to this book in its very early stages are Franco Fabbri, Rachel Haworth, Paul Long, Ewa Mazierska, Goffredo Plastino and Gábor Vályi, aka DJ Shuriken. Our gratitude goes to them for having given us both intellectual stimulus and more public stages to begin to work on the ideas that eventually crystallised in this volume. We would like to thank Arabella Stanger, Mimi Haddon and Michael Lawrence for giving this book a platform at the Brighton Disco! Conference in June 2018 when we were still in the heat of working through this editorial project, and to all the attendees of that conference for their generous input, enlightened comments and enthusiasm for this book when it was just beginning to take shape. We wish to acknowledge generous help and input from Lucia Udvardyova and Marysia Lewandowska; Colin Cumming’s eagle-eyed work was invaluable in helping us move through the final throes of preparing these texts and we want to thank him for his professionalism and interest in our work. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Our deepest thanks to the series editors of Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, and in particular to Matthew Worley for making this collaboration happen. Indeed, thanks to all the individuals we have interacted with at Palgrave over the years for their patience, help and guidance. This collection couldn’t have happened without the unwavering support and love of our partners Robert Jack and Jelena Gluhak Zubak (and Maša and Jura). Thank you for everything. Finally, we wish to thank the authors whose chapters make up this collection. It is a huge honour and pleasure to be able to host your work.

Contents

 Introduction: Disco Heterotopias—Other Places, Other Spaces, Other Lives  1 Flora Pitrolo and Marko Zubak  Montreal, Funkytown: Two Decades of Disco History 29 Will Straw  Dancin’ Days: Disco Flashes in 1970s Brazil 51 Ivan Paolo de Paris Fontanari Gimmick! Italo Disco, Copy and Consumption 75 Flora Pitrolo  Japanese Disco as Pseudo-International Music101 Yusuke Wajima  Disco, Dancing, Globalization and Class in 1980s Hindi Cinema127 Gregory D. Booth  Dancing Desire, Dancing Revolution: Sexuality and the Politics of Disco in China Since the 1980s151 Qian Wang

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Non-stop, I Want to Live Non-stop: The Role of Disco in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia173 Jakub Machek  Yugoslav Disco: The Forgotten Sound of Late Socialism195 Marko Zubak  The Lebanese Music Experiment: Disco and Nightlife During the Civil War223 Natalie Shooter and Ernesto Chahoud  Disco and Discontent in Nigeria: A Conversation251 Uchenna C. Ikonne, Flora Pitrolo, and Marko Zubak  Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia281 Ken McLeod  Epilogue: Decolonising Disco—Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco303 Tim Lawrence Index339

Notes on Contributors

Gregory D. Booth  is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Auckland and has been engaged in the study of Indian music and culture for more than 30 years. He has published numerous articles and chapters on music, film, industry and culture in South Asia, and is the author of Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios (2008) and Brass Baja: Stories from the World of Indian Wedding Bands (2005). Ernesto Chahoud  A philosophy postgraduate, Ernesto Chahoud is a DJ, compiler and radio host who has been working in music for over 20 years. In 2009 he founded The Beirut Groove Collective, which evolved into a weekly clubnight with an international reputation playing obscure records from the 1960s and 1970s from around the world. As a DJ, Chahoud has toured the world and hosts monthly radio shows on NTS, Totally Wired Radio and Radio Alhara. Specialising in Arabic and Ethiopian music, his discography includes two electro-acoustic albums, Taitu, a double compilation of Ethiopian music from the 1970s, and a series of reissues of groundbreaking Lebanese music under the series ‘Middle Eastern Heavens’. Ivan Paolo de Paris Fontanari  is Professor of Anthropology and coordinator of the Anthropology, Youth and Youthfulness Research Group at Federal University of Fronteira Sul, Chapeco, SC, Brazil. He writes on issues concerning youth and expressive culture in contemporary Brazil. He is the author of The DJs from Periferia: Electronic Dance Music, Trajectories and Cultural Mediations in Sao Paulo (Editora Sulina, 2013), published in Portuguese, based on his award-winning doctoral dissertation. ix

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Uchenna  C.  Ikonne  is an author, DJ and historian specialising in the field of Nigerian popular music. As the head of the Comb & Razor Sound record label, he has curated collections of vintage recordings such as Wake Up You! The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock 1972–1977 (released by Now Again Records in 2016). He has written extensively about music and popular culture for a variety of outlets, and is working on a four-volume history of Nigerian music. Tim Lawrence  is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. He is the author of Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–79, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–92, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–83. He is a co-founder of Lucky Cloud Sound System, which has been staging Loft parties in London since 2003. Jakub  Machek is a popular culture historian. He lectures in the Department of Media Studies at the Metropolitan University Prague. His research covers Czech popular culture from the end of the nineteenth century, throughout socialism until the present day. He is the author of the monograph The Emergence of Popular Culture in the Czech Lands (2017) and has co-edited several collections of essays. His latest research is focused on the function of music in Czech society, from brass band music to disco. Ken McLeod  is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Toronto. He has published widely on identity politics in popular music; the intersections between technology, science fiction, and hip hop; and popular music appropriations of art music. He is the author of We Are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Popular Music (2011) and Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture (2020). He is researching issues of colonisation, racism and spirituality in the nexus of popular music, science fiction and the space industry. Flora  Pitrolo lectures on theatre, performance and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London and Syracuse University London. Her work investigates alternative European performance and music cultures of the 1980s, with a special focus on Italy. She publishes both as a scholar and as a journalist, and is active as a DJ and producer in various archival and experimental music scenes.received her PhD in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in 2014. She teaches courses on Performance and

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Media Studies at Birkbeck, University of London and Syracuse University London, and works independently as a curator and as a consultant for cultural projects in the UK and in Italy. Her work investigates alternative European performance and music cultures of the 1980s, with a special focus on Italy. She has published both as a scholar (Theatre Journal, About Performance, Studies in Theatre and Performance) and as a journalist (she was Editor of Archival and Reissues for leading UK electronic music portal JunoPlus between 2014 and 2016, and broadcasts since 2011 on London’s Resonance FM and on Skopje’s Kanal 103). Her most recent large editorial project is the archive book Syxty Sorriso & Altre Storie (2017) on performance art in early 1980s Milan. Natalie Shooter  Based between Beirut and the UK, Natalie Shooter is an editor, writer and researcher with a focus on music from the South West Asian/North African (SWANA) region. She has worked as editor of several magazines, and her writing has been published in The Guardian, Pin-Up, Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye. She has also curated and produced many concerts, clubnights and festivals in Beirut and beyond, such as the outdoor festival series The Shoreline Sessions and Hiya Live, a digital festival focused on progressive female artists from the Arabic-speaking world, founded in 2020. She co-runs The Beirut Groove Collective, a vinyl DJ collective and clubnight in Beirut that has been running for the past 12 years. Will Straw  is James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies at McGill University in Montreal, where he teaches within the Department of Art History and Communications Studies. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America (2006) and co-­editor of several volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop (with Simon Frith and John Street, 2001), Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (with Alexandra Boutros, 2010), Formes Urbaines (with Anouk Bélanger and Annie Gérin, 2014) and The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (with Janine Marchessault, 2019). He is the author of over 160 articles on music, cinema and urban culture. Yusuke Wajima  is Professor of Musicology at Osaka University. He has published on the history of Japanese popular music, authoring Tsukurareta ‘Nihon-no-kokoro’ Shinwa (2010), which won the 2011 IASPM Book Prize and the Suntory Prize. Its English translation, Creating Enka: The ‘Soul of Japan’ in the Postwar Era, was published in 2018. He contributed

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a book chapter, titled ‘The Birth of Enka’, for Made in Japan: Studies in Popular Music (2014). His recent book, Odoru Showa Kayou (Dance Music in the Showa Period (1926–1989), 2015), focuses on dance music in modern Japan. Qian Wang  is Professor of Sociology at Yibin University. His research is mainly focused on music sociology, cultural studies and gender studies in the context of Chinese popular music. He examines the sophisticated interaction between popular music and social transformation since the economic reform and writes on issues such as gender and queer. He is the author of Rock Crises: Research on Chinese Rock Music in the 1990s and the co-author of Research on New Media and Urban Children (forthcoming). Marko  Zubak  is a researcher at the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb, specialising in popular culture in socialist Eastern Europe. Recent publications include the monograph The Yugoslav Youth Press (1968–1980) (2018). He has curated the exhibitions ‘Yugoslav Youth Press as Underground Press’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive: Socialist Disco Culture’, which travelled across the region.holds a PhD in History from the Central European University in Budapest. He is a research associate at the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb, focusing on popular, alternative and youth cultures and media in the second half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe, on which he taught at several universities (Zagreb, Budapest, Klagenfurt). He published on these topics, including a monograph The Yugoslav Youth Press (1968–1980): Student Movements, Youth Subcultures and Alternative Communist Media (2018). His recent interest focuses on popular music and club cultures. He has curated two exhibitions (‘Yugoslav Youth Press as Underground Press: 1968–1972’, ‘Stayin’ Alive: Socialist Disco Culture’) that have travelled around the region and collaborated on many others, most recently on ‘Restless Youth: 70 Years of Growing up in Europe, 1945 to Now’ at the House of European History in Brussels.

Introduction: Disco Heterotopias—Other Places, Other Spaces, Other Lives Flora Pitrolo and Marko Zubak

The purpose of this collection is to shed light on disco’s global journey between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, investigating the whys and hows of its evolution across ideological, social, political, economical and linguistic contexts other to the one in which it originated. The chapters compiled here look at how disco acquired different forms, meanings and functions as it was adopted and re-imagined outside of its Anglophone manifestations; they analyse the cultural and economic infrastructures disco travelled through, the musical forms, styles and traditions it adopted, the various ways it located itself on cultural mainstreams or undergrounds, its links to parallel artistic phenomena, to distinct sexual and racial politics, to the lifestyles of particular groups, subcultures and to specific spaces of the social city and of the built environment. While scholars have increasingly

F. Pitrolo (*) Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK M. Zubak Department of Contemporary History, Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_1

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taken disco seriously over the past two decades, examining both its underground roots and its more conventional aspects (Lawrence 2003; Flatley and Kronengold 2008; Echols 2011; Lawrence 2016), the genre’s capacity to be absorbed and remodelled across a wider geographical range has not thus far been chartered, and disco’s other lives in local, marginal and peripheral scenes remain mostly under-appreciated. But as it exploded, atomised and travelled, disco served a number of different agendas: its aesthetic rootedness in ideas of pleasure, transgression and escapism and its formal malleability, constructed around a four-on-the-floor beat, allowed it to permeate a number of local scenes for whom the meaning of disco shifted, sometimes in unexpected and radical ways. This volume seeks to go some of the way in opening up a terrain for the global study of disco as a musical genre, as a dance culture and as a wider cultural phenomenon. Across these chapters, our authors capture the variety of scenes, contexts and reasons for which disco took on diverse dimensions in its global journey, acting as generous interpreters between English-language scholarship and geo-political, ideological and sociological landscapes that fall outside of its more well-trodden narratives. From oil boom Nigeria to post-Invasion Czechoslovakia, from post-colonial India to war-torn Lebanon, our aim here is to increase the visibility of scenes that have hitherto been under-represented and to make some critical interventions in how to tackle the ideology of derivative musics and ‘glocal’ and ‘non-local’ music- and nightlife-related cultures. How can we balance representation and appropriation in a globalised world? How can we complicate the discourse between centre and periphery? How do difference and sameness play out in the complex travelling of global cultural phenomena? The book you hold in your hands is intended as a set of guided tours— which may be a starting point for your own historical research and musical discoveries, or an ulterior step of the way in debates you are already embedded within—which can serve as tools of comparison and differentiation. It contains rich historical and geo-political backgrounds, expert analysis and much discographic detail. It is the result of deep reading, deep listening, oral histories and personal discoveries; it is made by writers and scholars who are also diggers, collectors, DJs, label bosses, cultural agitators and people of the night, and targets the music lover as much as the academic reader. Indeed, our curation of writers, contributions and investigative angles here seeks to establish a crucial connection between ‘scene’ and ‘field’, because there are important differences in the kinds of

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knowledge the two produce and in the ways in which that knowledge circulates. Allowing these to overlap and cross-pollinate is crucial to enrich our work from both sides, taking disco seriously as an object of analysis without sacrificing its effects on lived experience.

Other Places: The Global, The Local, The Glocal World This volume comes into a critical panorama in which debates on cultural imperialism—and concepts of local and global, centre and periphery, hybridisation, colonisation, decolonisation and self-colonisation—have undergone and are still undergoing a huge, and hugely generative, process of complication. Current movements in popular music studies, and indeed in the studies of all cultural phenomena, are undoing structures and assumptions that have tainted our disciplines since their inception. In her introduction to the collection Relocating Popular Music, Ewa Mazierska notes that [m]usic travels practically as long as it exists, but some routes are more frequented than others. (…) In the twentieth century, music is used less in open acts of colonisation and missionisation (not least because they were replaced by subtler forms of dominance), yet its production and consumption reflects well on the imbalances of power between different regions and countries. (Mazierska in Gregory and Mazierska 2015, 8)

We are conscious that the terms ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘glocal’ have to be productively redefined at each turn, and indeed these and other terms appear in this volume in multifarious ways which not only speak back to ongoing debates in Anglophone scholarship but also reflect the cultural and discursive positionalities of each author. This collection seeks to join a protean move towards analytical differentiation in an interdisciplinary field already marked by work such as that performed by Gregory and Mazierska and many others (see, e.g., Mitchell 1996; Fairley 2001; Connell and Gibson 2003; White 2012; Guerra and Quintela 2020), as well as single-­ regional focus work (such as the volumes making up the Routledge Popular Music Studies Made In series, as well as texts in the same series as this book such as Marsh 2016, Lohman 2017, and Tosoni and Zuccalà 2020), work invested in both demolishing and rebuilding the critical and racial palimpsests that still bury our understanding of many popular musics

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(beyond the volumes mentioned across these chapters see, e.g., recent volumes such as diverse as Brooks 2021 and Haddon 2020) and work on how the digital reconfigures our perception of the ‘global’ (as an example see Clayton 2016). As such, it inscribes itself as part of a process that seeks to nuance understandings of local and global in the face of the hybrid, the hyperlocal and the decentralised. This process has been underway for at least two or three decades in academic circles, but it is now being accelerated by progressively moving up the mainstream agenda. The world this volume comes into is not simply a world in which one might hear the same single being played in clubs and on radios everywhere, as was the case in the time this book explores, the 1970s and 1980s; it is a world in which tapes from a market vendor in Azerbaijan will end up on a famous DJs SoundCloud account and be distributed to millions of followers, a world in which Dutch and Syrian students of economics might argue expertly over the best Russian trance singles on a beach in Goa. Situated beyond Jameson’s problems with postmodernist ‘random cannibalisation’ (Jameson 1991, 18) and beyond the notions of ‘mutual misunderstanding/an imagined quality of elsewhere/a projection from the unconscious’ that sit at the centre of David Toop’s pyramid diagram at the beginning of his Exotica (1999), the world this volume comes into is a world in which students openly protest curricula that don’t adequately account for the global South and in which statues are toppled. The notion of ‘world music’ has been problematised for at least two decades in popular music scholarship (Connell and Gibson 2003; Guilbault 2001; Stokes 2003), but the mere fact that it has become quite hard to find a ‘world music’ section in independent record stores demonstrates on a day-to-day level how there is a widespread dissatisfaction with the taxonomies we have hitherto used to order experience. Equally, in academic fields, the notion of intersectionality has found many applications as ‘buzzword’ since Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it in 1989 (Davis 2008), and intersectional views of cultural phenomena proliferate in contemporary scholarship; at the same time, the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism (Papastergiadis 2012; Regev 2013), which works on a quasi-Derridaen always already globalised and thus interactive formation of taste and artistic practices in late modernity, has provided much food for thought and has been both utilised and criticised. Meanwhile, in the scene, three decades of DIY internet radio experimentation have brought us now to a place in which NTS, still one of the most successful internet radios, carries the slogan ‘don’t assume’; the radios Threads and Threads* broadcast at the

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same time from Tottenham (‘Tottenham’—not ‘London’) and from Zona Leste de São Paulo not São Paulo, Debar Maalo not Skopje; concurrently, Radio Al Hara is the world-reaching but firmly Palestinian lockdown radio that has scored the COVID-19 era for hipsters all over the world. These phenomena might not all be doing it ‘right’ from everyone’s point of view or from a scholarly perspective—and they often represent the interests of those who have had the luxury to study and travel—but they do tell us about an impatience to problematise assumptions, include what had been excluded, widen the breadth of the archive and celebrate difference. Anybody who teaches at a university will have remarked how decentralisation and hyperlocality are becoming increasingly cool; of course, these discourses in their vernacularised forms still sometimes appear in ways haunted by twentieth-century essentialism and, much more often, hijacked by the cogs of neoliberalism. If difference is cool, then difference sells: the increasingly interconnected lines linking promiscuous listenership and ethical considerations are not straight, and the fetishisation of place is still a powerful marketing operation (Connell and Gibson 2003, 153). We mustn’t be naive with regards to ours or our students’ enthusiasm—or that of diggers, or dancers—at the same time, however, we should take care to not throw out the baby with the bathwater: what Gregory and Mazierska in 2015 intercepted as a spatial turn in popular music studies is, in 2021, much more widely reflected in a spatial turn in the experience of music lovers, in which place really matters and universalism is increasingly seen as suspicious. Interdisciplinary and anti-hierarchical in how it moves through knowledge, this volume comes to disco as a genre as it blossomed across the world through two epistemological constructs which we want to devote some time to here so that they may follow the reader as they delve into the scenes and archives explored as the volume progresses: on the one hand, Foucault’s philosophical construct of the heterotopia as a term rooted in the spatial and able to account for a simultaneous participation in different geographical and imaginary regimes; on the other, the vernacular practice of crate digging, which we elevate here to a scholarly methodology. It is not only that ‘promiscuous and omnivorous, disco absorbed sounds and styles from all over, and in the process accelerated the transnational flow of musical ideas and idioms’ (Echols 2011, xxiv)—it is also and crucially that charting disco’s travels as a genre, as an archive and as a set of values allows us to account for highly differentiated experiences of listening, dancing

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and living while keeping our eye on ‘the investment in imaginary unities’ that keeps these experiences in common (Straw 1991, 369).

Other Spaces: The Heterotopian Paradigm We are bringing together the work presented in this volume under the rubric of heterotopia, one of Michel Foucault’s most infectious yet also most fluid terms, outlined briefly in the preface to The Order of Things and then returned to in the 1967 lecture ‘Des Espaces Autres’, published in 1984  in French and two years later in English. Infectious, because the term has sparked the imagination of generations of scholars across fields and proven immensely flexible in bridging disciplinary areas: the concept of heterotopia holds together and at the same time sets in motion a series of spatial, temporal, ideological and affective dimensions of marginality and liminality, and because of this its applications have been far-reaching and wide-ranging. Fluid, for those very same reasons; and thus perhaps overly elastic and porous, dialectically contradictory and self-fulfilling. Foucault elaborated very little on the term in the canon he left behind following his untimely death: the ‘heterotopia’ as a critical edifice is, as such, unfinished, and always open to being completed and integrated every time it is interpreted and applied. Therefore we are also indebted here to the careful subsequent engagements with the term offered by those who have come to it before us—in scholarly contexts as diverse as the study of vampires, shopping centres, adult education, porn sites and Islamic architecture and in geographical contexts from Congo to L.A., from Hong Kong to Vienna (and we are grateful to Peter Johnson for both carefully working through the concept and keeping tabs on the term’s application).1 Perhaps most starkly within its own disciplinary confines of spatial studies—Foucault’s lecture addressed a group of architects in Berlin—the term has come under scrutiny. David Harvey has argued that in the term ‘the problem of Utopia could be resurrected and simultaneously evaded’ (Harvey 2000, 183): in Harvey’s account the final ‘ship’ in Foucault’s lecture is a ship which allows both Foucault and postmodern theory to ‘escape’ (a crucial term for us here) the problem of utopia, and the revolutionary, useful re-materialisation of the term ‘heterotopia’ happens in Lefebvre, not in Foucault (Harvey 2012). Edward Soja laments how Foucault’s rendering of the term is ‘frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent’ in his influential Thirdspace (1986): ‘Foucault romps through the principles of heterotopology with unsystematic autobiographical

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enjoyment and disorderly irresponsibility’ (Soja 1996, 159). Indeed, the cumulative taxonomy Foucault provides in his lecture has perhaps proven more of an enigma than a solid theoretical foundation: the stacking up of spaces—beach, cemetery, ship, prison, mirror—has kept most of us guessing at the Sphinx, trying to cross-check the ‘principles’ of these other spaces onto one another and understand where we might go looking for them in our world. We have heterotopias everywhere, it seems, and we have never fully been able to ‘map them’; such is their appeal and, most importantly, their usefulness as a category by which to question the contemporary. The power of the term, after all, lies also in its inbuilt capacity to at the same time provide and disrupt categorisation, ordering itself as a locus of ‘disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry’ (Foucault 1966, xix, emphasis added). Our sense is that a collection of chapters about a phenomenon such as dance cultures—incoherent, disobedient, disorderly, vernacular and playful—should ride on such a fluid concept, in which glittering possible orders should be redefined at each turn. We also feel that in devoting our attention to dance cultures, ‘autobiographical enjoyment and disorderly irresponsibility’ (Soja 1996) are the name of our game, in which a ludic marginality is always at work. The various ‘missions’ we encounter across this volume—musical, cultural and subcultural, collective missions and individual ones, driven by love, by money or by fame—always entail building ‘something like counter-sites: a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Foucault 1984, 3); and yes, these missions are also always and undoubtedly laced with a longing to escape. And while the problem of utopia, as Harvey suggests, is (literally) jettisoned in Foucault’s second text—and we too are firm on the idea that indeed the term can be so easily evacuated of its materiality—this is also because utopias are built into the idea of heterotopias. Perhaps in no other example offered by Foucault is this more evident than in the mirror, which is a utopia because when I look in the mirror ‘I see myself there where I am not’ (Foucault 1984, 4). But the mirror is intensely real, although it gives me an image of myself which is effectively unreal: it projects me into a utopian space but it is definitely over here. The ‘joint space’, Foucault calls it, of the heterotopia powerfully takes shape:

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The mirror makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Foucault 1984, 4)

The example of the mirror makes tangibly perceivable and demonstrable a synchronous participation in regimes that logically do not connect. Our use of the concept in this volume, similarly to authors who have most recently approached the term (Ferdinand et al. 2020) and to Ben Gallan’s work on music scenes (2015) with whom we share a disciplinary kinship, embraces its slipperiness and enigmatic nature. In fact, we are interested above all in the heterotopia as a locus of potentially irreconcilable contrasts in which different regimes co-exist in unstable ways which constantly necessitate reinvention and restructuring. ‘Existing’, however, is key: the heterotopia does not carry an anticipatory ‘there and then’ but a strange ‘here and now’. And while Foucault’s formulation of heterotopias as ‘effectively enacted utopias’ does create some problems in how we think the tension between the two terms, it is a definition worth reckoning with—and it is worth doing so away from the clamour of celebratory accounts of disco as an easy horizon of liberation through dance and as an altogether more complex, thornier phenomenon. Its usefulness could likened it to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, in as much as it provokes a defamiliarisation: [I]n describing generally the space in which we live, as opposed to Bachelard’s inner space, Foucault refers to that which ‘draws us out of ourselves’. This is crucial. Heterotopias draw us out of ourselves in peculiar ways; they display and inaugurate a difference and challenge the space in which we may feel at home. (Johnson 2006, 84)

In our work on this volume we are using this concept on two levels: on the one hand, the level on which as Garcia has rightly picked up before us, ‘given their layered spatialities, interstitial sites, and fleeting materializations, disco’s dancefloors could be perhaps described as heterotopias instead of utopias’ (Garcia 2014); and on the other, we are using it to speak of the position of disco scenes that are geographically, socially, economically, politically, linguistically other to disco’s original conditions of production and consumption. Reinvented at each turn—in each linguistic, political, socio-cultural landscape—the scenes taken into analysis in this volume

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present different ways in which the domain of the imaginary produces effectively enacted, existing local impacts. Each scene is thus ‘drawn out of itself’, and draws into itself the disco paradigm as imaginary cipher made available by a globalising music industry and by the cultural imperialism of US-made products and images (the film Saturday Night Fever, mentioned in almost all of the chapters that make up this collection, is a case in point). These mutations of the disco paradigm—variously described by our authors as translations, adaptations, importations, fakes, reformulations, absorptions, imitations, inflections, inspirations, aspirations, assimilations, globalisations—function as heterotopias within heterotopias: the already ‘joint’ space of the discotheque and disco music vis-à-vis everyday life takes its place within larger cultural operations by which the imaginary regime of ‘disco’—which we might pseudo-geographically refer to as ‘New York City’ as utopian locus—co-exists, for example, with Rio, Beirut, Lagos, Prague as places of ‘real’ experience. We are interested in these modes of co-existence not in order to celebrate a kind of cultural flattening—the heterotopian edifice could be folded into all sorts of political idealisms which evade the question of everyday life and can even end up in a tragic embrace with neoliberalism, as some of our authors suggest—but because of the spikes, the tensions, the difficulties that this co-existence make available to consider. The pervasiveness of mirrors in discotheques all over the world has something to do with the description of the mirror offered by Foucault. My image in the mirror—forcefully real and unreal at the same time— proves to me that I am participating in multiple incongruous orders simultaneously: at once day and night, reality and fantasy, domesticity and foreignness. But even more, we might locate our heterotopian mirror in the mirrorball, the main purpose of which is to refract, a term which Ferdinand et  al. (2020) also return to time and again in their work on globalised spaces. To re-frangere is to break again, to scatter the whole into a myriad different pieces: the mirrorball refracts light as well as our own image, and while the image that comes back is made of recognisable units, these appear to us ordered in a way that is no longer what it was. The act of glittering, then, carries important epistemological consequences: the mirrorball scatters what is whole, makes difference out of sameness and multiplies the singular. In an interrogation of Jim Hodges’ artworks in which mirror mosaics are placed on canvas, José Esteban Munoz writes:

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Hodges’s mirror work, such as the piece Great Event, also promises another wish-landscape. Tiny pieces of mirror connect on canvas in the shape of a circle. One immediate connotation is the disco ball and the world of play, dance, and exuberance it represents. Here the world of salvation on the dance floor is conjured. But the mirrored orb also has other connotations. It can be understood as an aerial perspective of a great glittering landscape. It can appear to be something like a demographic or population-density map of a queer utopia. (Muñoz 2009, 142)

We can venture that discos, disco, dance music and nightlife in general function in these terms: the space of a dance culture always refracts everyday experience, reassembling it into new and other potential demographics and ‘great glittering landscapes’. The dots of light on the walls of the discotheque—shattered, scattered—return the image of what is over here broken up into a thousand pieces by ‘this virtual point which is over there’ (Foucault 1984, 4). Another work that famously used a mirrorball was Marc-Camille Chaimovicz’s Celebration? Real Life (1972)—about which, importantly, Lizzie Carey-Thomas has singled out the question mark in the artwork’s title as ‘a metaphor for that gap between art and life’ (Carey-­ Thomas 2011). Tom Holert notes that the mirrorball in the artwork became the tool Chaimovicz used to conjugate the ‘lower class ballroom’ and the ‘upper class mansion’ and still show how it ‘remains at odds with its surroundings’: ‘the working class dream of upper class glamour transcends even the realities of the upper class home’ (Holert 2007, 83). We might use this idea to return to questions of importation, assimilation, aspiration, inspiration—and reflect on how the imaginary conditions of disco might be transcended in the chapters collected here. Holert continues: The inclusion of the mirrorball in Celebration? Real Life suggests that the mirrorball can be put into the service of an aesthetic critique of everyday life. By recontextualising its deterritorialising, scattering and disseminating powers, Chaimovicz explores its cultural and sensual, discursive and political dimensions. (Holert 2007, 83)

What a mirrorball does, what a heterotopia does, is invest the real into an aesthetic regime of mystery and at the same time illuminate a limit, a border between here and there. Our vision switches continuously in the heterotopian condition from experiencing separate spaces to experiencing the joint space, and back again (and again, and again). Scattering and

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disseminating the knowledge they produce, the chapters herein collected all negotiate this switching, navigating a series of cultural dilemmas in the various scenes taken into analysis which extends into the present moment as a dilemma in scholarship: similarly to the tension between what is always perceived as an Anglophone genre and its permutations across countries, the tension between Anglophone scholarship and non-Anglophone objects of inquiry is enacted and continuously renegotiated across the pages of this volume. By setting the heterotopian paradigm in motion as a framework by which to read these contributions, we hope to also keep alight the critical question of what it means to keep together what we have already termed ‘potentially irreconcilable contrasts in which different regimes co-exist’. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. (Foucault 1966, xix)

This volume itself is a joint space in which various ideological, cultural, linguistic contexts co-exist, held together by the English language and by contemporary Anglophone scholarship, both of which are forms of syntax as Foucault describes. This gesture is not without problems, but those problems appear—conjugated in different ways—across each one of the chapters presented here, and are made available to the reader as problems to work with. Our editorial effort has been to balance the demands of knowledge circulation while respecting the cultural frameworks each author is embedded in and writes from: most of the authors who have contributed to this collection are either based in or come from the region they write about, and in preparing these chapters with them we have attempted to ‘hold together’ Anglophone and non-Anglophone ‘syntaxes’. Translation scholar Lawrence Venuti’s influential work on the concepts of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignisation’ (1995) might finally come to our aid here, according to which the former performs ‘an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values’, and the latter applies ‘an ethnodeviant pressure on those target language values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text’ (Venuti 1995, 20). Venuti differentiates between to two as ‘bringing the author

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back home’ versus ‘sending the reader abroad’ (Venuti 1995, 20). We have always tried to send the reader abroad here, staging the author as guide but keeping the demand to travel firmly on those who come to the text; our hope is that chapter by chapter, scene by scene, the reader will register ethnodeviance and cultural difference and work with the disturbance they provide. If heterotopias, as we have seen, ‘display and inaugurate a difference and challenge the space in which we may feel at home’ (Johnson 2006, 84), we hope nobody ever feels at home in this collection of chapters, and that they will serve as an invitation to travel and experiment with one’s own syntactical worldview.

Other Lives: Digging as Methodology Crate digging is the practice of picking through stashes of old records in search of forgotten or underrated musical artefacts: tracks which for various reasons have remained under the radar, but which because of certain characteristics become valuable to those who go hunting for them. Beyond vinyl, the practice encompasses other media used to preserve and record music, from magnetic tapes to online digital formats. The term now designates any type of exploration through big collections of unstructured musical information, undertaken in order to catch, preserve and circulate lost or ignored musical expressions that lay outside of the prevailing canon. Crate diggers—music aficionados, DJs, collectors—feature strongly in this volume, evoked through mixtapes, compilations and reissues; we also have crate diggers amongst our contributors, and explicitly link this informal research practice to the work of scholarship and recent studies of popular music heritage and history (Baker 2015; Bennett and Janssen 2017; Baker et  al. 2018). Driven by a DIY ethos, crate diggers—many of them DJs themselves—uncover a body of previously unknown and unappreciated music, establishing new musical narratives in the process. Within the last two decades, the practice has played an especially important role in the safeguarding and circulating of non-Western musical heritage, expanding our knowledge of global, hyperlocal and peripheral scenes. While DJs have searched for old records to use in new contexts at least since the Northern Soul craze, when British DJs looked for fresh but forsaken soul tracks to sustain an ongoing fascination with Black American dance rhythms, the term as we use it today is indebted primarily to the early 1970s practices of Bronx hip-hop DJs who turned digging for ‘breaks’ into an aesthetic. In his groundbreaking study on crate digging,

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Gábor Vályi posits that hip-hop’s use of sampling provided the core of a new aesthetic approach to musical heritage, which he identifies as ‘break aesthetics’. Grounded in the search for breaks, and emerging from an innovative approach to repertoire, this new sensibility shifted the focus to qualities different to those favoured by traditional musical criticism, namely rhythmic appeal and the potential for the music to be used in sets (Vályi 2013). The term ‘digging’ acquired more prominent visibility from the mid-1990s, when the search for breaks began to be extended to new musical landscapes and was no longer limited to dance-oriented findings. Over time, crate diggers became interested in an ever-wider range of genres: beyond traditional digging areas such as jazz and soul, more obscure genres came into sight, such as psychedelia or exploitation, and many other genres that find their way into this collection, including forms of ‘disco’. Indeed, disco has proven to be a particularly fertile playground for diggers—and thus digging as a methodology is particularly suited to studying disco—because of at least a couple of the genre’s inherent qualities. First, its status as a dance music: the congenital overlay between digging and DJing has enabled disco tracks to resurface, often re-edited or remixed, on dance floors and in mixes. Second, its supposed artificiality— heightened in musical cultures in which disco sounded very unfamiliar, and often took the form of one-offs, B-sides and isolated artistic excursions in artists’ careers—played into its neglect: left outside of popular canons, it became available to be rediscovered and reassessed. From the mid-1990s onwards, in parallel to a general diversification of digging in terms of genre, the end goal of the practice also shifted: the functional search for the break gave way to a more organic exploration of entire tracks, genres and musical traditions, and the practice began to overlap with that of ‘rare groove’ collectors, with whom diggers shared an interest in ‘obscure’ and ‘exotic’ musics. While many diggers share a fondness for vinyl, the format on which the music is stored is not essential to the practice, and digging is set apart from record collecting by three of its major traits: its exploratory dimension, its element of aesthetic (re)evaluation and its inherently inclusionary nature. Digging is exploratory because its fundamental aim is to expand the canon by including within it new elements—unknown, misplaced, lost or forgotten tracks, artists and genres. In this regard, diggers play an important role in the preservation of local musical heritage which for various reasons has remained outside of general interest. But beyond this work of expansion and preservation, diggers re-evaluate existing traditions by rearranging

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them according to new aesthetic sensibilities, a feature rooted in the old days of hip-hop. Fundamentally eclectic and unrestrained by established categories of genre or taste, diggers also complicate and destabilise the canon, setting the music in a context other to its original frameworks. Finally, crate digging is inherently inclusionary and democratic in the sense that it is a non-institutional, vernacular practice: digging, like other DIY approaches to the appreciation of a musical legacy, happens ‘from below’, and there are no rules to how one might go about it (Bennett 2009). Additionally, digging—at least in its inception and ethos—is not as tied to market forces, and ‘rare’ and ‘obscure’ doesn’t necessarily translate to ‘expensive’. Indeed, the cheap, rare and great record is the digger’s ultimate goal; and that record is to be played, not to be cleaned and stored away. For Western diggers, non-Western music provides the perfect material for these kinds of endeavours: under-publicised and rarely circulated, much of it has remained ‘unmapped’ for a long time, and provides new and rich territory to be explored and classified. Digging practices in the West have naturally been drawn to the ‘exotic’ quality of musics that are at the same time unusual yet familiar enough to be understood within Western frameworks, and that can easily find their way into DJ sets, compilations and mixtapes. But digging at this point is not an exclusively Western practice: over time, diggers around the world have started to explore their own local lost or forgotten scenes. Just like Bronx hip-hop DJs had turned to their parents’ record collections to look for usable ‘breaks’, diggers across the globe search in their own backyard—visiting local music libraries, second-hand records shops and flea markets—to find material which will expand not only the way their heritage is viewed from the West but much more crucially, the way they view the musical heritage of their own region or community. While we have so far framed digging as fundamentally a force for good, the practice can of course be criticised for its ethics. This kind of hunt for the rare, hidden or forgotten can be linked to a fundamentally colonial mentality, especially when Western diggers search for tracks outside of their own musical terrain—the ‘discovery’ in this sense is a false discovery, as all it does is reveal to the West something that had been well known to the locals all along. Indeed, the narrative of musical discovery can easily carry echoes of Orientalism, in which the ‘othering’ of music created elsewhere strengthens a perception of Western supremacy embodied in the figure of the digger. Instead of an image of enthusiastic aficionados

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performing a labour of love as they search for lost musical treasures, a picture emerges of commercial exploitation that utilises the discursive mechanisms of colonialism to misread and misrepresent other people’s heritage, shaping it according to Western acoustic sensibility (Aaltonen 2016). While such apprehension towards the cultural hegemonic tendencies inherent in digging is essential to keep in mind, it also oversees some of its more innovative and generative elements: in order to breathe new life into a certain musical heritage an aesthetic relocation needs to take place, and in this sense the fact of hearing oneself with somebody else’s ears is vital. In contrast to the memory industry that simply re-packages non-Western music under the category of ‘world music’, the crate digger’s approach re-­contextualises, reshuffles and reuses it by placing it within the contexts of more familiar popular genres. To be sure, packaging non-Western music for Western ears and Western markets carries the inherent danger of artificially tailoring it to fit Western musical tastes and expectations. Yet, as pointed out in some of these chapters, it does not exclude the potential for establishing a cultural flow in the other direction, with the ‘periphery’ at times impacting the core canon itself—as in the famous example of Cameroon’s Manu Dibango’s hit “Soul Makossa”, which both Tim Lawrence and Uchenna Ikonne deal with in this collection. Furthermore, although the liner notes of many of the records spawned by contemporary reissue culture tend to overstress the ‘forgotten’ dimension of the music, there is no doubt that a lot of the music currently in circulation as a result of digging was by and large ignored in its context of provenance as well—indeed, the denigration of the domestic archive in favour of foreign music appears time and again across the contributions collected here. Finally, an Orientalist critique of digging neglects the ever-growing impact of local diggers, whose role is ever more dominant. Across Eastern Europe, for example, the digging and reissue scene is at the time of writing mostly local; at the same time, as a disheartening meme from the past decade shows, the situation in Africa works practically in reverse.2 While one might see even local diggers as fundamentally tied into a global aesthetic cosmopolitanism (Regev 2013), what we have previously called an ‘always already globalised formation of musical taste’, their expertise is indispensable in shedding new light on local musical heritage, and this has an important impact on younger generations and current musical production. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the practice of digging was almost exclusively tied to vinyl, and vinyl was generally insisted upon and

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fetishised. Rooted in its resistance to damage, as well as in the alleged inherent credibility it carries, the format of the record provides a sort of proof of the authenticity of the music inscribed onto it; during this early, ‘romantic’ digging era, key digging spaces were second-hand record shops, record fairs, flea markets or old attics where collectors, connoisseurs and fans rummaged through dusty stacks in search of some precious slab carrying a forgotten gem. The expansion of digital music and platforms for its circulation has since enabled a much wider circle of fans to access previously unreachable and copyright-protected music, and years of collecting were suddenly replaced by a few clicks. In parallel, a shift has taken place from vinyl to online digging. Next to old school diggers, a new generation has appeared whose practice happens at least partially online, from early blog culture to more current YouTube playlists and streaming services. The important aspect of this shift is that the internet plays a major role in popularising findings. A key aspect of current crate digging is sharing, and working towards the popularisation of this newly (re)found music. This is a drastic change vis-à-vis the original digging tradition, where hip-hop DJs deliberately obscured their sources, the knowledge of which secured competitive advantage and gave them cultural prestige and a certain sense of ‘property’; this kind of ‘possessive’ attitude was still common in the 2000s as diggers still often claimed their ‘digs’ and were not willing to reveal their origin. But since the rise of music blogs, online music archives and peer-to-peer platforms, an open source policy has prevailed. Diggers around the world increasingly see it as their mission to promote the music they curate and educate others to understand its value. YouTube, Mixcloud or SoundCloud make it possible to post thematic playlists, DJ sets and mixtapes; in the current landscape the hierarchy between diggers and common users is hardly visible, as anyone can create or repost content according to their own personal musical narratives. In fact, the work of diggers has gained visibility precisely through such online playlists and compilations of newly discovered and classified music, even though, more often than not, these are rip-offs of the research performed by the primary investigators. At the same time, specialised blogs have become popular archives (Long and Collins 2016) which both provide expert additional context to the music and express the personal feelings of their curators, facilitating and personalising access to music that would otherwise remain inaccessible (Pogačar 2016). Along with the democratisation of personal preferences, comprehensive online music catalogues such as Discogs have had an important role in codifying new taxonomies:

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as users place genre tags on its ever-growing list of tracks and albums, they help spread diggers’ informed insights and work to canonise their findings. An informed search through the Discogs database across different countries will thus easily locate most if not all the tracks of certain genre or style in a chosen country. Taken as a whole, diggers’ mixtapes and their echoes on YouTube playlists, new classifications and musical blogging from below have created alternative, popular musical archives which have democratised practices of preservation. While traditional archives are characterised by limited access and professional archival methodologies, online archives are freely accessible and their self-fashioned archivists have no formal qualifications, enabling a simple, direct approach in line with the DIY ethos. While these generatively supplant the notion of authority implicit in archival practices and the notion of the arché as tied to power (Derrida 1996), they also open up questions of legitimacy in a joint, communal, collective process (Long et  al. 2017). Diggers’ mixtapes, compilations and reissues create counter-canons and forge new connections, and can be seen as ‘anti-­ collections’: collections made by non-institutional, non-expert actors according to methods beyond formal regulations that can nevertheless sustain interactions and co-exist with core official collections (Welburn 2013, 148). An example of anti-collection in this sense is provided by how reissue labels increasingly inform and/or are absorbed or distributed by major labels. Finally, diggers create new audiences, attracting a new generation of fans who either did not know about a certain scene or never thought of it as valuable, desirable or interesting. Reissue labels, radio shows and thematic parties are all digging-related activities that work to recirculate the music sonically, physically and socially. Some of the authors in this collection are heavily involved in the making of contemporary scenes that re-­ evaluate the archival in this sense, with their non-scholarly activities informing their scholarly work and vice versa. Uchenna Ikonne’s research runs parallel to his work as a curator for labels including his own Comb & Razor, and Flora Pitrolo has for the past decade run the radio show A Colder Consciousness and label ACC Records, devoted to DIY electronic musics of the 1980s. Tim Lawrence has curated disco compilations based on his groundbreaking volumes Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 (2004) and Life and Death on the New York Dancefloor, 1980–1983 (2016), and his party ‘All Our Friends’ keeps the memory of David Mancuso’s Loft parties alive and pays homage

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to its legendary sound system; Ernesto Chahoud is also a curator of specialised compilations, and he and Natalie Shooter run the Beirut Groove Collective who throw a weekly strictly 7” club-night of 1960s garage, funk and Ethiopian and Lebanese tracks. These activities too share the dual function of bridging the ‘official’, ‘diurnal’ work of scholarship and the ‘unofficial’, ‘nocturnal’ work of making and dancing to records, and the two kinds of knowledge derived from these activities sustain each other in important ways. By now, a number of exciting, previously unacknowledged local scenes have resurfaced, and this points to the striking number of local disco variants, revealing and reminding music historians and fans of a forgotten musical past. The way the various disco scenes charted in this volume materialised depended on numerous factors such as the political climate they emerged in, degrees of cultural freedoms, the extent of cross-cultural flows, the availability of media and infrastructure and the existing intellectual and musical heritage of a certain country, which deemed certain expressions valuable while discounting others. The authors in this collection explore how disco was reworked, what was taken and what was left out, which media were used in this process, in what kind of environments it lived and to what effect. What diggers have brought to the study of these scenes needs to be taken seriously as it forces us to adjust existing narratives and expand our understanding of our musical world; it is thanks to diggers that, all of a sudden, exciting genres and sonorities have appeared in unexpected places where they have been reworked in unexpected ways, as this collection shows.

Chapter Outline We have organised the interventions in this volume primarily following a thematic logic, choosing to run a series of threads between chapters and opening up areas of enquiry, critical approaches and social, cultural and political landscapes progressively. While readers are welcome to navigate these chapters as they wish, those who approach the volume following its order will notice micro-areas of research being passed from chapter to chapter, in a sort of intellectual relay which we hope will also spark other terms of contrast and comparison in the reader’s own knowledge and imagination. While this book declaredly singles out its historiographical focus on the 1970s and 1980s—and more often than not on the passage between the two, when most of the disco cultures studied across these

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pages took hold—other temporalities are also at work here, and although the account this book proposes is not chronological, we have attempted to nevertheless reflect an attention to the temporal in its structure: as such, we start from a kind of pre-history of disco in the 1960s, work our way to the genre’s most futuristic incarnations and end on a set of propositions for the future of the field. Finally, and duly for a volume so deeply interested in space, a spatial organisation also underpins the way these chapters are presented—but rather than geographical space, what we contemplate here is imaginary and cultural space, from the built environment of the discotheque and the city to outer reaches of the universe. The volume opens with Will Straw’s chapter (Chap. 2), ‘Montreal, Funkytown: Two Decades of Disco History’, in which the author charts the social, cultural and commercial roles of disco in the city, starting from its many dance floors. Integrating his previous work on Montreal’s nightlife and sound, Straw concentrates here on the years before and after the city’s disco heyday, starting from the 1960s—which saw the importation of the ‘chic’ Parisian nightclub paradigm—and ending with considerations on the current memorialisation of the disco scene Billboard called the continent’s second best. The connections between city and scene are central to Straw’s contribution here, as are the tensions between the city’s nightlife and the way the image of that nightlife was recounted, promoted and sold to the city’s inhabitants as well as to outsiders. Indeed, a dual (self)representation is always at work in Straw’s work on Montreal as a centre of mediation between European and North American styles and appetites and as a locus of internationalisation; the notion of performance is key in his analysis, as he traces the ups and downs of how ‘the city performed and contemplated the spectacle of its own extravagant urbanity’. Ivan Paolo de Paris Fontanari also concentrates on a dance floor—that of impresario Nelson Motta’s first discotheque, The Frenetic Dancin’ Days Discotheque—and follows it in its transformation from space to institution, brand, track, soap opera and finally to overarching symbol of the Brazilian disco era. In Chap. 3, ‘Dancin’ Days: Disco Flashes in 1970s Brazil’, Fontanari works across various manifestations of Motta’s disco empire, singling out the contributions the Dancin’ Days concept made to youth cultures in Brazil. In particular, the author pays attention to the class transformation operated via the Dancin’ Days soap opera, from disco as Rio-based élite phenomenon to mass televised escape and to the discotheque’s house band, Frenéticas, who subverted gender norms in rich and multifarious ways. While the chapter as a whole focuses on disco’s role in

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shaping a new sensibility for Brazil’s middle class, white, metropolitan youths, Fontanari turns towards the end of his chapter to what and especially who disco left out, reflecting on how the disco heritage is present and absent in successive, and more globally successful, forms of Brazilian popular music. Flora Pitrolo’s contribution to this volume acts as a bridge between the investigation of local phenomena and the question of derivative and imported musics. Chapter 4, ‘Gimmick! Italo Disco, Copy and Consumption’, adds to a slowly emergent canon of work on Italo disco, a genre that has historically been greatly appreciated abroad and perceived as an enigmatic misnomer at home. While this chapter too begins in the register of the spatial and the historical, painting the genre’s emergence against the backdrop of the Adriatic riviera at the end of Italy’s decade of terrorism, it concentrates chiefly on theorising the genre in an industrial logic of copy first and seriality later. Working through Italo’s story of production and consumption—in which notions of copy and original, fake and real, domestic and foreign, import and export gradually lose consistency—Pitrolo ultimately intercepts the genre’s unoriginality as its trademark and asks some fundamental questions about its value. Here, she turns to Italo lyrics and to the particular pidgin English they deploy to theorise the genre as the music of a ‘felt loss’, in which the impossibility of originality is dealt with in the key of postmodern irony. In Chap. 5, ‘Japanese Disco as Pseudo-International Music’, Yusuke Wajima also considers the ‘industrial’ question of the formula in making and marketing dance music between the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the frictions between domestic and foreign records and their representations in a given culture and society. Wajima’s nomenclature of ‘pseudo-­ international music’ is particularly complex, as it braids together questions of international aspirations and of domestic market forces, also touching on the ‘big in Japan’ phenomenon and, in his final remarks, on Eurobeat as a specifically Japanese genre. At the centre of Wajima’s analysis is the story of the track “Sexy Bus Stop” and of its makers, who navigated a multifaceted cultural and commercial web and invented new paradigms for the production and consumption of pop music in Japan. Wajima’s work here is also precious in taking into account dance styles and disco’s traces in visual cultures, noting how disco’s transformations continue to provide visual clues and embodied traces in contemporary Japanese culture.

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Gregory D.  Booth in Chap. 6, ‘Disco, Dancing, Globalization and Class in 1980s Hindi Cinema’, chronicles how disco was adopted and especially adapted—yet never fully replicated—in the relatively culturally isolated but progressively globalising context of Indian 1980s film. Propelled into popular culture, as most pop music was, via the medium of film, the author notes how disco took on a number of received meanings as a ‘fetish’ and can be seen to have enacted transformations of class and masculinity of India’s film and music industries at this particular stage of their globalisation. Booth’s investigative thread is supplied here by the actor/composer duo of Mithun Chakraborty and Bappi Lahiri, whose collaborations provide exemplary case studies of the manner in which disco found its ideal audiences in Hindi-speaking lower-classes cinemagoers. For this section of Indian society, disco became a symbol of global modernity: it played out in nightclub settings, which most viewers had never seen or experienced first-hand, and leaned on the recognisable borrowing of Western disco music, equally unknown to fans. Its appeal was driven by disco’s visual flamboyance and its connection to social dancing, which proved more adaptable to local cultural traditions and gendered cinematic conventions than earlier musical styles. Chapter 7, ‘Dancing Desire, Dancing Revolution: Sexuality and the Politics of Disco in China since the 1980s’, by Qian Wang traverses the little-known territory of Chinese disco to investigate the genre vis-à-vis the country’s sexual mores and Communist policies. Beginning with a rich history of the emergence and various re-significations of the term, Wang argues that because the ‘disco fever’ was impossible to keep at bay it was in fact ‘assimilated’ by way of various official and vernacular strategies in terms of politics, culture and lifestyle: from poetry that militarised disco, to disco as a form of exercise for the elderly and middle-aged, to hybrid forms meshing disco and disco dancing with folk traditions and Peking Opera, the author shows how the struggle between disco and state-­ sanctioned Chinese identity was constant throughout the 1980s. The heart of Wang’s analysis rests on a notion of ‘desexualisation’ of disco at the hand of the authorities, which he explores via the analysis of three Chinese cover versions of Modern Talking’s “Brother Louie”; successively, in the long decades following the events of Tiananmen, we learn that disco is currently being ‘resexualised’ by increasingly active but still very much underground LGBTQI+ communities. Another complex relationship between censorship and mainstreaming, and underground and overground, is articulated in Jakub Machek’s

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chapter (Chap. 8), ‘Non-stop, I Want to Live Non-stop: The Role of Disco in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia’, which takes into analysis two generations of Czechoslovak disco music and culture and their respective negotiations of an ever-more liberal-leaning youth culture on the one hand and the impositions of the socialist state on the other. Machek explores how, perhaps surprisingly, disco as a genre and form of socialisation was partially endowed in the climate of ‘normalisation’ following the 1968 Soviet invasion, for whose authorities it provided a potentially wholesome, fresh, optimistic vision for future Czechoslovak generations. The author examines how a disco craze took hold in the country while its potential disruptive power and implicit connections to private dimensions of escape and consumerism were tamed via interventions such as ‘retraining examinations’ for musicians and DJs, strict instructions for radio broadcast, the balancing of entertainment and education in discotheques, and the content of lyrics. Investigating both official policy publications and youth magazines, and leaning on Alexei Yurchak’s (2003) notion of a shift from semantic to pragmatic discursive regimes, Machek sheds light on the complex mechanisms that underscored disco’s absorption as both an official and unofficial praxis, seen differently by critics and authorities, and acquiring different meanings in the city and in the countryside. Disco’s conquest of Eastern Europe is returned to again by Marko Zubak in Chap. 9, ‘Yugoslav Disco: The Forgotten Sound of Late Socialism’. Zubak explores the curious absence of disco from the local popular canon and from collective memory, despite its rich presence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and roots this amnesia in the prevailing musical discourses of the time which mythologized punk and new wave as historical synchronisers of local and global trends. Ironically, it was the deep Western imprint of Yugoslav popular culture that led to this mistreatment of disco, since music critics adopted early Western tropes which dismissed the genre as worthless. Zubak, in turn, pays respect to the crate diggers who, against this background, came across the disco sound and follows its sonic traces back to Yugoslav media archives to reveal a wider and more complex culture around it. Here too, Yurchak’s seminal work (2006) provides the theoretical framework for the analysis of different layers of Yugoslav disco’s appropriation, from its initial import to consequent local adaptations. Yurchak’s non-binary optics, which approach late socialism beyond the dichotomies of repression and dissent, accommodate Yugoslav disco’s own contrasting elements, which ranged from the

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co-­existence of affluent fans and proletarian dance champions to the conjugation of funk grooves with exploitative brands of Schlager disco. Natalie Shooter and Ernesto Chahoud survey the opulent rise, against-­ the-­ odds survival and melancholy decline of disco in one of its non-­ Western bedrocks in Chap. 10, ‘Other Voices of the Orient: Lebanese Disco and Nightlife during the Civil War’. As the authors make immediately clear, the history of Lebanon’s civil war and that of Lebanese disco are ‘inextricably linked, each forming the backdrop to the other’—yet their account is of an effervescent scene rife with musical and cultural invention and experimentation. After setting the scene of one of the Arab world’s most developed music hubs, Shooter and Chahoud trace the intricate story of the early singles “Liza … Liza” and “Abu Ali”—marked by pioneering choices and international difficulties—before chronicling the story of the genre as it took root, from Jacqueline and Rafic Hobeika’s Oriental-tinged covers and Marwan Rahbani’s “Salade du Chef” to the emergence of ‘bellydance disco’. Shooter and Chahoud’s chapter weaves discographic and musicological analysis through extensive interviews across the Lebanese scene and archival research, and their writing hinges on letters and invoices, and personal accounts gathered in studios and living rooms across the world. Even as we turn our gaze to home studios to avoid the bombings and to the rise of synthesizers to cut production costs, this is a precious portrayal of a precious scene which is finally—also thanks to the authors’ own efforts as DJs and cultural agitators—receiving renewed attention. Another context in some ways framed by war—and by the ‘oil crisis which turned out to be an oil boom’—is that explored in Chap. 11, ‘Disco and Discontent in Nigeria: A Conversation’, in which we present an interview with label boss, journalist and cultural theorist Uchenna Ikonne. Beginning by positioning the rise of Nigerian disco amongst the end of the civil war, a huge financial boom, and the decline of the Fela Kuti-led movement of Afrocentrism, we discuss the peculiarities of the country’s nightlife, its rich club scene, DJs and sound systems, the influence of disco on Nigerian social and cultural life at large in the 1970s and 1980s, and the various ways in which a growing sense of austerity that came with the military coup of 1983 eventually swallowed the movement. Ikonne makes significant reflections across this conversation about how disco’s ‘original’ locus in New York City was informed by African sonorities—a topic which returns forcefully in Tim Lawrence’s epilogue to this volume—and makes rich interventions on how Nigeria acted as both a sonic and cultural

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factory for disco and as a consumer of disco as it came back, glossier, more polished, sounding ‘expensive’. What does it mean, in this context, to want to ‘sound foreign’? And how can current reissue cultures, archival practices and newly found interests in Nigerian disco ethically navigate a history without once again replicating colonial gestures? As we move towards the end of the volume, we posit outer space as our last geographical and cultural positioning. Ken McLeod’s chapter (Chap. 12), ‘Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia’, hones in on the widespread fascination with outer space, intergalactic travel and encounters with alien species in disco cultures around the globe, interrogating these under the Blochian rubric of hope. McLeod begins by tracing the history of space disco and interrogates its materialisation on the dance floor via its iconography, the design of clubs and that of sound systems, before moving to discuss the genre in musical terms. Here, he provides a panoply of discographic examples across the ages and across countries— from the American 1950s to Berlin School iterations, from Italo disco to French touch—and offers a deep analysis of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” (1977) and Boney M.’s “Night Flight to Venus” (1978) as case studies. The chapter moves on to analyse the cross-pollination between space films and their soundtracks and space disco through the 1970s, putting forward a series of theoretical readings that braid together ideas of utopia, heterotopia and atopia: ‘impossibly, at once a place and not a place, a territory without boundaries, a position without parameters’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010). We hand the final word in this volume to Tim Lawrence, who as the key scholar on disco is in a privileged position to comment on current work and to understand what research still needs to be done. His chapter (Chap. 13), ‘Decolonising Disco: Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco’, undoes some important political and cultural assumptions made about disco in New York City and lays the ground for future scholarship on the genre. Lawrence’s generous epilogue makes two crucial critical moves. On the one hand, it offers a post-Harveyan counter-reading of NYC disco as engaged in a form of ‘collectivist proto-­ politics’, shedding light on its radical nature by traversing the 1970s through the personal and philosophical journey of Sylvère Lotringer and juxtaposing its development to—rather than distancing it from—the parallel formation of punk and hip-hop as scenes. On the other, this epilogue lays the foundations for an expanded definition of the disco archive which pays attention not only to disco as a much more stratified phenomenon

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than has been historically been acknowledged, but to how disco’s story in the US is in itself an expression of a colonial logic. Shedding light back onto some of the work done in the volume, Lawrence asks: ‘what might an anti-colonial history of disco look like if it was written from within Africa or Latin America or another part of the world?’. Here too we end on hope, a ‘strange hope’, as Lawrence calls it: the wider and more complex history of disco is still recuperable, and in our taking seriously ‘an oft-ridiculed cultural formation’ we may just find a key to better interpret the present moment and more dance cultures to come.

Notes 1. Peter Johnson provides an updated survey of work done across disciplines on the concept of heterotopia on his website www.heterotopiastudies.com [Accessed 10th January 2020]. 2. The meme is a colour-coded map of Africa ‘partitioned’ not by colonial powers but by diggers and discographers mostly based in Western Europe. The meme is from 2010 and is accessible here: https://africasacountry.files. wordpress.com/2010/09/29476_413133910989_529365989_511226 5_1384749_n.jpg [Accessed 20th February 2017].

Bibliography Aaltonen, Lari. 2016. Crate-Digging Columbuses and Vinyl Vespuccis – Exoticism in World Music Vinyl Collections. In Intercultural Masquerade. New Orientalism, New Occidentalism, Old Exoticism, ed. Regis Machart, Fred Dervin, and Gao Minghui, 67–79. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, Higher Education Press. Baker, Sarah, ed. 2015. Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-­ Together. New York: Routledge. Baker, Sarah, et al., eds. 2018. The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage. New York; London: Routledge. Bennett, Andy. 2009. “Heritage Rock”: Rock Music, Representation and Heritage Discourse. Poetics 37: 474–489. Bennett, Andy, and Susanne Janssen. 2017. Popular Music, Cultural Memory, and Heritage. New York: Routledge. Brooks, Daphne. 2021. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carey-Thomas, Lizzie. 2011. The Scene Is Set: Tate Britain New Displays I. Tate Etc. 22. https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-­etc/issue-­22-­summer-­2011/scene-­set. Accessed 12 April 2021.

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Clayton, Jace. 2016. Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. 2003. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. New York: Routledge. Davis, Kathy. 2008. Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful. Feminist Theory 2008 (9): 67–85. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. University of Chicago Press. Echols, Alice. 2011. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York: Norton. Fairley, Jan. 2001. The “Local” and “Global” in Popular Music. In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, 272–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferdinand, Simon, Irina Souch, and Daan Wesselman, eds. 2020. Heterotopia and Globalisation in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. Flatley, Jonathan, and Kronengold, Charles. 2008. Special Issue: Disco. Criticism 50(1, Winter). Foucault, Michel. 1966 (1970). The Order of Things. Trans. Alan Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge. ———. 1984 (1986). Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Gallan, Ben. 2015. Night Lives: Heterotopia, Youth Transitions and Cultural Infrastructure in the Urban Night. Urban Studies 52(3). Special Issue: Geographies of the Urban Night, pp. 555–570. Garcia, Luis-Manuel. 2014. Richard Dyer, “In Defence of Disco” (1979). In History of Emotions: Insights into Research. https://www.history-­of-­ emotions.mpg.de/texts/in-­defence-­of-­disco. Accessed 10 February 2021. Gregory, Georgina, and Ewa Mazierska, eds. 2015. Relocating Popular Music. London: Palgrave. Guerra, Paula, and Pedro Quintela, eds. 2020. Punk, Fanzines and DIY Cultures in a Global World: Fast, Furious and Xerox. London: Palgrave. Guilbault, Jocelyne. 2001. World Music. In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, 176–192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haddon, Mimi. 2020. What Is Post-Punk?: Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977–82. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Holert, Tom. 2007. Marc-Camille Chaimowicz, Celebration? Real Life. London: Afterall.

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Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke. Johnson, Peter. 2006. Unravelling Foucault’s “different spaces”. History of the Human Sciences 19 (4): 75–90. Lawrence, Tim. 2003. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2016. Life and Death on the New  York Dance Floor. Durham: Duke University Press. Lohman, Kirsty. 2017. The Connected Lives of Dutch Punks: Contesting Subcultural Boundaries. London: Palgrave. Long, Paul, and Jez Collins. 2016. Affective Memories of Music in Online Heritage Practice. In Memory, Space and Sound, ed. Johannes Brusila, Bruce Johnson, and John Richardson, 85–102. Bristol: Intellect. Long, Paul, Sarah Baker, Lauren Istvandity, and Jezz Collins. 2017. A Labour of Love: The Affective Archives of Popular Music Culture. Archives and Records. The Journal of the Archives and Records Association 38: 61–79. Marsh, Hazel. 2016. Hugo Chávez, Alí Primera and Venezuela: The Politics of Music in Latin America. London: Palgrave. Mitchell, Tony. 1996. Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2012. Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Pogačar, Martin. 2016. Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling: Re-presenting the Past. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Regev, Motti. 2013. Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-­ Imagined Places. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Stokes, Martin. 2003. Globalisation and the Politics of World music. In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 297–308. London: Routledge. Straw, Will. 1991. Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music. Cultural Studies 5 (3): 368–388. Toop, David. 1999. Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World. London: Serpent’s Tail. Tosoni, Simone, and Emanuela Zuccalà. 2020. Italian Goth Subculture: Kindred Creatures and Other Dark Enactments in Milan, 1982–1991. London: Palgrave. Vályi, Gábor. 2013. Digging in the Crates. Practices of Identity and Belonging in a Translocal Record Collecting Scene. PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths. https://www.academia.edu/21726724/Digging_in_the_Crates_Practices_of_Identity_and_ Belonging_in_a_Translocal_Record_Collecting_Scene_Doctoral_thesis_PhD_

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in_Sociology_Goldsmiths_College_University_of_London. Accessed 17 April 2018. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator‘s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Vermeulen and van den Akker. 2010. Notes on the Metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetic & Culture 2: 1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/ jac.v2i0.5677. Accessed 10 October 2020. Welburn, William C. 2013. Digging the Digital Crates. http://www.ala.org/ acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2013/ papers/Welburn_Digging.pdf. Accessed 11 January 2019. White, Bob W., ed. 2012. Music and Globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Yurchak, Alexei. 2003. Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (3): 480–510. ———. 2006. Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Montreal, Funkytown: Two Decades of Disco History Will Straw

Observation: Everybody, even the suit-and-tie business crowd and the fashion-conscious slummers, knows how to dance, really dance, in Montreal —Chin (1997)

In 2016, the Cologne-based Red Bull Music Academy came to Montreal for a month of seminars, talks and concerts. One of the most high profile of these events was an evening devoted to celebrating the period now known as the ‘golden age’ of Montreal disco, which extended from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s. Guests at this event included Robert Ouimet (who had DJ’d from 1973 to 1981 at the Limelight, the city’s pre-eminent discothèque during those years) and Montreal-born performer France Joli (whose hit records during the city’s golden age of disco included “Come to Me” in 1979 and “Gonna Get Over You” in 1981).

W. Straw (*) Department of Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_2

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Brian Chin, who covered disco records for many years for Billboard, has described “Come to Me” as ‘the generational turning point between traditional Fire Island disco and the more progressive ‘dance music’ of the ‘80s’’ (Chin 1997). Joli’s international career had taken off in 1979, when she was a last-minute replacement for Donna Summer at a 1979 Fire Island concert, in New  York, beginning an association with LGBTQ groups which has continued through the present. The Red Bull Music Academy’s acknowledgement of Montreal’s centrality as a disco city went beyond this celebratory evening. In 2014, I had been asked to write a piece on Montreal disco for the RBMA’s online platform (Straw 2014), and other articles on the site have covered Montreal’s dance music history from a variety of other perspectives. Outside the RBMA, commemorations of Montreal’s disco history have grown in frequency and media ubiquity since the early 2000s. DJ sets or playlists of disco music made in Montreal may be found on a number of download or streaming sites. Some of them, like Disco Spatial Quebec (1976–1982) (Psycquébélique 2013) or Disco 80s Canadian MONTREAL SOUND Hi-NRG Electro—Non-Stop Mix (77 mins) 1977–1984 (Mixcloud 2015), highlight (or retrospectively construct) specific generic strains within the history of the city’s disco music.1 In 2009 Funkytown, an hour-long Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio documentary, interviewed key players in the scene and set the city’s golden age of disco within a broader history of the city’s nightlife (Funkytown: The Montreal Disco Era 2009). Two years later, a feature-­ length French-language film, also titled Funkytown, was released, accompanied by a 2-CD soundtrack album. Its fictional story was set in and around a 1970s Montreal disco called Starlight (based on the original Limelight). The film both glorified Montreal’s disco culture of the 1970s and set out to expose the corruption and violence allegedly at the core of the scene in which that culture was embedded. Funkytown met with a mixed reception, criticized in several quarters for its emphasis on Anglophone participation in the city’s disco scene and for its marginalization of the French language (Lisée 2011). Commemorations like these of Montreal’s disco histories acknowledge achievements too long overlooked in official accounts of the city’s cultural heritage, which have tended to emphasize the legacies of Québec political chanson or Montreal’s folk-tinged rock music of the 1970s. At the same time, it must be admitted, coverage of Montreal disco culture often reveals the city’s fondness for exaggerated claims about its cultural pre-eminence.

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In the mid-1960s, local news reports repeated the boast that La Licorne, which opened in Montreal in 1962, was the first discothèque in North America. One of its owners, it was reported, had seen discothèque-style dance clubs in Paris and other parts of Europe and brought the idea back to Montreal (La Patrie 1968, 31). While this claim was often repeated over the next decade (Billboard 1969, C12), it may easily be contested. Jim Dawson, in his history of the twist, suggests that the first true discothèque in North America was Le Club, launched in New  York City in 1960 (Dawson 1995, 60). A thorough history of record-centred nightclubs in Harlem and other North American locations would almost certainly move the moment of their appearance back even further, though this would require resolving the murky instability which marks the very definition of ‘discothèque’ (Thornton 1995, 37–43). These claims of Montreal’s absolute pre-eminence as a nightlife capital would continue. In 1970, Current Events, a tourist-oriented entertainment magazine distributed in Montreal hotel rooms, suggested that ‘Montreal’s ratio of discothèques to population is the highest in the world—certainly the highest in Canada!’ (Current Events 1970, 46). In that same year, a reporter for The Gazette newspaper made reference to Montreal’s one-time reputation as ‘the city that had the best night-life on the continent’ (The Gazette (Montreal) 1970, 39). A more modest and convincing claim about Montreal’s stature as disco music capital came in a headline from Billboard magazine in 1979: ‘Montreal may be the continent’s 2nd best city [for disco music]’ (Billboard 1979a, 84). This article appeared at a time when press coverage of Montreal’s disco culture, both in specialist and in general media, would enumerate several empirical indicators of that culture’s success: the numbers of people attending clubs, the capacity of Montreal discothèques to stimulate record sales and the significant number of Montreal-based performers, producers and record label owners who had emerged from the city’s disco music infrastructures and attained international stature. Together, these phenomena were seen to place Montreal just behind New York on a list of North American disco capitals. In my own research and published work, I have returned regularly to the history of Montreal disco culture, focussing on the networks of collaboration and dissemination which marked this scene from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s (Straw 2005, 2008). To avoid excessive duplication of these other writings, I am concentrating here on the periods before and after the perceived ‘heyday’ of Montreal disco culture. I will begin by

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looking at the wave of discothèque openings in Montreal in the 1960s, and at the range of economic, cultural and other actors pulled into what quickly became a discothèque scene. I will briefly summarize the reconfiguration of the city’s disco culture in the early to mid-1970s, when ‘disco’ came to designate a distinctive complex of musical styles, recording formats and transnational musical flows. Finally, I will turn to the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this final period, ongoing international diagnoses of a crisis or ‘death’ of disco (the familiar post-Saturday Night Fever ‘burn-out’) obscured the real successes occurring at this time within Montreal’s disco infrastructures.

A Scene Takes Shape, 1962–1970 The opening of La Licorne, widely regarded as Montreal’s first discothèque, occurred, as noted, in 1962. It preceded, by only a few months, the opening of Place des Arts, a major performing arts centre funded with public monies. Both establishments permitted Montreal to reimagine itself, during a decade in which the city became a major world tourist destination, largely as a result of its hosting of the 1967 World’s Far, Expo ’67. In the 20 years following the beginning of World War II, Montreal had acquired a reputation as a corrupt and vice-ridden city, one whose night-time culture was intimately interwoven with sexual commerce, gambling and the collusion of municipal administrators with organized crime (Lapointe 2014; Straw 1992). By the 1950s, many of the venues dominating Montreal’s nightlife were decaying cabarets and supper clubs from the pre-war era, or smaller taverns and ‘grills’ offering versions of burlesque entertainment and small-ensemble musical performance. While crime and vice would continue to flourish in the 1960s, the city’s image would be revised in important ways during that decade. The 1960 election of a Liberal Party government in the province of Quebec is now viewed as the beginning of the so-called Révolution Tranquille [Quiet Revolution], a broad set of social transformations marked by the growth of the middle class, the spread of post-secondary education, moves to protect the French language and a modernization of Quebec’s cultural sphere. The newly built Place des Arts was intended both as a home for a new, liberal Quebec culture—one which resisted the oppressive influence of the Catholic church—and as one stop on the continental circuit of municipal cultural centres that included Lincoln Center in New York and the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto, Canada’s largest city. The construction of

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Place des Arts had occurred on one edge of Montreal’s longstanding redlight district, an area of bars, brothels and back-room gambling pits that the city was anxious to eradicate. The city government used the building of the new arts centre, and the subsequent hosting of the 1967 World’s Fair, as pretexts for demolishing many of the vestiges of the city’s older nightlife (Straw 2015). It was meaningful, within Montreal’s linguistic and moral geographies, that the city’s first discothèque, La Licorne, opened on McKay Street, several blocks to the west of the old red-light district. From the early 1960s through the 1980s, McKay and the streets adjacent to it (including Stanley Street, where the Limelight would later be located) would serve as the gravitational centre of Montreal’s disco scene. To move west in downtown Montreal is to move closer to its English-speaking populations, and while McKay Street was still in the linguistically mixed centre of the city, it was in close proximity to the largely Anglophone bohemian strip on Crescent Street and to the campus of the English-language Sir George Williams University (renamed Concordia University in 1974). It was in this neighbourhood, as well, that the city’s largest concentration of gay bars could be found, before police repression and a changing real estate market pushed the institutions of gay nightlife to the city’s present-day Gay Village, far to the east of downtown (Crawford 2016). This section of Montreal’s downtown remains a key site of nightlife, but the dominant institution, since the 1980s, has been the British-style pub. In the journalistic commentary which accompanied the opening of La Licorne, it was clear that the institution of the discothèque was seen as a European invention. The discothèque was chic and modern and thus appeared to have little to do with the burlesque clubs and cabarets which had typified Montreal nightlife for much of the post-war period. Over the next ten years, advertisements for La Licorne would brag that ‘[t]here’s the atmosphere of Paris in Discothèque La Licorne,’ and compare the club to a Parisian ‘cave’ (Current Events 1971, 20). The perceived freshness and cosmopolitanism of the 1960s discothèque are efficiently condensed in the following passage from an article in the popular French-language weekly newspaper La Patrie. If I quote it at some length, it is because it expresses, better than anything else I have seen, the specific appeal of the discothèque as an institution engaged in reordering the temporal and spatial dimensions of music. The article’s very title—‘La “dolce vita” dans le vent établit ses quartiers dans les discothèques’ [‘The “good life” of today finds its domain in

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discothèques’]—invokes the glamorous world featured in contemporary Italian films, while the description which follows captures the transition from an old era of live orchestras to a new culture based on the playing of records: Montreal, just like New York, now dances to Paris time. Old-fashioned now are those nightclubs where you suffered your boredom in front of a listless orchestra of lifeless, mechanical fingers. (…) In the discotheques, there are neither bands nor music-hall shows. Boys and girls, alone or with others, crowd around a dance floor the size of a handkerchief to talk and dance, breathing in the latest hits by their idols of the hour: the Beatles, Richard Anthony, Petula Clark, Alan Barrière, Johnny Halliday, France Gall, the Rolling Stones and the rest. This is the triumph of the record (directly imported from France) over bands unable to update their repertory at the same pace. Because, in this way, we are more free, preferring originals to bad imitations. (La Patrie 1965, 6)2

The vinyl record, here, is an agent of synchronization, binding time and space. It guarantees that Montreal is hearing the very same music as Paris at roughly the same moment, rather than awaiting the slow assimilation of that music into the repertoires of orchestras performing covers. As well, the record carries within it the auratic presence of celebrity, of a song’s original performer, rather than sacrificing that presence for the liveness of the anonymous club musician, an experience now stripped of any value. In this, and other accounts, the freshness of the record would be set in contrast to the stale labours of ageing, bored nightclub musicians (La Presse 1970, 15). In a musical culture where music from elsewhere often arrived through the intermediary of the local cover band or the cabaret orchestra (often performing translations of English songs into French), the discothèque offered contact with the original version of songs. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the discothèque made the record rather than the live musician the guarantee of presence and authenticity. In the five years that followed the opening of La Licorne, dozens of other clubs opened in Montreal. We may trace several processes whereby the discothèque as cultural form rippled across the terrain of public discourse and attached itself to local systems of celebrity and creative expression. Three developments pulled the culture of the discothèque towards the centre of Montreal’s public life, imbricating the phenomenon within the complex, overlaid networks of Quebec’s entertainment culture during

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a period of that culture’s significant expansion. One of these was the circulation of a range of pedagogical interventions—in newspapers, in magazines, and in clubs themselves—instructing Montrealers on the origins of the discothèque, where to find them in the city, how to dance and what to wear. This pedagogy extended beyond the expected coverage of passing trends; it cast the discothèque as a complex, aspirational space requiring multiple forms of preparation and prior knowledge. The most basic form of preparation involved learning how to dance currently popular steps like the Watusi. A key figure in instilling such knowledge in Montrealers was the New  York-based dancer and teacher ‘Killer Joe’ Piro, who had served as dance instructor at the Manhattan club the Palladium in the 1950s and early 1960s. Piro was brought to Montreal in 1964 for the opening night of the discothèque Manny’s, and he would return on several occasions for similar events. In the same year, Piro, with his Discotheque Dancers troupe, undertook a tour of department stores across Canada, providing dance lessons as a means of cross-­ marketing new fashions to be worn at discothèques (The Gazette (Montreal) 1965, 4; Fritz 1964, 4; Kilgallen 1964, 36). In 1966, when the Gazette newspaper introduced the first eight books in its Modern Living Library, a manual for ‘Discothèque Dances’ was sold alongside guides to interior decoration and Jewish cooking (The Gazette (Montreal) 1966, 38). A second dynamic within Montreal’s discothèque culture of the 1960s was its attachment to broader systems of celebrity, and those of music celebrity in particular. If it was common in Montreal, as in so many other cities, for media and social elites to be seen in discothèques, a large number of members of Quebec’s entertainment star system actually invested in such venues, in many cases incorporating their name within that of the club. Singers Joel Denis (with Disco à Jo-Jo) and Donald Lautrec (Chez Donald Lautrec), and actress/singers Dominique Michel (Zouzou) and Denyse Filiatrault (Epoca) all announced or opened discothèques during the period 1967–1970 (Tele-Radiomonde 1967a, 19; Tele-Radio Monde 1969, 8). The affiliation of celebrities with discothèques ensured that the latter’s openings were high-level gatherings of other celebrities, whose presence attracted coverage within the gossip columns and social pages of Montreal’s many newspapers and entertainment magazines (Tele-­ Radiomonde 1967b, 16). This dynamic pulled the city’s discothèques into the very centre of its popular culture, at a time when an expansion of broadcasting outlets and recording companies bolstered Montreal’s status as centre of Québéc’s increasingly mediatized cultural effervescence. In

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Montreal, as in so many other cities in the 1960s, the discothèque became a space in which the city performed and contemplated the spectacle of its own extravagant urbanity. A third dynamic, likewise common in other places but of great importance in Montreal, was the involvement of high-profile designers and architects in the structure and look of the city’s discothèques. Eleanora Diamanti and others have traced the influence of radical movements within architecture on the design of the Italian discothèque in the late 1960s and 1970s (Diamanti 2017). Montreal participated within a broader international interest in discothèque design, but this was given local inflections by the burst of architectural activity which accompanied the construction of the Expo ’67 site, the completion (in 1967) of the city’s first metro (subway system), and a wave of building of commercial and government buildings during the same period. In Montreal, the designer associated with the most high-profile discothèque projects was Jean-Paul Mousseau, who had begun as an abstract painter and subsequently worked on a key station in Montreal’s new Métro system, among many other projects. Articles in Montreal’s daily newspapers, and in specialized design magazines like Architecture/Concept set discothèque design within the broader emergence of a modernized Quebec design culture whose primary other examples were public works projects and corporate skyscrapers (Architecture/ Concept 1969, 38–43; Saumart 1969, 15).

Narratives of Decline and Rebirth Writing of a later period in the history of New York City’s disco culture, Tim Lawrence quotes music journalist’s Brian Chin’s bemoaning of the ‘ceaseless proclamation[s]’ of disco’s death that would mark this period (Lawrence 2016, 105). In fact, such proclamations had accompanied the expansion of Montreal’s discothèque culture since its very beginnings, in the early 1960s. Announcements of disco’s death quickly followed Montreal’s first wave of club openings and were made at regular intervals in the 20 years that followed. The frequency of these obituaries had much to do with the contempt of so many journalists and cultural elites for the institution of the discothèque and the musical forms with which it was typically associated. This contempt would only grow as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, and as the appeal of fashionably designed spaces gave way to the conviction, on the part of so many journalists, that the discothèque represented a capitulation to passing trends with little staying

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power. The eagerness to declare the discothèque dead would become almost epidemic in the 1970s, when such proclamations could draw more easily on a disdain for assembly line records and nameless, faceless recording artists. Already, in the very aftermath of the opening of La Licorne, we find predictions about the imminent death of the discothèque as institution. In 1965, the author (‘Fritz’) of the ‘On and Off the Record’ column in the English-language newspaper The Gazette laid out the reasons why discothèques were doomed in Montreal: DISCOTHEQUES NO GO-GO HERE: They are still thriving in New York and elsewhere, but the discotheque fad has failed to catch on in Montreal; and more and more spots which tried them are switching to other forms of entertainment. The younger set which patronized them created a problem for licensed operators, who had to institute door-checks to keep out under-­ age would-be patrons. Those that did pass muster for the most part lingered all evening over a single drink or two, effectively silencing cash registers. The better-spending middle-aged and older crowd didn’t take to the acrobatic antics of the frug and its myriad variations. The take hasn’t been sufficient, even at reduced entertainment cost, to make the experiment worth-while. Hence the decline of the discotheque hereabouts. (Fritz 1965, 4)

In 1966, without directly responding to the Gazette, the French-­ language newspaper La Patrie ran an item titled ‘Les discothèques ne sont pas mortes’ [‘Discotheques are not dead’], pointing to the imminent opening of three high-profile clubs with significant backing behind them (La Patrie 1966, 2). By 1971, when the wave of discothèque openings which had marked the 1960s could well appear to have run its course, a newspaper article could still protest that, if discothèques were supposedly dead, ‘someone forgot to bury them’ (The Gazette (Montreal) 1971, 45). Indeed, the stability of Montreal’s discothèque scene in 1970 was compared to the uncertainty of that in New  York City, where ‘the focus of attention seems to change so quickly that a place that’s crowded one weekend is literally empty the next’ (The Gazette (Montreal) 1970, 39). In fact, Montreal’s disco culture of the 1970s was characterized by a set of overlapping temporalities. In the first half of the 1970s, a perceived decline of the city’s discothèques unfolded against the backdrop of other signifiers indicating disco culture’s international reorganization and ascension. Those who diagnosed a decline often did so in moral terms, finding,

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in the discothèques of the early 1970s, an increased sexualization and moral degradation. In 1971, entrepreneur Gilles Archambault, a partner in both the original La Licorne and the extravagantly designed Mousse Spacthèque (which had opened in 1967), reopened and renamed the latter as the Sexe-Machine. Archambault called upon a well-known Montreal cartoonist to design Sexe-Machine as ‘a part-Clockwork Orange, part-­ Fellini fantasy with topless waitresses and plastic breasts’ (‘When Discotheques Reshaped Montreal, Told with Rarely-Seen Photos’ 2018). Press coverage of Sexe-Machine stressed the prevalence of nudity within its walls (Weekend Magazine 1974, 7–10). Narratives of the long history of Montreal’s nightlife since the 1930s too frequently locate the moral endpoint of that history in the perceived debasement and abjection of the post-burlesque strip club and sex show. This framing rarely acknowledges the role of such places as new spaces of congregation for subaltern communities, such as the city’s increasingly militant gay community, or as venues for the emergence of practices of drag performance. It was the case, nonetheless, that a rise in media reporting on night club murders and criminal gang wars in Montreal in the early 1970s set the city’s bars and discothèques against a backdrop very different from that of the chic, fashionable 1960s. As I note elsewhere, the photojournalistic representation of Montreal’s bars and nightclubs of the early to mid-1970s, in lurid tabloids like the weekly Allo Police, constructed a topography of night-time menace very different from the celebratory nightlife maps and design magazine spreads which represented the discothèques of the previous decade (Straw 2021).

The Montreal Disco Explosion Against this backdrop of the discothèque’s perceived loss of cultural status, the period 1973–1975 nevertheless saw a reconfiguration of the city’s disco culture around a set of new phenomena discernible in other cities in North America. These included the emergence of new musical styles, a newly enhanced role for the club DJ, and the ascension of the 12′ single and remix as both professional tool and cultural commodity. Within these shifts, the discothèque, as a distinctive kind of space, became less talked about than ‘disco’ as a musical form with its attendant forms of sociability and spectacle. A key event in this reconfiguration, as suggested, was the opening in 1973 of the Limelight disco (Pemberton 2016; ‘Lime Light Disco’ 2015). Located amidst a cluster of gay bars, and with a record

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library largely acquired from contacts in New  York City, the Limelight formalized the shift, in Montreal discothèque design and purpose, from European to American models. While the story of the Limelight and its transformative role in Montreal nightlife has often been told in mainstream media (Cross 2016), coverage of Montreal’s rise to importance as part of the economic expansion of disco music at a transnational level was largely confined to the music industry specialty press. In the absence, as yet, of trade magazines specializing in the dance music industries, the U.S.-based Billboard became a key chronicler of Montreal’s emerging status as disco capital in the mid-1970s. An unsigned article in its February 1, 1975, issue, ‘Discos Break in Quebec,’ offered early recognition of the role of Montreal clubs in spurring sales of ‘soul/r&b’ singles. Citing Richard Glanville Brown, the Montreal-based national director of publicity for Polydor Records, the article noted that the commercial successes of “Pepper Box” by The Peppers, “Do It (‘Till You’re Satisfied)” by B.T.  Express; and Gloria Gaynor’s “Never Can Say Goodbye” ‘have had their beginnings in clubs such as Dominique’s; the Speak Easy; Limelight; Marlow’s; Valentino and the 2001 Disco in Montreal’ (Billboard 1975, 72). One week later, Billboard’s Canadian correspondent, Martin Melhuish, enumerated a series of quite extraordinary sales figures: that “Soul Makossa” by Many Dibango had sold 6000 copies in Quebec with virtually no radio play; that George McCrae’s 1974 hit “Rock Your Baby” had sold 8000—10,000 copies in Montreal before adoption by radio playlists, and then gone on to sales of 175,000  in the Quebec market, and that Polydor had shipped 15,000 copies of the B.T. Express single “Express” in response to positive feedback from Montreal jukeboxes and discothèques (Billboard 1975, 60). This wave of activity had apparently begun only six months earlier. Two years later, in its January 29, 1977, issue, Billboard would feature a 22-page ‘spotlight’ on Quebec music. While this supplement was not devoted exclusively to disco, it was nevertheless full of self-congratulatory advertisements from disco labels and distributors, lengthy accounts of Montreal’s success as a disco city, and focused articles detailing the infrastructural role of media, clubs labels and studios in sustaining that success (Billboard 1977c). Between 1975 and 1977, the networks and foundations on which Montreal disco rested and through which it would flourish had quickly taken form. In 1976, Dominique Zgarka and George Cucuzella, key figures in the disco scene who occupied a variety of mediating functions, launched the

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first disc jockey record pool (the ‘Canadian Record Pool’). That same year, in partnership with a new, disco-focused television programme (Disco Tourne) on Quebec’s privately owned television network, TVA, they held the first annual Canadian disco awards in Montreal. A key dynamic during this period was the movement of record industry personnel into the launch of small disco labels and the local production or distribution of disco records. In some cases, employees of the Canadian subsidiaries of international music industry majors left these to form independent companies servicing disco markets (this was the case of Pat Deserio, who had worked for CBS and moved to become a partner, with George Lagois, in the disco-centred Empire Records) (Billboard 1977a, 54). In other cases, independent distributors who had previously focused on other genres of music became key figures in the importation into Montreal of disco records from elsewhere. As early as 1975, Variétés de l’est, a long-time Quebec rack jobbing operation, began buying disco records from a New  York-based independent distributor, selling these within Montreal and across Canada (Billboard 1975, 72). Further transnational relationships included the importation of rhythm tracks from Alabama’s Muscle Shoals studio band for use in records released by the Montreal label Parapluie (Billboard 1977b, 101; The Gazette (Montreal) 1976, 39). In the latter half of the 1970s, Montreal’s disco culture drew strength from a constant back and forth between its various undergrounds—the networks which linked record stores, labels, distributors, disc jockey associations and tipsheets—and a variety of public phenomena which set disco at the centre of the city’s night-time effervescence. The latter included the high-profile opening, in 1978, of a branch of the Paris-based discothèque chain Régine’s and a series of articles, in American newspapers, heralding the city’s status as disco capital (New York Times 1979, 9; Chicago Tribune 1979, H5). An article in the national English-Canadian Financial Post, under the title ‘Sweet Music for Investors as Bubble Keeps On Growing’ spoke of the economic viability of Montreal’s discothèques and the stability of the membership-fee-based business model employed by Régine’s and other clubs (Financial Post 1978, 18). Other developments undermined the otherwise ubiquitous exuberance which surrounded Montreal disco culture in the second half of the 1970s. In 1974, Montreal’s police department released a document claiming that half of the murders in the city during the previous year had taken place in nightclubs (The Gazette (Montreal) 1975, 3). At a discothèque named Le

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Dôme, in 1976, two men were killed amidst a larger wave of night-time killings (The Gazette (Montreal) 1976, 1). A more long-term set of issues reached public attention in 1977, when major police raids on a gay bar called Truxx resulted in the arrest of 145 customers in what was the largest mass arrest in Canada since World War II (The Gazette (Montreal) 1977b, 3). The Truxx case dragged on, amidst complaints of police harassment, until 1979 (The Gazette (Montreal) 1979, 7), and stands as a key moment in a history of gay activism against police oppression that would continue through the 1990s (Crawford and Herland 2016; Podmore 2015; Podmore and Chamberland 2015).

A Scene Survives As I have suggested elsewhere—echoing many other commentators— Montreal’s key role as a production centre for mid-1970s disco music had much to do with its capacity to mediate between the forms and styles of European and American versions of disco (Straw 2008). In 1977, a lengthy report in the Gazette celebrated the city’s disco culture as emblematic of the broader interweaving of European and American sensibilities which has long functioned as a stereotypical explanation of the city’s distinctiveness. Noting that Montrealer’s were amongst the world’s most avid buyers of disco singles, journalist Juan Rodriguez suggested that [l]ocal audiences were more attuned to the European sounds, in which florid, echoed string arrangements blend with the cooler rhythms of American disco records. That’s not the only way Montreal blends the flavors of the American styles it lives so close to with the European lifestyle it wants to emulate. The success of the disco scene rests in that mix. The fever of the American night scene combines here with a more refined, European penchant for evening entertaining. (The Gazette (Montreal) 1977a, 39)

If this cultural duality is one of the clichés through which Montreal markets itself to the world, it is nonetheless verifiable that, in the movement of disco records through the world, Montreal was a key hub through which European tracks found their way to New York and other U.S. markets, and through which the sounds of Italo disco and other European variants entered the musical languages of North American disco. The same perceived lack of a local soulfulness which led Montreal labels to import rhythm tracks from a studio in the American south would leave Montreal

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producers and labels open to the Hi-NRG and synth-pop sounds which, by the early 1980s, rendered Montreal dance music distinct from that being made elsewhere in Canada or the United States. By the end of the 1970s, as music industry trade publications and the general press spoke with increased frequency of disco’s unravelling, the Montreal scene seemed to reach its highest levels of success. To be sure, observers of the scene began to note the emergence of musical currents which threatened to displace disco—new wave, in the first instance, and the more eclectic cluster of styles named ‘Dance Oriented Rock’ on the other. In 1979, I attended an event promoted as a ‘punk rock disco’ at McGill University, and, by 1980, journalists such The Gazette’s John Griffin were speaking of a ‘demise of disco’ and triumphant return of rock, to be glimpsed not only in the ascendancy of punk and its successor forms, but in the resurgent popularity of such artists as Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin (The Gazette (Montreal) 1981, 36). In 1979, panicked downtown Montreal clubs revised their music policies. The Limelight introduced 20% New Wave musical content, while Disco 1234 and Oz, prominent downtown discos, moved to full New Wave formats the following year (The Gazette (Montreal) 1979, 3; The Gazette (Montreal) 1980, 57). Tim Lawrence’s account of New York City club life in the 1980s shows the degree to which diagnoses of disco’s demise obscured the continuities and strengths of dance music in the early years of that decade (Lawrence 2016). If Montreal observers, in 1979, anticipated the withering of the disco explosion, this was also the year in which the number of Canadian radio stations playing disco music reached 90 (Billboard 1979b, 66). It was the case, as well, that several of the clubs which had dropped disco for New Wave quickly realized that this music’s younger customers were unlikely to spend money at the same levels as the more multi-generational clientele of the discothèque. By 1980, the Limelight was announcing investments of $250,000  in efforts to win back the disco crowd, while Club 1234 and others which had migrated to post-punk dance music were reinventing themselves as British-style pubs or updated forms of the chic discothèque. As late as 1983, the Toronto-based newspaper The Globe and Mail published a lengthy account of a journalist’s visit to the Limelight in which, it was claimed, one could find evidence of disco’s continued survival (The Globe and Mail 1983, E1). Still, a search for ‘disco’ in the online archive of Montreal’s Gazette newspaper finds that, after 1983, most hits

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were for classified advertisements by individuals looking to sell their disco hardware. Many of the key labels and personnel who had emerged within Montreal’s disco scene in the mid-1970s would remain active in dance music through the 1980s and beyond. The city would produce a wave of early 1980s synthesizer pop/dance bands, with Men Without Hats reaching international stardom and others, like Rational Youth, achieving long-­ term cult status. As I have shown elsewhere, 12″ singles of the late 1970s and early 1980s by long-time Quebec musician and producer Pierre Perpall, recording under a variety of names, would be retrospectively installed as important fore-runners of techno, even as they were regularly mistaken for examples of Italo disco (Straw 2008). The most broadly based success of Montreal dance music after disco, however, was that of the highly synthesized style known as Hi-NRG. In a 1993 interview, the Britain-based Ian Levine, perhaps the most prominent international producer of this music in the 1980s, noted that the hard, synthesized beat of tracks from Canadian labels—largely Montreal-­ based—had been one response to the growing expense of the ‘big string disco sound’ typical of major label productions (Tope 1993, 20–21). A quite reputable Wikipedia canon of the Hi-NRG sound shows the steady success of Montreal-based artists working in this style right through the latter half of the 1980s: Lime, “Your Love” (1981), Claudja Barry, “Work me Over” (1982), Lime, “Baby, We’re Gonna Love Tonight” (1982), Claudja Barry, “For Your Love” (1983), Miquel Brown, “He’s a Saint, He’s a Sinner” (1983a), Miquel Brown, “So Many Men, So Little Time” (1983b), Tranx-X, “Living on Video” (1983), Lime, “Unexpected Lovers” (1985), Suzy Q, “Computer Music” (1985), Claudja Barry, “Down and Counting” (1986) (‘Wikipedia: List_of_Hi-­ NRG_artists_ and_songs’ 2019). Often reissued or remixed, and newly cherished, records such as these, which were often dismissed as symptoms of disco’s retreat and Montreal’s abdication of the title of ‘disco capital,’ now stand as evidence of continuity and renewal in the city’s dance music culture. In their use of prominent, sometimes grandiose synthesizer flourishes these records are even, on occasion, read against the backdrop of Montreal’s other distinctive taste culture of the 1970s and early 1980s: that which made the city a key launching pad for European progressive rock (La Presse 2013).

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Disco: Underground and Overground I have argued elsewhere that the history of the discothèque might be written as much through the lens of European culture (with its chic Parisian clubs and Mediterranean dance venues) as from perspectives which follow its emergence through a set of mutations in the club life of New York City (Straw 2008). An even broader internationalization of disco histories, of the sort represented by this volume, is obviously more welcome. The ‘problem’ of a Europe-centred history for cultural analysts is that it is not so obviously (or not yet) the story of underground struggles by identitarian communities to build spaces of encounter. Nor is it so clearly a story of the transformative interweavings of musical traditions, of the sort which may structure histories of disco music in New York. If U.S.-centred histories of disco may organize themselves around these heroic processes, they also, however, organize transnational disco culture in terms of a geographical centre in which the music is defined and a set of peripheries in which the music (thus defined) is imitated, lightly inflected, debased or always arriving a little too late. The challenge of writing histories of disco in places like Montreal, then, is that such histories are not always the histories of musical undergrounds in any direct or exclusive sense. In Montreal, disco was about the building of new mainstream entertainment forms, in which relationships between entrepreneurs, designers and architects, language groups, ethnic communities and areas of the city came to be reordered. In this reordering, sexual communities might find new spaces of public expression, and racially distinct musical communities might come to inhabit new kinds of proximity. Both these developments were often driven by commercial imperatives which swept up older traditions of show business, launched new careers and set something called disco at the centre of media networks which were quick to absorb it as something like a cultural dominant. The history of disco in Montreal is in significant ways about the fate of popular culture in an urban centre which is, on the one hand, outside of the major centres of popular culture (New York, Hollywood and Paris) and, at the same time, itself the cultural metropolis of a circumscribed cultural territory (that of the province of Quebec). The Francophone culture of Montreal during the disco period was minor vis-à-vis that of Anglophone North America, yet dominant within Quebec, where it was embedded within a range of cultural institutions (such as highly successful media networks) whose capacity to magnify new cultural phenomena

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across multiple platforms was significant. At the same time, the city’s Anglophone population was minoritarian within Montreal, but disproportionately represented within Montreal’s downtown disco culture, which ensured high-level coverage of disco in the city’s English-speaking media. Further, Montreal’s disco culture, like that of New  York City (as Tim Lawrence has described it), involved significant numbers of people rooted in Italian immigrant communities (Lawrence 2016, 64), whose positioning between Anglophone and Francophone populations of long standing (and whose high rates of bilingualism) facilitated their role as intermediaries. And, in a process I have described elsewhere, disco’s success in Montreal pulled certain black Québécois musicians out of the background roles of session musician or background singer, to which pre-disco trends in Quebec popular music had relegated them, and into the limelight of new supergroups, like that assembled for the compilation La Connexion Noire or solo performer-producer careers like that of Pierre Perpall (Straw 2008). One effect of Montreal’s disco culture was a redistribution of the visibility of these populations across the stages of public life. In the 1960s and 1970s, then, Montreal’s disco culture was in many respects a machinery of visibility, producing a spectacle of downtown exuberance which had been in remission in the city since the decline of the much-celebrated Golden Age (from the 1920s through the early 1950s) of Montreal’s cabaret and dance hall scenes. Dance music cultures are very often about the knitting together of invisible undergrounds, and this would be partially true of Montreal’s from the mid-1970s onwards. In specific times, and in particular places, however, dance music cultures are one of the resources through which a city performs itself as a spectacular, festive space.

Notes 1. These playlists and mixes may be found at http://psyquebelique.blogspot. com/2013/02/psyquebelique-­presente-­disco-­spatial.html and https:// www.mixcloud.com/retro-­n rg/montreal-­s ound-­h i-­n rg-­e lectro-­8 0s-­ canadian-­d isco-­n on-­s top-­m ix-­7 7-­m ins-­1 977-­1 984-­c anada-­d isco/, Accessed 15 January 2019. 2. All translations are henceforth the author’s unless otherwise stated.

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References Architecture/concept. 1969. Plexi: disco-club. July–August, pp. 38–43. Billboard. 1969. Soul Music—A Long Time Arriving in Canada, May 24. ———. 1975. Discotheque Scene in Quebec Is Seen Unique as Single Breaker, February 8. ———. 1977a. Empire Records Looks to Disco, January 8. ———. 1977b. Parapluie Imports Rhythm Tracks For Quebec Hits, January 22. ———. 1977c. A Billboard Spotlight: La Province de Québec, January 29. ———. 1979a. Montreal May Be Continent’s 2nd Best City, March 17. ———. 1979b. 90 Canadian Stations Now Programming Disco, March 24. Chicago Tribune. 1979. Montreal Clubs Dance to a Disco Beat, April 8. Chin, Brian. 1997. Brian Chin. Accessed November 20, 2018. https://www.jahsonic.com/BrianChin.html. Crawford, Jason B. 2016. Forgetting Montreal’s Gay Downtown: The Popular Gay Geographic Imagination and a Miş-mash History of the Present. Quebec Studies 61: 165–186. Crawford, Jason B., and Karen Herland. 2016. Sex Garage: Unspooling Narratives, Rethinking Collectivities. Journal of Canadian Studies 48: 106–131. https:// doi.org/10.3138/jcs.48.1.106. Cross, Alan. 2016. Canadian Nightclub History: Montreal’s Infamous Limelight. A Journal of Musical Things (blog). October 18. https://ajournalofmusicalthings.com/canadian-­nightclub-­history-­montreals-­infamous-­limelight/. Current Events. 1970. Montreal Discothèques, April. ———. 1971. Advertisement, ‘La Licorne,’ April. Dawson, Jim. 1995. The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World. Boston: Faber & Faber. Diamanti, Eleonora. 2017. The Parabola of Italian Discothèques: Between Radical Architecture and Spaghetti Dance. Scapegoat 10: 134–150. Financial Post. 1978. Sweet Music for Investors as Bubble Keeps On Growing, October 21. Fritz. 1964. On and Off the Record. The Gazette (Montreal), September 12. ———. 1965. On and Off the Record. The Gazette (Montreal), July 24. Funkytown—The Montreal Disco Era. 2009. Inside the Music. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. https://soundcloud.com/colinmackenzie/ funkytown-­the-­montreal-­disco-­era. Jay. 1971. Discotheques Dead? Somebody Forgot to Bury Them. The Gazette (Montreal), November 6. Kilgallen, Dorothy. 1964. Voice of Broadway. The Gazette (Montreal), October 9. La Patrie. 1965. La ‘Dolce Vita’ Dans Le Vent Établit Ses Quartiers Dans Les Discothèques, May 27.

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———. 1966. Les Discothèques Ne Sont Pas Mortes: Trois Nouvelles Ouvrent Leurs Portes à l’Automne, September 3. ———. 1968. Les Discothèques Sont Nées En France En 1945? Pourquoi? Comment?, August 11. La Presse. 1970. Spec by Night: Une Soirée Dans Le Montréal d’avant Drapeau, April 16. ———. 2013. Montréal n’oublie pas ses héros, September 28. Accessed February 10, 2019. https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/201309/28/01-­4694294-­montreal-­ noublie-­pas-­ses-­heros.php. Lapointe, Mathieu. 2014. Nettoyer Montréal: les campagnes de moralité publique, 1940–1954. Québec City, Québec: Septentrion. Lawrence, Tim. 2016. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983. Durham: Duke University Press. Lime Light Disco. 2015. Montreal Time (blog). June. Accessed January 21, 2019. https://mtltimes.ca/Montreal/montreal/lime-­l ight-­d isco-­t hen-­n ow-­ montreal/. Lisée, Jean-François. 2011. Le Problème de Funkytown | L’actualité. January 30, 2011. Accessed April 22, 2019. https://lactualite.com/politique/ le-­probleme-­avec-­funkytown/. Mixcloud. 2015. Disco 80s Canadian MONTREAL SOUND Hi-NRG Electro— Non-Stop Mix (77 mins) 1977–1984. Accessed January 31, 2019. https:// www.mixcloud.com/retro-­nrg/montreal-­sound-­hi-­nrg-­electro-­80s-­canadian-­ disco-­non-­stop-­mix-­77-­mins-­1977-­1984-­canada-­disco/. New York Times. 1979. Notes: Montreal Claims Disco Crown, April 1. Pemberton, Rollie. 2016. Nightclubbing: Montréal’s Lime Light. Red Bull Music Academy Daily. October 20. Accessed April 20, 2019. https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/10/nightclubbing-­lime-­light. Podmore, Julia A. 2015. From Contestation to Incorporation: LGBT Activism and Urban Politics in Montreal. In Queer Mobilizations: Social Movement Activism and Canadian Public Policy, ed. Manon Tremblay, 187–207. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press. Podmore, Julia A., and Line Chamberland. 2015. Entering the Urban Frame: Early Lesbian Activism and Public Space in Montréal. Journal of Lesbian Studies 19: 192–211. Psyquébélique. 2013. Psyquébélique présente: DISCO SPATIAL QUÉBEC 1976–82. Accessed January 30, 2019 http://psyquebelique.blogspot. com/2013/02/psyquebelique-­presente-­disco-­spatial.html. Saumart, Ingrid. 1969. L’inventeur Montréalais Des Discothèques Prépare La Suit. La Presse, February 20. Straw, Will. 1992. Montreal Confidential: Notes on an Imagined City. CineAction 28: 58–64.

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———. 2005. Pathways of Cultural Movement. In Accounting for Culture: Thinking Through Cultural Citizenship, ed. Monica Gattinger, Caroline Andrew, Sharon Jeannotte, and Will Straw, 183–197. Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press. ———. 2008. Music from the Wrong Place: On the Italianicity of Quebec Disco. Criticism 50 (1): 113–131. ———. 2014. How Montréal Became Disco’s Second City. Accessed April 25, 2019. http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2014/08/montreal-­disco-­feature. ———. 2015. Place Des Arts et La Vie Nocturne à Montréal. In 50 Ans de La Place Des Arts, ed. Louise Poissant, 115–130. Montreal: Presses de l’Université du Québec. ———. 2021. The Pastness of Âllo Police. In Photogenic Montreal: Ruins and Revisions in a Postindustrial City, edited by Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan, Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 99–216. Tele-Radio Monde. 1969. Donald Lautrec Ouvre Une Discothèque à Montréal, May 31. Tele-Radiomonde. 1967a. La Discothèque à Jo-Jo: Une Boîte Très Sympathique, April 8. ———. 1967b. Ouverture Officielle de La Boîte à Joel Denis: La Discothèque à Jo-Jo, Une Boîte Très Sympathique, April 8. The Gazette (Montreal). 1965. Discotheque King Loves His Subjects, July 31. ———. 1966. Announcing the Gazette Living Library, January 29. ———. 1970. Discotheques—We’re Number One: Something for everyone from freaks to old folks. June 6. ———. 1975. “Montreal this morning,” September 4, 1975, p. 3. ———. 1976. Rock & Pop: Disco ‘Lindbergh’ Flies High, October Paris-based discothèque chain Régine’s 30. ———. 1977a. Rock & Pop: Want to Boogie? You’re in the Right Place, May 21. ———. 1977b. “Homosexuals fighting back after raid.” October 27, 1977, p. 3 ———. 1979. Ted Blackman, December 21. ———. 1980. Punk, It Seems, Is Marrying Disco, January 16. ———. 1981. Rod Stewart Roars Back with a Super 1980 Album, January 3. The Globe and Mail. 1983. Toujours Le Disco!, May 7. Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. London and New York: Polity. Tope, Frank. 1993. Lifting You Higher. DJ Magazine (July 1). Weekend Magazine. 1974. The Biggest Dirty Joke in Town, December 14. When Discotheques Reshaped Montreal, Told with Rarely-Seen Photos. 2018. Coolopolis. Accessed January 31, 2019. http://coolopolis.blogspot. com/2018/04/when-­discotheques-­reshaped-­montreal.html Wikipedia: List_of_Hi-NRG_artists_and_songs. 2019. Accessed April 4, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hi-­NRG_artists_and_songs

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Discography B.T. Express. 1974. Do It (‘Till You’re Satisfied). Scepter Records/Roadshow. ———. 1976. Express. Musart. Barry, Claudja. 1896. Down and Counting. Epic. ———. 1982. Work Me Over. Jupiter Records. ———. 1983. For Your Love. Jupiter Records. Brown, Miquel. 1983a. He’s A Saint, He’s A Sinner. Record Shack Records. ———. 1983b. So Many Men, So Little Time. Record Shack Records. Dibango, Manu. 1972. Soul Makossa. Fiesta. Gaynor, Gloria. 1974. Never Can Say Goodbye. MGM Records. Joli, France. 1979. Come to Me. Ariola/Disques Dreyfus. ———. 1981. Gonna Get Over You. Manhattan. Lime. 1980. Your Love. Prism. ———. 1982. Babe, We’re Gonna Love Tonite. Matra, 16 ———. 1985. Unexpected Lover. Matra. McCrae, George. 1974. Rock Your Baby. RCA Victor. Suzy Q. 1985. Computer Music. Matra. The Peppers. 1973. Pepper Box. Sirocco Trans-X. 1983. Vivre Sur Vidéo/Living On Video. Illusion. Various Artists. 1978. La Connexion Noire. Les Disques Revelation.

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Dancin’ Days: Disco Flashes in 1970s Brazil Ivan Paolo de Paris Fontanari

In 2019, over 100,000 Brazilians saw the musical O Frenético Dancin’ Days.1 A major international production taking its title from the famous Rio de Janeiro discotheque Dancin’ Days, and in part written by its mastermind Nelson Motta, the show nostalgically but energetically recalled the musical and visual codes of the disco era. The staging of the musical coincided with a strong conservative turn in the country’s politics marked by the 2018 election of President Jair Bolsonaro who, despite being a democratically elected president, came to power in a context not dissimilar to that of the military dictatorship 40 years earlier. In the late 1970s, when Brazil was transitioning from the toughest phase of the military dictatorship, the emergence of disco seemed to form part of a new and naïve movement of personal liberation. Despite the decades that have since passed, and the impact disco and subsequent musical genres have had on the national psyche, a patriarchal worldview still persists in Brazil, and disco continues to serve as a crucial metaphor for individual freedoms. Although disco had a huge media impact across the channels by which music and music cultures were consumed in Brazil, it first appeared in the

I. P. de Paris Fontanari (*) UFFS – Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul [Federal University of Fronteira Sul], Chapecó, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_3

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country at a time when music travelled exclusively through physical records and musicians. Brazilian discotheque owners and DJs travelled abroad to experience disco first-hand, and then returned home and shaped local audiences in line with North American and European musical repertoires, trends, and DJing techniques. Disco would soon express an array of local manifestations, mediated by local tastes and acquiring different meanings across various class, gender, and racial identities. Some of these incarnations acquired fame beyond the physical audiences of Brazilian discotheques, and etched themselves into the wider Brazilian collective memory: the TV show Carlos Imperial, the disco movie Sábado Alucinante (‘Hallucinating Saturday’2), the soap opera Dancin’ Days, disco records such as Tim Maia’s Disco Club, and the image and sound of Brazilian disco divas like Gretchen are all examples of this, and were collectively responsible for shaping the mainstream idea of disco based on corporeal and sensorial self-liberation in the face of restrictive dominant values. The resulting paradigm, which both drew from and was adopted by the gay scene, would eventually influence Brazilian underground gay clubs, from which a new Brazilian electronic dance music scene would emerge a decade later. Beyond its adoption as an underground ethos, the proliferation of material relating to Brazilian disco online illustrates how disco was integrated within the Brazilian media and cultural industry at large, its memory and visibility cherished and preserved in the decades that followed. Right from its emergence, disco was responsible for creating a shared, cosmopolitan cultural sensibility among a large segment of Brazilian youth, from the white, metropolitan educated middle classes to the multi-­ ethnic, suburban working poor. The authoritarian government brought by the 1964 coup, and sponsored by conservative elites, worked hard to annul the social reforms of the previous Goulart government. Suppressing civil rights, and exerting military control over institutions, they imposed cultural censorship and persecuted oppositionists. By the late 1970s, however, the regime had begun to loosen its grip, preparing the country for a gradual return to democracy in 1984. Though many discotheque habitués positioned themselves against conservative politics, there is no clear evidence of direct military intervention in the Brazilian disco scene; nevertheless, in what was still a highly conservative climate, those who were not aligned with the regime could easily find themselves persecuted for their progressive views. In this sense, the discotheque was a kind of escape valve: a place to cultivate non-conformist identities and lifestyles from which

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new forms of personal interaction and worldviews could eventually be crafted. This chapter explores how disco circulated as a music, a sensibility, and a lifestyle in 1970s Brazil, paying particular attention to its symbolic function in fostering new class, gender, and race identities in the country. I posit the emergence of a ‘disco body’—a new-found consciousness in which, through dance, the body becomes a locus of pluralisation of the self—to trace the story of Brazilian disco from its initial middle-class and elite adoption, through its popularisation via television, to its rise in other social milieux. Like other dance music settings with analogous ritual functions, disco and discotheques allowed people to temporarily depart from their regular selves, attracting those who—for whatever reason—felt ‘out of place’ in their respective places of social belonging. As I argued in my study of periphery DJs (Fontanari 2013a), the body as a site of ‘pluralisation of the self’ performs a dual function: on the one hand, it inscribes onto the dancing body an otherness (e.g. social, sexual, racial) experienced through the body itself; on the other, it allows the dancing body to travel into another space, world, or milieu. This idea of the body as a site of both inscription and exploration resonates with the heterotopian reading of disco underpinning this collection: in the physical and cultural space of the discotheque, dancers become ‘others’ due to the radical changes they experience between the outside world and the inside of the discotheque, thus ‘pluralising themselves’. While this pluralisation is intrinsically tied to an emic notion of self-liberation and occurs on an individual level, its effects are ultimately political—for this reason, I stress the triangulation between sensibility, lifestyle, and worldview throughout this chapter. In the disco body, a new ethos is thus performed, and dominant identities are contested, particularly patriarchal notions of gender, class, and race. While scholarly work on Brazilian disco is still very much in its early stages,3 studies in parallel but related Brazilian contexts confirm the reading of disco I am proposing here. Velho (1998) has offered a dense description of white, middle-class young adults living in Rio in the early 1970s who dramatically balanced an ‘alternative’ lifestyle based on sexual liberation and recreational drug use with the social and financial constraints of family life. Likewise, in a study exploring the Brazilian New Age movement, Soares (1994) has highlighted the importance of ‘individual liberation’ from moral and family constraints imposed onto a specific milieu socialised in the Catholic tradition. It is reasonable, then, to suggest that the whole disco ‘package’ appealed to the emerging Brazilian urban

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middle class: its values and practices appeared liberating in relation to the old patriarchal and military restraints, connecting disco enthusiasts to new cosmopolitan lifestyles. This chapter begins in 1976  in the New  York City Discotheque (NYCD), the first true disco experience to occur in Rio de Janeiro; from this starting point, I focus on the role and achievements of the aforementioned Nelson Motta, a key player in the introduction and diffusion of disco in Brazil. Specific sections will consider the first and second incarnations of Motta’s nightclub, Dancin’ Days, and another section will investigate the soap opera Dancin’ Days, also masterminded by Motta, which aired on the influential TV network Globo between 1978 and 1979. As the chapter traces the various iterations of the Dancin’ Days brand, it also focuses in on the role of the Dancin’ Days ‘house band’—the waitress-diva group the Frenéticas—and their track ‘Dancin’ Days’, which served as the soap opera’s credit music and remains the most famous Brazilian disco hit to this day, with a look into the symbolic resonance of its lyrics. In the final part of the chapter, I offer some remarks on the political dimension of the ‘disco body’ as a relevant mark of class and racial distinction, in the hope that future research can build upon this.

The Beginnings: The New York City Discotheque By setting up the New York City Discotheque (NYCD) in Rio de Janeiro in May 1976, owner Carlos Wattimo and DJ Ricardo Lamounier introduced the discotheque paradigm to Brazil. A year earlier, Wattimo—an ex-US army major—had been running the Ipanema Discotheque in New York City where Ronnie Soares was the DJ. New York symbols could be found throughout his new Rio club, in its music, architecture, fashion, décor, and menu, as well as its name. The entrance door had the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty sculpted in its frame; the New York phonebook and New York road signs were also scattered around the club. ‘The New York’, as it was known, offered a number of hot dishes, all with English names; whisky and vodka were its signature drinks, served by 15 uniformed waitresses matching the current beauty standards (Abbade and Junior 2016, 16–19). The NYCD marked the first appearance of a disc-jockey who played records on turntables—a so-called discotecário—in a Brazilian middle-class nightclub, but music from gramophone records had been common for some time at poor working-class social dances. As early as 1959, radio

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technician and vinyl salesman Osvaldo Pereira had served as a proto-DJ at downtown Sao Paulo social dances, where he played a mix of foreign records by Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra and domestic ones by Bolão and Eduardo Lincoln, among others. These events presented poor black youth with an affordable alternative to the luxurious venues with live orchestras playing to white elites (Assef 2003, 23). The middle classes, however, had no such options. Before the arrival of disco, live MPB, bossa nova, and jazz music were the standard night entertainment, which remained chic and expensive, and which were mostly an elite bohemian pastime, catering for heterosexual couples wishing to dance cheek-to-cheek to romantic songs.4 The NYCD changed all this: dressed in an extravagant lurex overall, DJ Ricardo Lamounier played funk and soul records from the likes of Diana Ross and KC and The Sunshine Band.5 His Bozak mixer and two Technics turntables, set up in a mezzanine booth from which he faced the crowd, made him the club’s main attraction. The disco repertoire that echoed from the club’s powerful sound system—which Wattimo had brought over from the US—invited people to dance alone through random liberating movements, in contrast to the previous routine of dancing in couples. The lighting system included a disco ball and colourful cannon lights that flashed in a darkened room full of mirrors, and the overall atmosphere created a unique experience of time and place, which further reinforced the newly experienced corporeal effects of disco music. The NYCD soon became a symbol of social prestige; famous Rio soccer players visited after their matches, and renowned musicians, actors, and models were among its habitués, sharing their evenings with anonymous crowds. Reports from the club regularly appeared in local newspapers, and the city’s most prestigious high schools organised their graduation dances there. However, by 1978 the NYCD was no longer the only disco option, as by then virtually every Rio nightclub had turned into a discotheque. As larger and more affordable nightclubs emerged, the NYCD was no longer the place to be seen, and its crowd began to slowly shift its loyalties (Abbade and Junior 2016, 17, 47, 114). The NYCD was the first Brazilian nightclub set up on the US model, but the club that turned disco into a national phenomenon had a more complex history—one involving an interplay of people, music, ideas, and aesthetics that gave shape to what came to be understood as disco in Brazil.

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The Frenetic Dancin’ Days Discotheque The two English words ‘Dancin’ Days’ undoubtedly remain the most evocative expression of the Brazilian disco era. They refer simultaneously to two local discotheques, a TV soap opera and its soundtrack, and a famous disco track recorded many times by various artists. These different iterations of Dancin’ Days fed off each other across various media, addressing different audiences and establishing distinct ways of experiencing disco—but one person, Nelson Motta, was behind each and every one of them. Raised in an elite intellectual social circle, Motta came from a prestigious artistic family background. His grandfather was the intellectual Cândido Mota Filho, one of the founders of Brazil’s modernist movement, and we will meet his cousin Ricardo Amaral later in this chapter due to his own contributions to Brazil’s nightlife. In the late 1960s, at the age of 23, Motta became a writer for the influential Rio newspaper Jornal do Brasil, interacting with youth who would later become recognisable cultural figures in the fields of music, cinema, theatre, photography, literature, and journalism. Given that Brazil was going through the hardest period of its military dictatorship at the time, Motta had the power—as he himself recognises—to make those artists visible, had he wished to. He chose instead to ‘shed light on new talents and give voice to outcasts and transgressors who spread novel cultural and artistic liberties’, most of them white, elite, or middle-class youth from Rio de Janeiro and, to a lesser extent, Sao Paulo (Motta 2014, 15–20). Embedded in the established national pop-cultural vanguard of the 1960s and the 1970s, Motta and his friends served as local guides to visiting foreign rock stars like Mick Jagger and Bob Marley on their tours across Brazil. In 1976 Motta launched his own first big musical enterprise, the open-air rock festival Saquarema, Sol, Som e Surf (‘Saquarema, Sun, Sound and Surf’) at a well-known surf beach, featuring both established and up-and-coming Brazilian rock artists. Bad weather prevented the live recording of the event for a planned documentary film, leading to Motta’s financial collapse (Motta 2014, 93–96). Despite this failure, back in Rio de Janeiro Motta was invited to develop a marketing strategy to attract customers to the recently opened and still little-known luxurious Gávea Shopping Mall. Given the venue for four months, he first imagined running a hippy rock club, following the emergence of the alternative-­ psychedelic fad he was involved with at the time. Motta had already noticed a strong appetite among Rio’s youth for fresh global music trends:

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As soon as the psychedelic wave was launched in San Francisco, people in Rio de Janeiro were aware of it and boldly claimed they were experts, even though they had no idea what it was really about. Anything to avoid being perceived as an outsider: a purple wooden shoe is psychedelic, hot asphalt is psychedelic, a clearance sale is psychedelic, nail polish is psychedelic […]. It was necessary to consume and jump on the bandwagon to show that we were not underdeveloped, or so we thought; in fact, by doing this we were just proving the exact opposite. (Motta 2014, 21)

However, after talking to his cousin, a disco enthusiast from New York, Motta changed his mind and went to New York to witness its booming disco scene first-hand, and concluded that disco would be a better investment. He returned home with a huge disco ball, light effects, and plenty of disco records, determined to set up a local discotheque modelled on those he had just seen. His instinct proved correct, as the opening of Frenetic Dancin’ Days in August 1976 was a huge success. Among the 700 attendees were media professionals capable of turning the club into a prestigious venue and attracting new visitors, but the diverse crowd also included left-wing militants, psychotherapists, discreet police observers, surfers, journalists, and a wide assortment of celebrities such as actress Sonia Braga (who would later star in the eponymous soap opera) and movie producer Glauber Rocha, as well as the MPB and tropicalist musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil (Motta 2014, 99–100, Motta 2000, 295, Assef 2003, 56). DJ Don Pepe played funk and disco hits throughout the night, interrupting his set only to make way for a live performance by Rita Lee, ex-frontwoman of the psychedelic rock band Mutantes. Through his social capital and media influence, Motta mastered the cultural codes both of the artistic elite and of the urban audiences he targeted. Acting as a cultural mediator, he was able to introduce musical novelties intertwined with pre-existing local values, making them more easily accepted. Within a week of its launch, the venue reached its full capacity, a feat it would maintain week on week until the club closed three months later. According to Motta, ‘the environment was so sexy and liberal that the dark stairs of the empty mall were full of groans of both straight and gay couples, while others preferred the dark corners under the discotheque bleachers, hidden by the curtains’ (Motta 2000, 297). This hedonistic lasciviousness, paired with a careful mix of established, ‘safe’ cultural codes and cosmopolitan appetites, was not exclusively the domain of

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discotheques or disco music, of course—it fitted into the wider and more complex movement for (sexual) liberation evident in other cultural manifestations of the time, for example pornochanchada movies6—but it was crucial to the Frenetic Dancin’ Days discotheque’s legendary status, and to opening the door to deeper social and cultural innovations.

The ‘Frenetics’ One of the key attractions of the Frenetic Dancin’ Days discotheque was the multi-racial female group the Frenéticas (‘The Frenetics’) made up of six club waitresses, all of whom were previously unemployed actresses, singers, and dancers. Halfway through the night, they would stop serving tables and step on stage to sing and dance to a few rock songs by the likes of Rita Lee or the Rolling Stones, after which they would return to their regular duties. This interplay of rock and disco recurred in Motta’s musical entrepreneurship, as he saw the genres as complementary to each other; it also remained typical of the manner in which disco circulated in Brazil, as depending on the audience being addressed, the music genres and cultural codes associated with disco changed. Due to their popularity, the Frenéticas’ interludes over the course of the evening gradually became longer and longer, until they stopped waiting tables altogether and became the main attraction of the night (Motta 2000, 297). They soon recorded their first album, simultaneously released by Atlantic Records in Brazil, the Netherlands, Germany, and Portugal, and appeared on TV shows in the same sensual clothes they wore in their disco performances, quickly becoming national stars. From 1977 to 1983 they released five albums and seventeen singles, all filled with songs which spoke of happiness, individual liberation, and sexual allure.7 Rather than just copying the original American disco divas, the Frenéticas were regarded as a true local phenomenon, inspired by the Brazilian and Portuguese nineteenth-century burlesque genre teatro de revista tradition, which they updated to a modern rock and disco atmosphere (Motta 2000, 302). Dressed in tight-fitting lurex body stockings and sporting high heels and over-the-top make-up, the Frenéticas’ outfits accentuated their sex appeal and reinforced the role of the disco body as a site of transformation and self-pluralisation. In their performances, the bodies of the members of the Frenéticas were a vehicle for disco values. The costumes they wore evoked extravagant, almost carnivalesque imagery, and were derived from

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Dzi Croquettas, a smoothed out female version of the cutting-edge gay dance troupe Dzi Croquettes, who had comically interpreted Brazilian music during the 1970s. Dressed in costumes covering only their genitals, the original Dzi Croquettes played with gender identities by showing their masculine, hairy bodies in extravagant female outfits. The Frenéticas heavily borrowed from this aesthetic, but did so in a way that was both more and less conservative in how they represented women and their role, performing a kind of ‘drag without drag’ which exaggerated the female body and showed it in a new light. Mixing dance, singing, sensuality, and ambiguity, they questioned gender identities not by presenting the female body as a feminised site, but by freeing women from patriarchal representation and domination, an urgent endeavour in Brazil’s social context, within which just a few years earlier women would not go out if not accompanied by a male partner. This complex layering of gender identities, both subversive and conservative—from drag and back, with the highly sexualised but tongue-in-cheek performance of women performing men performing women—produced joyful, comical, and at times cutting, sarcastic performances. While they were clearly opposed to the dictatorial suppression of individual liberties, they set up a non-verbal and highly coded representational game which might have liberated insiders, but which was also confusing to the outside eye, which made them harder to censor (Dzi Croquettes, 2009). As well as intervening in gender norms, the Frenéticas made sophisticated cultural comments on class, as the very idea of waitresses stepping up on stage in the middle of the evening to perform represented a major shift from many perspectives. It subverted the traditional stage/dance floor hierarchy which discotheques had introduced to middle-class Brazilian nightlife, and similarly blurred the borders of class and race, represented by the multi-ethnic composition of the band: the waitress/diva switch resonated strongly in a country like Brazil, where social inequalities were closely linked to skin colour. The way in which the Frenéticas shifted in status at different stages of the night can thus be interpreted as a kind of dramatisation of the multiple transformations enabled in the heterotopian night/club towards a pluralisation of the self—in social, racial, and sexual terms—of the social actors involved. These features all helped to create an ambiguous environment in the Dancin’ Days discotheque which was sometimes normative and hierarchical, and at other times liberated and egalitarian. Following Turner (1974), we might then posit the Frenetic Dancin’ Days discotheque as a liminal

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space par excellence: such ambiguity is an attribute of all liminal situations, as found in many tribal rites of passage, but also in certain urban settings. The parties at Dancin’ Days could be seen as an example of a site that allowed the re-evaluation of meanings being put in practice (Sahlins 1990) as much as the redefinition of those who were there. While epitomising Brazilian disco, the Frenéticas also managed to subvert the old perceptions of gender, class, and race that marked Brazil in general and the dictatorship era in particular.

The Second Dancin’ Days Following the closure of the original Dancin’ Days, the whole club crew— from musicians to bouncers, with whom Motta readily shared his profits— were happy with its success. Motta was asked to revive the club but initially resisted doing so, wishing to preserve its memory rather than exploit its success. He changed his mind two months later, when the directors of the company running the cable cars, stores, and restaurants of Rio’s Urca Hills presented him with an offer he could not refuse: a twelve-square-mile location with a bar, a restaurant, and an amphitheatre with a grand 650-foot-high vista of Rio and—most importantly—no neighbours. Motta, from whom Globo Television had already bought the Dancin’ Days trademark rights for their upcoming show, agreed to take it on, and TV commercials gave the new discotheque much-needed promotion, turning the once exclusive nightclub into a big business. Globo also asked Motta to produce musical vignettes for its forthcoming soap opera, which, once released, would become the third Frenéticas hit of the year (Motta 2000, 305–307). The new Dancin’ Days club had all the elements in place to repeat the success of its predecessor and become a new ‘summer dream’; yet according to Motta, it ended up being a ‘complete disaster’, mostly due to poor logistics. The opening in the summer of 1978 featured a guest performance by the now-famous Frenéticas. As thousands wanted to see the ‘new’ Dancin’ Days, the crowd exceeded the club’s 3000-strong capacity. The cable cars and restaurant had never experienced such demand before: the food and water ran out soon after midnight and the restrooms collapsed; long queues formed for the cable cars since they could not take more than seventy passengers at a time. Among those angry at the organisers were Motta’s old friends and patrons, and while things ran more smoothly on the following nights, Motta never felt that the new club was

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a true successor to the original (Motta 2000). The team had made more money, but had had less fun in doing so, and by the end of the summer, once the soap opera had ceased broadcasting, they decided to shut down the club for good. Much had changed since the opening of the original discotheque. The old clientele from Rio’s South Zone was replaced by ‘unknown’ crowds from the North Zone and the suburbs, who confused it with the actual soap opera as they pretended to be ‘on set’, perhaps hoping to bump into the telenovela’s star Sonia Braga on the dance floor. This second iteration of Dancin’ Days thus represented the moment when disco in Brazil became widely accessible through the media, reaching a wide, national audience: what had formerly been reserved for cosmopolitan elites alone could suddenly be experienced by everyone. The space of the discotheque was no longer the terrain of a distinct cultural vanguard where a heterotopian existence became possible, but had become a space in which audiences could pluralise themselves by very literally performing—and thus ‘becoming’—the fictional characters who they watched on television (Motta 2000, 308). This logic of hierarchical identification—by which people identify with an upper strata rather than their own class—was identified by Roberto DaMatta (1997) as a structural feature of Brazil’s hierarchical society, as opposed to an egalitarian one. The way in which disco became a mass phenomenon in Brazil neatly follows this logic. In both locations, the Dancin’ Days discotheque became a tool of individual self-­ liberation, a place which allowed people to distance themselves from their diurnal social position—something which had remained a feature of most urban, cosmopolitan social dance events ever since disco was first introduced (Fontanari 2013a, b). Furthermore, both iterations of Dancin’ Days architecturally embodied the shift from the nightclub—with a separation between audience and stage—and the dance floor-only discotheque in which the roles of audience and performers coincided. While they were heavily focused on the dancers’ experience, both discotheques had stages and regularly hosted bands, again establishing Motta as a leading transitional figure between established modes of consumption and future trends.

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From Dance Floor to Small Screen: The Dancin’ Days Soap Opera As mentioned above, by visiting the discotheque many club-goers sought to recreate the soap opera Dancin’ Days, aired between July 1978 and January 1979 on Brazil’s influential TV network Globo, which had bought the prestigious name rights from Motta. The Dancin’ Days soap opera had a tremendous impact both on the national promotion of disco and on its link to Brazilian middle classes and elites, even though the main plot actually followed independent (and familiar) soap opera dynamics of personal dramas, love affairs, and generational tensions between youth and patriarchal families. Federal censorship, which was based on and committed to the government’s orthodox Christian values, prevented the show from running before 10pm, and from dealing with themes like ‘family disaggregation due to break-up’ and ‘free love’, all linked to the main character of a single mother. The imposed restrictions affected 25 episodes, an indication of how the liminal practices emulated in discotheques were regarded as having the potential to become widely and dangerously subversive (‘Globo 50 anos: censura na TV Globo’, 2020). Whereas MPB and bossa nova music accompanied everyday scenes, a disco-style vignette provided the background for the opening and closing interludes of each of the series’ 174 episodes, while also complementing the transition sequences to the copious commercial breaks. Such a unique position within the show not only embedded the theme tune into the audience’s psyche, but reinforced the extraordinary character of disco music as something appropriate for weekends and for those special, liminal moments when people could reinvent themselves. The plot was also sporadically interrupted by scenes shot in  local discotheques that featured some of the leading characters. On the dance floor, women danced in platform shoes, bell-bottom trousers, bikini-style crop-tops, and loose dresses, while men wore half-buttoned polos and t-shirts—across the board, the style was much more down to earth than the extravagant outfits of the Frenéticas, and much more casual than the dressed up code that had dominated the early elite nightclubs. The posters for the soap opera, on the other hand, sported images of bare-chested young men among other people dressed in a relaxed style. Adhering neither to the formality of the early nightclub nor to the liberal and orgiastic atmosphere of the real discotheque (Castro 2015; Abbade and Junior 2016), the soap opera conflated the various moods and class contexts of the history of Brazilian disco

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up to that point, merging various waves into one ‘accessible’ and recognisable environment. With the end of the series Motta’s close engagement with disco ended, but the impact and effects of his work proved long-lasting and wide-­ reaching.8 Dancin’ Days introduced the exotic scenario of night entertainment to a huge national TV audience, and spread the global discotheque fever across the whole country. By 1979, new discotheques were popping up everywhere, famous Brazilian musicians like Tim Maia and Ney Matogrosso recorded their own disco LPs, and discotheque fashion inspired by the characters’ dress choices became broadly popular among the youth. The programme’s fame even spread beyond national borders, as Dancin’ Days was broadcast in forty countries, most successfully in Italy in the early 1980s, and was most recently remade in Portugal in 2012— thus popularising the Brazilian reworking of an imported language and music style (‘Memória Globo’ 2020). The original soundtrack, released in 1978 by the Som Livre label, sold over a million copies, including eleven tracks in different genres, all but one of which were by Brazilian artists (Motta 2000, 309). An LP with a Spanish version of Dancin’ Days was released in Peru and Venezuela in 1982, and an eponymous compilation came out on RCA in Italy in 1982 which featured eleven Brazilian and Italian disco tracks.

‘Come Into This Party’: The Dancin’ Days Soundtrack The theme track from the soap opera’s opening and closing credits became the most famous Brazilian disco hit (Motta 2014, 103–104). Unsurprisingly, Motta was involved once again, and had a decisive influence on the track’s style; he also wrote the lyrics, which reflect the ethos that dominated Brazil’s early discotheques. The instrumentation was typically ‘disco’: a continuous and regular beat marked by a cymbal along with alternating parallel bass and snare drum, backed by conga beats in sixteenth notes. The melodies were played either by brass or string arrangements. Both the style of instrumentation—already well known in funk and soul music— and the lyrics were designed to invite people to dance and sing along: Open your wings Unleash your beasts Let yourself go Come into this party

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Take me with you to Wherever you go I wanna see your body Beautiful, light and loose

Sometimes we feel We suffer, we dance Without wishing to dance

In our party everything’s allowed It’s allowed to be someone like me, Like you

Dance well Dance bad Dance non-stop

Dance well Dance bad Dance even if you don’t know how to dance.9

The overall structure allows the rhythm to fit strictly to the beats and instrumentation, helping the dancer to intensify their experience of liberation on the dance floor. The music and lyrics, along with the overall sociability that evolved in Dancin’ Days both in its discotheque and soap opera forms, reveal a kind of libertine, almost orgiastic atmosphere, although it remains a firmly exclusive and glamorous one—thus resembling the ambience of famous US discotheques like Studio 54. The lyrics, brief and direct, allude to a particular mode and meaning of the experience of disco dancing, in which the Frenéticas take on a kind of narrator-mediator role, inviting people to join them in a hedonistic, self-­ transformative, physical performance. The first verse directly addresses the dancers, suggesting that they ‘liberate’ themselves from their inhibitions and join the party. Then, moving into the role of seductresses and evoking personal freedom, the Frenéticas offer themselves to be taken by the

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dancer wherever she/he wishes to go, reaffirming the role of the body— ‘beautiful, light and loose’—as a site for potential self-transformation. The following stanza switches to a more realistic tone, referring to the binary differentiation between the two parallel universes inside and outside the discotheque: the inside is a wonderful, celebratory, creative, and authentic place, while the outside is marked by ‘suffering’ and ‘beasts’ to be ‘unleashed’. The fourth stanza returns to the optimism of the ongoing party at the ‘discotheque’, highlighting its inclusive character and offer of the opportunity to be true to oneself or indeed to oneself-as-other, freed from the social masks used in everyday, unauthentic interactions. The chorus reinforces the spontaneous, democratic, polyphonic aspect of disco dancing. The fact that no special skillset is needed likens the experience more to a transcendental ritual than to a formal social dance event. Importantly, the female voice has a varied agency in the song as, in turn, narrator and seductress, who first appraises limitations of everyday social life and then offers permission and liberation. Although it was written by a man, the performance of the song was perceived by the public as feminine, with the Frenéticas seen as ambassadors of social and sexual liberation. We hear a group of female voices addressing ‘you’, as if that group of women had already liberated themselves from patriarchal norms. A collective of waitress-divas of different skin colours taking ownership and granting permissions over the liminal, heterotopian space of the discotheque was a momentous gesture in the context of Brazil’s stifled gender politics at the time, and although it didn’t change the structure of gender relations, it certainly supported the later move towards a more egalitarian perception of gender roles in Brazil.

Disco and Race Disco emerged in Brazil in a context dominated by MPB, Jovem Guarda, and Tropicália music, each of which had its own identity and all of which differed greatly from the modes by which disco was experienced. These genres were related to pre-existing national music traditions, to aesthetic innovation and the adoption or refusal of international influences, to varying degrees of opposition to the military regime, and, finally, to the ways in which the body was used by fans and musicians alike (Dunn 2009). Apart from an engagement with funk and soul by a minor lineage of Jovem Guarda black artists such as Tim Maia and Jorge Ben, disco had no explicit aesthetic connections with any of these dominant music trends—although,

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as we have seen, it wasn’t uncommon for Jovem Guarda and Tropicália artists to be regular discotheque attendees (Motta 2000, 2014.). It is therefore clear that white middle-class youth saw disco as an altogether different musical experience because of the importance it afforded to dancing and, by extension, to the liberation of the self through physical movement and expression. This was a novelty in the circles Motta mingled with, and which he represented—university graduates who were knowledgeable about global popular culture, who felt connected, physically or symbolically, to North American and European art and fashion, and who were mostly from white middle-class and elite circles. A brief consideration of disco’s ethnic-racial dimension, however, throws a slightly different light on the genre’s practices, and reveals disco to have been less innovative than it might have originally sounded to its middle-class fans. This is because for the multi-ethnic working-class youth from the metropolitan suburbs, the introduction of disco followed a path already taken by two other imported US genres, funk and soul, known together as ‘black music’ in Brazil. Indeed, disco was rooted in—and was perhaps even just another name for—the funk and soul music played throughout the 1970s at social dances attended mostly by poor black suburban youth. This notion of ‘black music’ had a different meaning, as for these poor black Brazilian youth, disco became a symbol not—or not only—of personal and sexual freedom, but of their own blackness and of an emerging international black identity, just like funk and soul had been before. While to the white middle classes, disco challenged the dominant conservative mores and gender roles, to the multi-ethnic working-class youth it was both a source and an extension of their racial identity. This is precisely the reason given for the failure of the Brazilian music industry’s investment in local soul-funk artists: ‘if there is a good audience for funk in Brazil, it has not [got] enough income to buy LPs’ (Vianna 1988, 31). The business strategies of the music industry, of which disco was a product, were defined in economic terms, segregating a large population of consumers unable to afford musical products. Vianna (1988) also describes how those same suburban youth who were unable to buy LPs attended black ballrooms on the outskirts of Rio and Sao Paulo at weekends. These venues would later gave birth to the funk carioca and Brazilian hip hop scenes, crafting some of Brazil’s greatest musical exports precisely from a genre neglected by the music industry.

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Indeed, in the 1970s, the radio host and the master of ceremonies Big Boy and Ademir Lemos began organising a series of social dances in Rio de Janeiro called Bailes da Pesada (‘Heavy Social Dances’), where the DJs mixed soul, rock, and pop tracks within the same set; likewise, FM radio stations were extremely important in diffusing disco music beyond discotheques (Assef 2003, 112). At the time, Lemos was regarded as the best DJ in Rio, and distinguished himself by playing original records imported from Europe that made his sets unique. He was also the first Brazilian DJ to employ mixing techniques on the turntables. The cover of a 1970 compilation of his favourite club hits without breaks between the tracks featured Lemos’ face, with a black power hairstyle and wearing African-Brazilian necklace beads.10 Soon, other crews organised similar bailes black (‘black dances’) in peripheral communities, and the Black Rio movement, as these dances came to be known, grew exponentially.11 Their musical repertoire, in turn, gradually narrowed. Once favouring samba and Jovem Guarda’s rock, suburban working-class youth from the outskirts later turned to ‘black’ genres like American soul and funk along with their Brazilian versions by artists like Sandra de Sa and Tim Maia, who recorded his Disco Club LP in 1978, although a large part of his other compositions could also be considered to be ‘disco’ music.12 Bearing in mind the dominant presence of black singers and musicians, blackness was evident in disco music and dance to the point that it was seen as a label created to describe funk and soul music to a white public. According to Motta (2007), Tim Maia never considered disco as ‘white music’, but instead saw it as complementary to black soul music (Fontanari 2013a; Vianna 1988; Motta 2007). As disco and discotheques established ever stronger roots in Brazil during the late 1970s, the music at black dances became strictly ‘disco’. Dancers at the suburban dances and in the downtown discotheques danced to the same (disco) repertoire (Vianna 1988, 31; Motta 2007, 160). The meanings they attached to it varied, however. While the appeal of disco music successfully reached across social classes, discotheques remained reserved for the middle classes. Poor working-class youth could neither afford the transport to get to them nor the entry fee. In fact, considering their smaller size and capacity, downtown discotheques could not have survived in the suburbs even if they had been affordable to low-income patrons. This is why the low-cost venues in Rio aimed at poor youth always had a much bigger capacity and were located far away from downtown clubs, following the dominant socio-geographic

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patterns of Brazil where the farther the place is from the city centre, the lower its income and the less white the population (with the notable exception of the racially and socially segregated favelas which are physically close to Rio’s mid- and up-scale neighbourhoods) (Telles 2004, 199).

Conclusion Ricardo Amaral, Motta’s cousin and an influential Rio club entrepreneur who had a deep influence on the Brazilian music industry, has pointed out how the New York City Discotheque introduced lasting changes to the Brazilian nightscape.13 With its no doorkeeper policy, which prevented the pre-selection of who could get in, the NYCD radically changed Brazilian metropolitan commercial nightlife from one which had previously been expensive and exclusive to a more egalitarian scene (Abbade and Junior 2016, 6, 16–17). Various discotheques provided the middle classes with a comfortable, middle-ground option between formal, conformist, pricey nightclub-restaurants and crowded, peripheral, black social dances in the suburbs (Assef 2003, 58). The emergence of discotheques thus reflected the consolidation of an urban, middle-class lifestyle in Brazil that nurtured individualistic, liberal, cosmopolitan, and hedonistic values. The fact that by this time Brazilian youth had already experienced twelve years of military dictatorship that censored anything which challenged conservative mores—including gatherings of young people—only intensified disco’s heterotopian effect. With no other comparable sexualised dances aimed at the white urban population, the contrast between everyday life and discotheques could not have been greater. To them, disco challenged the patriarchal family values enforced by the church and the dictatorial state, fostering the rise of individualism in urban centres and allowing them to have direct and indirect experiences of self-­ pluralisation. In a modern though still highly hierarchical society, discotheques acted as safe places for the liberation of the body. The dance floor experience in downtown Rio discotheques in the late 1970s was reported to have the same atmosphere as the North American ones, where ‘everything was allowed’—from sexual encounters to heavy drinking and cocaine use—magnifying a liminal, heterotopian experience of place and time.14 Disco’s impact on gender practices was twofold: it fostered a gay-­ friendly environment, and it also provided middle-class women with new nightlife opportunities free of the previously necessary male accompaniment.15 At the same time, in less individualistic and more communitarian

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suburban settings, the story was slightly different, revealing nuances in disco experiences related to class and ethnicity. There, disco played the same role previously allotted to funk and soul, and was later replaced in turn by funk carioca. Experienced through collective choreographies, disco among the poor multi-ethnic youth reinforced their black/racial identity, highlighting their social and racial spatial segregation from the downtown middle-class disco crowds. As a whole, disco introduced new ways of performing and experiencing music. Before its arrival, live music in Brazilian clubs was intellectually appreciated, and not intended for dancing. With disco, a new relationship between performer and audiences came into being, as was highlighted decades later by research into electronic dance music scenes (Tagg 1994). Disco DJs epitomised this change in music performance, as although they had not yet ‘left the booth’ for the stage, a change which only occurred in the 1990s, they were considered responsible for the success of the party. DJs like Ademir Lemos were icons of the clubs in which they played, and in Rio nightclubs DJs acquired loyal audiences who admired them as unique and creative personalities with their own musical identities, and who even ‘followed’ them when they moved to another discotheque (Abbade and Junior 2016). Motta’s two versions of Dancin’ Days successfully transitioned the Brazilian white middle class from 1960s rock counterculture to disco. He managed this shift from multiple angles: music and visual codes, dance, self-expression, sexuality, gender roles, the local youth’s eagerness for international novelties, and the mainstream media, while also folding into disco the previous widespread appetite in Brazil for rock music. Still, discotheque crowds were eclectic by design—as was reflected in the very name of Motta’s club, which was supposedly inspired by the 1973 Led Zeppelin hard rock track—a reference that Motta’s social network was familiar with (Motta 2000, 294). Many rock musicians and fans were also part of the discotheque public, which suggests that despite the aesthetic and musical differences between the two genres, rock and disco were similar insofar as they challenged the dominant social perceptions about race, class, bodies, sexual freedom, drug use, or gender relations—all of which traditionally implied a high degree of segregation and inequality. Now a fixture in Brazil’s urban mythology, to its audience at the time disco constituted a kind of spontaneous, private rebellion against authoritarian views of gender, race, and class. The focus on the body and the music not only made available but celebrated and positioned the body

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itself as a liminal site: a threshold space through which a pluralisation of the self could be performed in the night, with the hope of it eventually becoming a diurnal reality. While disco may not have directly contributed to the return of democracy in Brazil, it was certainly a signal in the form of a small flash of personal freedom which brought an illusion of individual liberty to middle-class disco-goers. Forty years later, though in a quite different way and context, its aesthetics still sound appealing and its variety of potential meanings seem only to increase, evoking memories of different generations and pointing towards possible new formulations of a dance culture and a dance system of values.

Notes 1. O Frenético Dancin’ Days (2019), a musical by Nelson Motta and Patrícia Andrade, was directed by Deborah Colker. The musical was billed as ‘the ideal place to relive the glorious years of disco music and celebrate the 1970s decade’. 2. All translations are henceforth the author’s unless otherwise stated. 3. The only existing account of Brazilian disco was recently written by journalists Celso Junior and Mario Abbade, whose brother was a discotheque habitué, and I draw on their work here; other relevant information used in the present investigation was found in non-fiction books on the history of Brazilian DJs (Assef 2003) and Brazilian funk (Vianna 1988), as well as in the biographies of some of Brazil’s key disco players, from TV presenters to musicians (see Amaral 2010; Castro 2015, 2016; Couto and Fabretti 2015; Motta 2000, 2007, 2014; Imperial 1973, and Monteiro 2008). 4. MPB stands for Música popular brasileira (Brazilian Popular Music), a movement initiated in the mid-1960s by middle-class young urban musicians drawing on samba and Brazilian rural music traditions to develop socio-politically engaged songs with elaborate poetry, melodies, and harmonies (Dunn 2009). 5. Testifying to the kind of music played at NYCD, seven LP compilations under the NYCD name were released from 1976 to 1979, containing favourite club hits by North American funk and soul artists such as Stevie Wonder, Eddie Kendricks, The Jackson 5, Diana Ross, The Richie Family, Grace Jones, Gibson Brothers, Rare Earth, Sylvester, and so on. 6. The popular Brazilian cinematic genre pornochanchada provide a fitting comparison with, and unsurprisingly flourished at the same time as, disco. It refers to a series of erotic comedies which explored themes like extramarital affairs, flirting, dating, gay sexuality, psychoanalysis (which had become fashionable at the time among white urban middle-class people),

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and the intrinsic tensions between sexual liberation and the conservative constraints of the middle-class family. 7. The albums were Frenéticas (Atlantic 1977); Caia na gandaia (Atlantic 1978); Soltas na vida (WEA 1979); Babando Lamartine (Warner Bros 1980); and Diabo a quatro (Top Tape, 1983). These titles symbolise the Frenéticas’ public identity as women performing the role of ‘body liberators’. Caia na Gandaia (‘Let yourself go’) is a colloquial Brazilian Portuguese expression, which also appeared in their lyrics (see Sec. “The seConD DanCin’ DaYs”). Soltas na Vida (‘Women free in life’) may refer to the identity they publicly advocate for themselves. Babando Lamartine (‘Drooling Lamartine’) has multiple meanings: it could mean that the Frenéticas were poetically drooling over the Brazilian composer of satirical sambas, Lamartine Babo, whose family name is also analogous to the Portuguese verb ‘babar’(‘to drool’). ‘Babar’ –– the infinitive of ‘babando’ in colloquial Portuguese –– also means ‘to revere’, but for people who do not know the composer, it can also refer to the famous drink martini as a ‘Drooling Martini’. Both meanings evoke a sexualised sense of humour which is notable in the Frenéticas’ work. Diabo a quatro (‘Devil by four’) is an old popular expression in Portuguese referring to creating chaos or making a mess; here ‘quatro’ clearly refers to the four (devil) members of the Frenéticas, thus emphasising their culturally critical position against a patriarchal, conformist image of woman. 8. Motta claims that after closing the second Dancin’ Days discotheque, he grew tired of disco and wished to turn to Brazilian music instead. At the well-known Rio nightclub Canecão, he later set up the Latin-style discotheque Tropicana fully decorated in tropical themes, with live Latin music (salsa, merengue) performed by a big band dressed in a tropical style. Their performance, however, was coldly received, and the club reached full capacity only when former NYCD DJ Ricardo Lamounier took over the turntables and the Frenéticas performed on the stage. 9. For reference, the original lyrics are: ‘Abra suas asas/ Solte suas feras/ Caia na gandaia/ Entre nesta festa./ Me leve com você/ Pra onde você for/ Eu quero ver seu corpo/ Lindo, leve e souto./ A gente às vezes/ Sente, sofre, dança/ Sem querer dançar./ Na nossa festa vale tudo/ Vale ser alguém como eu/ Como você./ Dance bem/ Dance mal/ Dance sem parar./ Dance bem/ Dance mal/ Dance até Sem saber dançar.’ 10. Assef 2003, 39; Le Bateau Ao Vivo, Top Tape, Brazil, 1970. The tracks on the compilation featured North American rhythm ‘n’ blues, soul, funk, country music, and rock ‘n’ roll artists. Downbeats are emphasised with claps and tambourine on many tracks, as well as brass instrument phrases and vocal choirs on the choruses. Rhythm is also emphasised by acoustic guitar beats.

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11. Funk Santos, quoted in Assef 2003, 47. Funk Santos was a self-­proclaimed admirer of Ademir Lemos. 12. Tim Maia, Disco Club, Atlantic, Brazil/Portugal, 1978. Maia died in 1998 at 55, having recorded 32 albums during his 42-year-long career. Inspired by North American funk, soul, and rhythm ‘n’ blues, he had a deep influence on Brazilian music, particularly musicians and producers identified with ‘black music’. His compositions have been continuously re-recorded and sampled by numerous other musicians. Tim Maia’s Disco Club was re-­ launched in Brazil in 2001 (WEA) and 2011 (Abril Coleções), and in the UK in 2018 (Mr. Bongo/Atlantic). A biographical movie, Tim Maia, based on Nelson Motta’s book (2007), was released in 2014. 13. In the late 1960s, Amaral ran the Sucata nightclub in Rio de Janeiro, which was a home to young musicians who would later become MPB icons, like Elis Regina and Wilson Simonal (Motta 2014, 17). Years later he set up discotheques Club A in New York and Le 78 in Paris, and Papagaios Disco Club in Sao Paulo in 1977. 14. Another drug frequently used in Rio’s discotheques was Mandrix, a kind of sleeping pill taken with alcohol to produce a state of euphoria and dizziness. Assef 2003, 56; Motta 2014, 102. Mandrix is also known as ‘drake’, mandrax, or quaaludes. 15. Abbade and Junior (2016, 6, 19) quote O Globo 1976 article where the NYCD female restroom guard declared herself ‘scared’ of the fashion where ‘woman kisses woman’.

Bibliography Abbade, Mario, and Celso Rodrigues Junior. 2016. A Primeira e Única New York City: A Discoteca que Iniciou a Era Disco no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Autografia. Amaral, Ricardo. 2010. Vaudeville—Memórias. São Paulo: Leya. Assef, Claudia. 2003. Todo DJ Já Sambou: A História do Disc-Jockey no Brasil. São Paulo: Conrad. Castro, Ruy. 2015. A Noite do Meu Bem: A História e As Histórias do Samba-­ canção. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. ———. 2016. Chega de Saudade: A História e As Histórias da Bossa Nova. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Couto, Gerson, and Fábio Fabretti. 2015. Gretchen: uma biografia quase não autorizada. São Paulo: Ilelis. DaMatta, Roberto. 1997. Carnavais, malandros e heróis: para uma sociologia do dilema brasileiro. 6th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco. Dunn, Christopher. 2009. Brutalidade jardim: A Tropicália e o surgimento da contracultura brasileira. São Paulo: Editora UNESP.

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Fontanari, Ivan Paolo de Paris. 2013a. Os DJs da Perifa: Música Eletrônica, Trajetórias e Mediações Culturais em São Paulo. Porto Alegre: Sulina. ———. 2013b. DJs as Cultural Mediators: The Mixing Work of Sao Paulo’s Peripheral DJs. In DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music, ed. Bernardo A.  Attias, Anna Gavanas, and Hilegonda C. Rietveld, 247–268. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Globo 50 anos: censura na TV Globo. 2020. https://teledramaturgiaglobo.wordpress.com/category/dancin-­days-­2/. Accessed November 6, 2020. Imperial, Carlos. 1973. Memórias de um Cafajeste. Rio de Janeiro: CEA. Memória Globo. 2020. https://memoriaglobo.globo.com/entretenimento/ novelas/dancin-­days/. Accessed November 6, 2020. Monteiro, Denilson. 2008. Dez! Nota Dez! Eu sou Carlos Imperial. São Paulo: Matrix. Motta, Nelson. 2000. Noites Tropicais: Solos, Improvisos e Memórias Musicais. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva. ———. 2007. Vale-Tudo: O Som e A Fúria de Tim Maia. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva. ———. 2014. As Sete Vidas de Nelson Motta. Rio de Janeiro: Foz. Sahlins, Marshall. 1990. Ilhas de História. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Soares, Luiz Eduardo. 1994. Religioso por natureza: cultura alternativa e misticismo ecológico no Brasil. In O rigor da Indisciplina, 189–212. Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará. Tagg, Philip. 1994. From Refrain to Rave: The Decline of Figure and the Rise of Ground. Popular Music 13 (2): 209–222. Telles, Edward. 2004. Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Turner, Victor. 1974. O processo ritual. Petrópolis: Vozes. Velho, Gilberto. 1998. Nobres e anjos: um estudo de tóxicos e hierarquia. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas. Vianna, Hermano. 1988. O Mundo Funk Carioca. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.

Discography Frenéticas. Frenéticas. Atlantic, 1977, LP. ———. Caia na gandaia. Atlantic, 1978, LP. ———. Soltas na vida. WEA, 1979, LP. ———. Babando Lamartine. Warner Bros, 1980, LP. ———. Diabo a quatro. Top Tape, 1983, LP. Tim Maia. Disco Club. Atlantic, Brazil/Portugal, 1978, LP. Various. Le Bateau Ao Vivo. Top Tape, Brazil, 1970, LP. ———. New York City Disco. Top Tape, 1976, LP. ———. New York City Discotheque 2. Top Tape, 1977a, LP. ———. New York City Discotheque 3. Top Tape, 1977b, LP.

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———. New York City Discotheque 4. Top Tape, 1978a, LP. ———. New York City Discotheque 5. Top Tape, 1978b, LP. ———. New York City Discotheque 6. Top Tape, 1979a, LP. ———. New York City Discotheque 7. Top Tape, 1979b, LP.

Films, TV and Theatre Alvarez, Raphael and Issa, Tatianna (Dirs.). 2009. Dzi Croquetes. Canal Brasil e Tria. (Documentary). Braga, Gilberto (Dir.). 1978–1979. Dancin’ Days. Rede Globo. (TV Programme). Cunha, Cláudio (Dir.). 1979. Sábado Alucinante. Atlântida Cinematográfica. (Film). Imperial, Carlos. 1978–1979. Programa Carlos Imperial. TV Tupi/TVS/TV Record. (TV programme). Lima, Mauro (Dir.). 2014. Tim Maia. Globo Filmes. (Documentary). Motta, Nelson and Andrade, Patrícia. 2019. O Frenético Dancin’ Days. (Musical).

Gimmick! Italo Disco, Copy and Consumption Flora Pitrolo

Italo disco—a functional dance music characterised by a synthesiser-heavy driving sound, a steady beat, strong melodic content and highly emotional pidgin English lyrics—has sparked increasing curiosity over the past decade, both in Italy and abroad. The term ‘Italo disco’ was first used to sell Italian records in Germany in the early 1980s, gradually took hold and was, for a while, forgotten; but in the past ten to five years, a proliferation has taken place in fan materials, specialised reissues and club nights across Europe and beyond. Alongside this, scholars have begun to interrogate the genre. Amongst others, Will Straw (2008), Kai Fikentscher (2009) and Dario Martinelli (2014) have analysed its sonorities and its local and ‘glocal’ characteristics, asking questions about Italo’s musical properties and about its transnational appeal; Paolo Magaudda (2003, 2016) and Philippe Birgy (2018) have shared important reflections on its modes of production and circulation. More vernacular accounts and theorisations, such as Francesco Cataldo Verrina’s Italo Disco Story (2014), complete the

F. Pitrolo (*) Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_4

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picture of a genre that continues to fascinate for what it allows us to uncover in musical, social and philosophical terms. Academic and non-academic discoveries have illuminated how the seduction of Italo disco is rooted in the world it evokes: romance, desire and glamour dominate in a highly stylised, imaginary world inhabited by rich Americans who exist in the mono-temporal dimension of a warm summer night. While the sitedness of the word ‘Italo’ might identify this world with Italy abroad, Italo disco—which for a long time didn’t label itself as ‘Italo’ at home—is consciously engineered to sound non-Italian. Complexly and compellingly  then, Italo disco can be considered a Foucaultian heterotopia in the sense that it constructs a mirror-space grounded in local reality but also forcefully foreign to it, sharing characteristics of both ‘real’ and ‘mythic’ space: even in its denomination, the genre overlays a space of hyperlocality with a space of fantasy, with the idea of ‘Italy’ acting as both the music’s origin and its mythic destination. As such, Italo functions as ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Foucault 1984, 3). The music offers a dimension not unlike the world of tourism sold by private beaches, clubs, hotels and amusement parks on the Italian Adriatic riviera, which is the world that Italo referenced, originated from and circulated in: as with other forms of disco chronicled in this book, escapism and aspiration play an important part in this music culture, which made available the fantasy of glamour, luxury and romance for everyone. Italo disco’s current popularity has also demonstrated that the genre’s unoriginality plays a significant part in its appeal: as Angus Harrison put it in his ‘Bullshitter’s Guide to Italo Disco’ for Vice Magazine, ‘imagine someone had made a B-movie of the entire disco genre’ (Harrison 2015). The fact that Italo disco always feels like a copy—due to its ripped-off chord progressions and melodies, repetitive production values, kitsch faux-English lyrics and faux-American singers—has paradoxically become its trademark. The product of a delicate moment of transition for the country, identified by historians as years of individuality and hedonism as a reaction to Italy’s violent 1970s marked by political agitation and countless episodes of terrorism, Italo disco’s ideology of mass fantasy is reflected in its conditions of production: there is a lot of it (an estimated average of three releases a day between 1982 and 1988), it all sounds the same (producers sustained this glut by continuous processes of rearranging, octave-­ shifting and vocal-swapping the same material), and any DJ can play it and

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mix it (the vast majority of Italo disco is essentially pre-beat-matched, with long, ‘modular’ intros and outros that flow seamlessly into each other at roughly the same tempo, making for a satisfying dance experience in any context, regardless of skill). Italo disco as a banal, mass product is the subject of this chapter, which dissects the cultural, political and emotional landscape that makes Italo disco the music of a time and a place that appears to continuously evade its time and place. The first part of the chapter provides some contextual information, seeking to paint the geographical, socio-political and economical backdrop against which Italo disco comes into being; here I also frame the problem of Italo’s Italianicity building on the work of fellow scholars and advance some hypotheses regarding the genre’s simultaneous hyperlocality and hyper-foreignness. The heart of this chapter is taken up by two sections which reflect on first and second wave Italo disco, framing the first as a ‘culture of the copy’ and the second as ‘the age of seriality’. Across these two sections, I extend on the work done on the genre previously and offer some new reflections by critically analysing Italo’s development between 1978 and the mid-1980s in sound, modes of production and modes of reception. Pivoting on reflections offered by Philippe Birgy (2018), I progressively move into a dissection Italo’s ‘iconic’ sound as the result of a loss of both ‘body’ and ‘soul’ given by its technological musical infrastructure and industrial productive logic, likening it to what Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944 termed ‘a dreamless art for the people’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 42). From here, I advance questions about Italo’s appeal as a genre that ultimately severed its ties with both disco’s original sound and original social and political values, wondering whether the popularity of Italo endures due to, rather than in spite of, its banality and cheapness. In order to investigate this, my conclusive thoughts are on the subject of the Italo lyric, which I analyse thematically and linguistically to propose that Italo might be the expression of a felt loss: a music that knows of its own unoriginality and whose value might lie in a melancholy ‘making do’.

The Locus of Italo: The Adriatic Riviera In opposition to the densely populated, metropolitan, multi-racial context that marked disco’s origins in New York City, the locus of Italo disco is for a large part semi-rural/semi-urbanised, white Adriatic riviera. Although the main record labels of Italo operated from Milan and, for a minor part,

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Rome and other cities, the long stretch from Casal Borsetti to Gabicce Mare—95 kilometres of beaches and discotheques suspended between the sea and the (industrialising) countryside—fuelled Italo as a genre culturally and economically. Novelist and cultural critic Pier Vittorio Tondelli used to call the riviera a metropoli balneare, a ‘seaside metropolis’, a definition that continues to prove useful for sociologists, urbanists, and also music historians (Pacoda 2012). A sprawl in the shape of a stripe, marked by intense brightness and intense darkness ‘like strass on the neckline of an evening dress’: Because if on the one side all of the nightlife shone in the heat of the summer fervour, on the other, all that existed was the darkness, the deep, the unknown; and that road which for kilometres and kilometres followed the Adriatic offering parties, happiness and fun, that road I had only one expression for, in the spotlight, that very stripe of pleasure marked the boundary between life and its dream, the frontier between the sparkling illusions of fun and the opaque weight of reality. (Tondelli 1985, 431)

Economically, the situation of Italo disco was one on the verge of great financial wealth, and Italy’s rapid industrialisation between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s make the time of Italo a particularly rich and contradictory time in the country’s social and cultural history. In terms of youth culture and popular music, this moment also presents itself as a hybrid moment poised between—as Tondelli puts it—‘sparkling illusions of fun and the opaque weight of reality’: on the one hand, the seductions of neo-­ liberal lifestyles, the pursuit of pleasure, the rise of the petty bourgeoisie; on the other, the ideological and social inheritance of the political battles of the 1970s, and most starkly the final rattles of Italy’s so-called years of lead, the years of widespread right- and left-wing terrorism which between the late 1960s and early 1980s produced what was later famously called ‘a low-intensity civil war’.2 Journalists earmarked this moment as the era of the riflusso verso il privato (‘reflux’ or ‘return to the private’), painting it in broad brushstrokes as a moment of exhaustion towards class struggle and towards the pursuit of political aims. The riflusso generation, or so the story goes, was tired of bombs going off in the streets and instead chose to take refuge in the new value system perpetrated by Berlusconi’s televisual empire, just nascent in those years: the accumulation of wealth, pleasure, beauty, and above all distraction. The term riflusso is important because it implies a backwards flow: the hedonism of the Italian 1980s is always inscribed in a narrative of failure and resignation more than in one

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of liberation and release. Italy at this time had the largest Communist Party in a non-Communist state, and the passage from the 1970s to the 1980s, especially in what concerns youth culture, is often depicted as the disavowal of a political project. Zooming into the Adriatic riviera more specifically (which again we are taking here as the cultural locus of Italo disco although the records were produced as well as danced to elsewhere), the thorny ideological hybridity of this moment becomes even more cogent: designed as a resort during fascism and rolling with the leisure industry ever since, the ‘parties, happiness and fun’ of the riviera were still and nevertheless embedded in Italy’s ‘reddest’ region. Here, the conspicuous consumption of Italian and European holiday-makers of the late 1970s and early 1980s coexisted at this point with a solid and stratified left-wing culture whose scene was more social barbecues and traditional popular ‘balera’ dances than cocktails and light-up floors; a Soviet fascination slowly accommodated an American one, and magazines showing pictures of Russian youths having fun at social dances, highlighting aspects of their clothes and hairstyles, overlapped, often in the same teenage bedrooms, with publications featuring rip-out posters of Simon LeBon. While I cannot delve here into the socio-cultural complexities of its spatio-temporal dimension, I hope to have given the reader a sense of how Italo disco is born in a time and space that is already intensely heterotopian, marked by a participation in different real and mythic regimes which don’t always map onto one another in a coherent fashion. We can thus liken Italo disco to Foucault’s example of the mirror as a heterotopia—an object that exists in reality but in which ‘I see myself there where I am not’ (Foucault 1984, 4)—and liken its environs to Foucault’s example of the boat. The Adriatic riviera in the 1980s functioned as ‘a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea’ (Foucault 1984, 9). Italo disco is very much the product, then, of extremely Italian historical, social, economic and cultural conditions, yet it somehow garners its Italianicity by ignoring them: Italo is largely sung in English (American), its stars have English (American) names and takes place in America—it is full of Cadillacs, sunsets, neons, Chinese restaurants, therapists, the Mexican border and other images, loci and practices that hardly existed in Italy, received from music but perhaps especially from cinema, comic strips and advertising. As others before me have argued (Fikentscher 2009;

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Magaudda 2003, 2016; Straw 2008), and as any listener of Italo expertly or instinctively knows, one of the genre’s most unique traits is its congenital outward-looking gaze, its bottom-line desire to ‘sound foreign’, its rough or naive mimicking of a one-size-fits-all ‘Americanism’ which is both functional, commercial (the original idea behind Italo was, after all, to sell records abroad and/or to not pay import tax on foreign records) and at the same time desiring, provincial (the idea that the best thing one could be in the world is American, but at the same time Italian, haunts all Italo production). As the 1980s progressed, Italo lived through a strange reversal of the heterotopian mirror, which turned 360 degrees to reveal Italy itself as the fantastic world of Italo disco: Italy as the locus of the fantasy the music describes, Italy as the imagined America the music describes. This reversal continues to this day: Italo disco is Italian, and that’s what people love about it, whether they love it ironically or innocently (although the question remains of whether it is possible to love Italo disco innocently or whether, to paraphrase Umberto Eco, one can only love Italo ironically ‘in an age of lost innocence’—we will return to this). Italo, however, was really meant to feel non-Italian: its gradual absorption into the language of Italianicity—the same language as the famous Panzani pasta advert dissected by Roland Barthes in his essay on connotation and denotation in the advertising photograph (Barthes 1964)—occurred outside of Italy. As Dario Martinelli (2014) has discussed, Italo compilations circulated and still circulate abroad without any significant iconography other than the red, white and green colours of the Italian flag or the blue of the Italian national football team. Barthes’s interest in Panzani pasta deeply takes into analysis the fact that it was not Italian; it was a French brand performing Italianicity, and decoding this Italianicity is a French kind of knowledge, made to be viewed from outside (Barthes 1964, 153). As a mirror, Italo disco deflects the Italian gaze and draws upon itself the foreign gaze: it was read as American or Anglophone/foreign/more fun at home and as Italian/foreign/more fun abroad, and therein lay and lays its dual fascination.

First Wave Italo Disco: A Culture of the Copy The question of the Panzani pasta advert matters because the term Italo disco was in itself a marketing operation—the term was allegedly coined by Bernhard Mikulski, the owner of ZYX Records, who started using it around 1977–1978 to distribute Italian records in Germany and the

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Netherlands, and gradually came into European parlance as a genre name in the early 1980s. In Italy, we know that in the time of its development the expression ‘Spaghetti Dance’ was used, which lacks the seriousness of a real genre name although it is useful in as much as (a) it points to pasta, (b) it points to the genre as a ‘copy’ (the term is modelled on Spaghetti Western films). As Claudio Simonetti of Goblin fame confessed to Bill Brewster when asked whether he collaborated with British or American musicians given all the English names on the records: No. We changed the names! It’s like the ‘60s when they shoot spaghetti westerns they just changed the names, even Sergio Leone had a different name. That’s because if we had told the people it was an Italian production nobody would trust that it was good, because no one had done it. It was very funny. Simon Pouds, for instance, is me. (Simonetti in Brewster 2008)

Indeed, both a vernacular and a musicological debate have taken place about whether there was such a thing as ‘Italo disco’ at all (Fabbri and Plastino 2014). There was, there is; in fact there were two ‘waves’ of what we could call Italo disco: a first wave, perhaps best epitomised by Goody Music’s West Indian producer and entrepreneur Jacques Fred Petrus and his collaborations with Mauro Malavasi, which we could single out as the age of the copy; then, a much more widespread second wave, characterised by the sound we would identify as Italo disco today, which we could term the age of seriality. First wave Italo is not quite yet ‘Italo’, nor is it ‘Spaghetti Dance’, and was simply labelled as ‘disco’. Projects such as La Bionda, who had a hit with “One for You, One for Me” (1978), or Jacques Fred Petrus and Mauro Malavasi’s “Walkin’ on Music” and “Fire Night Dance” still have a ‘disco’ sound that is Black or Black-inspired, soulful, more organic. Malavasi-Petrus projects under Goody Music were often recoded in Italy, then the tapes were sent to US vocalists and finally sent back to Italy to be mixed (Cataldo  Verrina 2014, 108–109). As Magaudda notes: The connection of these Italian producers with the New  York producer Jacques Fred Petrus and their experience of new clubs such as the Paradise Garage in NY; the ability to mix the Italian sense of melody and the soul attitude of black American singers. Indeed, the success of these productions has been explained as the result of combining Italian melody with American musicality, a formula as well suited to listening as to dancing. Concerning the musical form, Italo-disco brought Italian melody again to the fore in combination with the soul feeling of the black singers. (Magaudda 2003, 539)

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Traits typical of an Italian pop sound and Italian production are audible in first wave Italo, but we are still in a phase we could view as some kind of apprenticeship. The so-called Italian melodic tradition—a fluid term often used by musicologists to speak of the influence of Neapolitan folk song on twentieth-century Italian pop from fascism onwards—is undoubtedly discernible in early Italo records. But at the same time, they engage in a kind of careful counterfeiting of American disco productions, of which they copy the sound and the style, and while certain elements of discontinuity begin to emerge, across the board it is clear that a ‘formula’ has not yet been found. Drawing a parallel with the booming design and fashion industries of the time, which in the early 1980s were developing the idea of ‘Made in Italy’ as a branding operation, we could say that a certain ‘artisanal’ expertise was at work here, in which conservatoire-trained musicians brought their own to copying the ‘great masters’ of American disco: ‘for us making disco meant transforming the heritage of 1960s pop, since the melodies of “disco disco” were less memorable’ (La Bionda in Simula 2016, 67). Also like ‘Made in Italy’ fashion and design, a declaredly entrepreneurial matrix was at work, which is common to both waves. It is difficult, for obvious reasons, to get complete information about business processes of the time, but we do know from various accounts, interviews and scandals that these productions were very much motivated by commercial prospects such as making money abroad, setting up alternative distribution routes and avoiding foreign import tax; we also know that in a producer- and label boss-led genre singers and performers were frequently short-changed by exploitative contracts and meagre revenue. Nevertheless, the Italo product began to be likened to food and fashion exports by its own players, which is bizarre given that at least 90% of it is in English and everyone had English names. But in this cusp-panorama, what was ‘Italian’ was again Italianicity, the Italian style—which, again, boiled down to melodic sophistication: We have always sold melody because none of the other countries produced it—apart from the Germans, but their stuff was impossible. The British didn’t understand us at the time because we were too far ahead of them. We used to dress the melody a certain way: we dressed it in Italian taste, and Italian taste is better than anybody else’s. Indeed, people consider “I Like Chopin” a sophisticated product abroad. It took me a lifetime to make people understand that Italy isn’t only spaghetti, pizza, olive oil and mozzarella. It’s also Armani, Versace, all of these people! (Naggiar in Cataldo Verrina, 67)

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Dance music was beginning to look like a great investment: the discotheques of the 1970s in cities such as Milan, Rome and Florence were by now solid establishments, and an expansive network of architecturally flashy venues was blossoming across more provincial and coastal regions. Moving hand in hand with the tourism industry (many only worked in high season) these were businesses set up by big investments which needed to keep their musical offer fresh week on week. Many of these were still discoteche in the strict sense of the word: the manager would buy the records, the DJ would come and play them. Daniele Baldelli—who would become the star of Baia degli Angeli, where he played going up and down in a glass elevator—recounts that for his previous gig at Tabù Club he was initially taken on as a metti-dischi, a ‘record-putter-onner’, and had to ask ‘to have his pocket money increased so he could buy some new records himself’ (Zagor Treppiedi 2014). First wave Italo—epitomised by the figure of Jacques Fred Petrus—set up not only a commercial bridge but also a cultural one between US and Italian dance music, and motivated a whole world of labels to join the game. Another early example is Freddy Naggiar’s Baby Records, founded in 1974, which was already doing big business by pressing artists such Albano e Romina and pop sensation Pupo, whom Naggiar had recruited ‘like the government recruits civil servants, by placing an advert in a magazine’ (Billboard 1976). Pupo abandoned Naggiar early on over financial disputes—but Naggiar collected many of these kinds of scandals over the years. Nevertheless, he was another astute and internationally minded businessman, whose network and knowledge gave him a long-sighted vision of music as an industry; he turned to Italo around 1979–1980, and by ‘dressing the melody up’ became one of the genre’s biggest players.

Second Wave Italo Disco: The Age of Seriality Second wave Italo was something else, and it is this second wave sound that we know as Italo disco today. Martinelli has summarised its ‘particular sound’ according to five general axioms, which I will return to across the chapter: (1) ‘a rigid four-in-a-bar rhythmic pattern’; (2) ‘repetitive bass riffs’ (vs. ‘inventive, soul-derived’ ones); (3) ‘a supremacy of catchy and melodic elements’, paired with Italian-style mixing (with the voice in front); (4) ‘full access to state-of-the-art music technologies, particularly synthesisers’; (5) ‘lyrically, a tendency to write meta-songs’: ‘to address the song itself and its social functions’ (Martinelli 2014, 211–212).

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A survey of the traits Martinelli helpfully discerns, and even a superficial listen of records from the two waves, reveals how musically speaking they don’t have very much in common at all. Although it is built on first wave Italo’s cultural and commercial infrastructure, second wave Italo’s proto-­ Hi-­NRG sound is more indebted to early UK new and synth wave acts (such as Mute’s Yazoo or Depeche Mode, or The Human League). The Italo sound, in turn, successively got folded into the mid- to late 1980s 12” sound of Factory, Belgian New Beat and even EBM, and then into forms of Eurodance proper. This is unsurprising given Italo’s cultural milieu in which, as Albert One unironically notes, ‘less than half of the people understood anything about music’ (Carpani in De Iulis 2011), but many of those who did had a rock or prog musical background and new romantic aesthetic tendencies: in subcultural terms, there is a direct line between rock/prog and new wave, which passes through punk and then post-punk, skipping disco qua disco completely. Maurizio Dami aka Alexander Robotnick was a guitarist who fell in love with Kraftwerk; Giorgio Fioroni and Leonardo Pancaldi of Amin Peck met in bands playing at the Communist Party’s Festa dell’Unità festivals in the mid-1970s; Italo super-producer Roberto Turatti, who started his career as the drummer in Enrico Ruggeri’s new wave project Decibel, admits that as a rockettaro he had no intention of setting foot in a discotheque until a friend dragged him along—the fact that ‘all the girls were so clean and dressed up’ changed his mind for good (Cataldo Verrina 2014, 128). The hybrid musical landscape second wave Italo embedded itself within is also made apparent by the multitude of murkily licensed cover versions of songs which act as a filler to pre-mixed Italo LPs (or were the original Italo songs filler to the covers?) which constituted Italo’s main form of circulation beyond the discotheque: covers of tracks by Mike Oldfield, The Police, Falco, hits by Pink Floyd and even soul standards like Stand By Me, are thrown in as party fodder alongside Italo tracks by the likes of Brand Image, Valerie Doré, Styloo. On the subject of the house party, it is also worth mentioning that the target audience of such records was hugely varied, and the eclecticism of the mix is also part of a ‘something for everyone’ mainstreaming logic, able to capture all tastes and also, crucially, all age groups. Freddy Naggiar’s Baby Records explicitly aimed its Mixage and Bimbo Mix compilation series to teenagers and even children, broadcasting adverts for them in children’s TV programmes via the cartoon character Cin Ciao Lin known as ‘il cinesino’ (‘the little Chinese man’); the records carried the imprint ‘Disco TV’ on the cover, which made them

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slightly more expensive to buy, thus offsetting the cost of advertising. The use of the medium of television alongside radio is yet another marker of Italo’s commodification, which ran well beyond the audience of the discoteca: beyond those who would be consumers of music or nightlife. The explicit targeting of children, which is widespread also in the music itself (the most notable example of this is Spagna’s super-project Baby’s Gang, but we can also think of how P. Lion’s “Happy Children” speaks in the name of children, amongst others), is interesting in both commercial and aesthetic terms, and more work deserves to be done on the figure of the child as both consumer and image to be consumed in Italy’s dance culture of this time. Musically speaking—by way of Martinelli’s third axiom on melody and production—we could also classify the sweet melodies that characterise a vast strand of second wave Italo (Savage’s “Only You” is a prime example) as ‘childish’; this ‘stream’ was then inherited by a range of other Euro-musics of the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in Eastern Europe. Returning to the commercial logic we have identified as central to both waves, it is here that we witness a move from ‘copying’ or ‘mimicking’ American disco in more or less discrete productions (it might be useful to think again here of the ‘Spaghetti’ nomenclature implying a copy of an established and already coded American genre) to the seriality of the formula and even automisation: from an artisanal logic to an industrial one. In interviews gathered in Pierpaolo de Iulis’s Italo Disco Documentary (2011), Discomagic boss Severo Lombardoni explains how at the height of his career a typical day at the studio would involve making five or six records, sending up to 60 records a month to press; Paul Mazzolini (otherwise known as Gazebo) explains that the slowness of international majors—who were presumably not fully aware of the business opportunity Italo represented, due also to the nightlife and private radio industries that depended on it3—motivated the whole Italo machine to write, record, press and distribute the records independently, since they had an infrastructure that could move through the entire process in a few days. A spreadsheet circulated in the Italo disco community forum on Discogs a decade ago calculated an approximate figure of 7,000-10,000 titles released between 1982 and 1988 in Italy alone classified as Italo disco.4 This means that, as I prefigured earlier in this chapter, we can realistically imagine a production of three–four records a day: an enormous production for a single European country and even more so for a single country in a single genre.

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The ‘industrial’ mode of production of Italo has been picked up on by other commentators with fascinating outcomes. Magaudda, for example, notes that Italo precociously adopted what he terms ‘forms of postfordist flexibility’ applied to musical production (Magaudda 2016, 97). ‘Precocious’ is a key term here, for it also stresses how subsequent forms of dance music adopted such a model of production, the key aspect of which is a new centrality of the producer rather than the singer. The extreme schematisation of the form of the Italo track—with its dependable four-on-the-floor rhythm pattern cruising steadily along between 110 and 120 BPM, its modular intros and outros providing at least 30/40 seconds of naked drum machine, its verse-bridge-synthline structure in which the chorus abdicates to the melodic element and the break is taken over by the octave shift—allowed producers to rapidly whip ideas into shape, and this rapidity of the production line is central to Italo’s paradoxical inventiveness. Within this rigid structure, the producer/label boss (the two professionalities often overlapped) became a kind of Midas who could make something out of almost nothing. Cataldo  Verrina explains how Lombardoni used to listen to a few seconds of all of the demos he received, and although he did give generous advances to the tracks he immediately believed in, he would ‘generally used to take everything, and something would come out of it’ (Cataldo Verrina 2014, 224). Discomagic’s strategy was risk-taking: by flooding the market something would eventually pay for the heaps of records that would fall into oblivion, and the time and money spent on each was so meagre that it made good business sense. The centrality of the producer also brings with it a waning of authorality, or at least of identification with the pop star. A debacle famously ensued across the Italian press when it surfaced that in the case of Den Harrow the ‘singer’ was not the singer at all but a model lip-syncing to the pre-­ recorded track; but this was the case for a huge amount of Italo acts, and it is interesting to note producers often use the verb interpretare to speak of singer/models, which is the Italian verb used in acting to mean ‘playing a role’: Stefano Zandri ‘played’ Den Harrow. With this comes the fact that when we listen to Italo, we don’t really know who we’re listening to: the romantic presumption of the pop song as autobiographical to he/she who sings it is effectively undermined across the genre, although judging on the fandom of icons such as Den Harrow (which is why the scandal was important in the first place) or Gazebo (for whom Naggiar pushed a fake biography according to which he was the son of a Lebanese diplomat), it was also quite happily ignored by its listeners. Presumably the Italo

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consumer was quite content in a logic of consumption, and the ‘reality’ of the image mattered less than what Marx would have called the ‘fetish-­ character’ of the all-consuming consumable good. Philippe Birgy delves even deeper into Italo’s automisation, charting how progressive technological democratisation and miniaturisation— which he richly intercepts in his discussion in the figure of the preset and later, in the rise of MIDI—both formed the backbone and provoked the aesthetic disqualification of Italo as a genre (Birgy 2018, 17). According to Birgy, alongside its commercial logic, it is Italo’s technological landscape that is responsible for its serial sound and progressive jettisoning of the ‘“spiritual essence” of disco (its constitutive “soul” [in English] element)’, and of its “human expressiveness”’ (Birgy 2018, 16). The clock surpasses the human somehow: we always know what comes next, and therein lies the genre’s capacity to grant satisfaction, to provide gratification. We might venture that Adorno and Horkheimer’s nightmare of mass industrial culture is fully realised in Italo disco—their 1944 description fits our discussions over the past few pages like a glove. I quote at length: This dreamless art for the people fulfils the dreamy idealism which went too far for idealism in its critical form. Not only do hit songs, stars, and soap operas conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, but the specific content of productions, the seemingly variable element, is itself derived from those types. The details become interchangeable. The brief interval sequence which has proved catchy in a hit song, (…) [is] like all the details, [a] ready-made cliché, to be used here and there as desired and always completely defined by the purpose [it] serves within the schema. To confirm the schema by acting as its constituents is their sole raison d’être. (…) [I]n light music the prepared ear can always guess the continuation after the first bars of a hit song and is gratified when it actually occurs. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 42)

One man’s nightmare is another man’s dream, and our current pop landscape marked by ready-made digital production and autotuned voices— which nevertheless represents a revolutionary democratisation of art and a rich pluralisation of musical expression—would surely be deemed even more horrifying if seen from the 1940s. Within our fully industrialised culture however Italo continues to provide something special in its plasticity, and is not only taken seriously but cherished by its fans. As I move towards the end of this chapter, my last reflections are devoted to attempting to understand how Italo disco nevertheless extends its grip

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onto listeners and dancers, ask questions about its mass affective charge and look briefly at the Italo lyric as a key to the genre’s sentimental unoriginality.

Conclusion: The Italo Lyric and Impossible Originality Let us return to the humorous but very serious idea of the ‘B-movie of the entire disco genre’: working from artisanal to industrial, from craft to automisation, we have established across this chapter that all Italo, as a genre, is undoubtedly derivative. At the same time though, we could also posit that Italo disco is also all original. As a mature genre—by 1984/1985— Italo copies nothing other than itself, and every Italo record sounds like every other Italo record: it sounds unmistakably Italo. As a form of ‘functional’ dance music, the repetition of the formula and modularity of the tracks is no bad thing, and indeed is what determined its continuous success until it ran its course as a product in the ever-evolving marketplace of dance music and dancing trends. As a form of pop music (because Italo is both Mr. Flagio’s “Take a Chance” and Gazebo’s “I Like Chopin”, simultaneously a music for adult encounters in lascivious discotheques and for starry-eyed dreaming in a teenager’s bedroom), its formulaic nature gets judged by a different measure: atmosphere without words, words without meaning, sex without body, body without organs. Birgy again notes: Although it has been so often described as cheap music, in bad taste, without presence, dematerialised, incorrigibly immature and obsolete due to the immoderate borrowing it made of the tropes of certain obsolete genres (the sentimental song, the variety song), it nevertheless provided recorded musical material on which the activity of night clubs depended. (Birgy 2018, 18)

Birgy closes his reflections by stating that whatever aesthetic judgement one might impose upon it, Italo has at least the merit of having held the fort, keeping a whole nighttime economy going while ‘waiting for something better’ (Birgy 2018, 18). It’s a seductive hypothesis—however I am mindful of the fact that two forms of judgement overlap here (the dance music vs. the pop music view I describe above), as well as of the fact that the same critics of Italo disco probably wouldn’t locate the ‘something better’ in successive forms of Italian dance music, although ‘better’ is of course a fluid term. Above all though, I am more interested in

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interrogating the enduring and widespread fascination towards Italo Disco by asking questions now about the affective world it speaks of and to. If despite having been continuously shunned as ‘disposable music’ Italo Disco continues to be hugely popular, shouldn’t we wonder if its appeal lies precisely in its disposability? Can we theorise something like a productive loss of aura here, or what philosopher Mario Perniola after Benjamin calls ‘the sex appeal of the inorganic’ (Benjamin 1935a; Perniola 2004a, b)? In other words, can we say that Italo’s aura is garnered because of and not in spite of it being very much a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin 1935b)? In an essay about the pumped village folk euro-electro of Disco Polo, Daphne Carr calls Italo ‘the first truly popular form of European Dance Music’ and retrieves a now lost piece by Alex Nikitin circulated in the highly vernacular space of a Europop internet forum circa 2000: ‘Italo singles always sounded like they were dead cheap. I think this is their appeal (…) The banality of them makes them strangely moving, somehow’ (Nikitin in Carr 2007, 274).5 We could, and perhaps should, read Birgy’s previously quoted loss of ‘the spiritual essence of disco’ in Italo, which he reformulates as both ‘constitutive soul element’ and ‘human expressiveness’, as a loss of Blackness, or what Martin Monro has discussed as technologically enabled but physically, socially and culturally experienced ‘decoupling of rhythm and race’ in dance music: Historically, rhythmic performances in the Caribbean and the broader Americas have been future-oriented means of imagining a different, better time to come, and if we see in the present a decoupling of rhythm and race, it is perhaps at least in part because history itself has lost its own forward momentum, its own rhythm of change and renewal. (Monro 2016, 14)

With this ‘decoupling’ comes, perhaps most crucially, the loss of disco’s foundational discourse, depicted by Tim Lawrence as ‘countercultural’ in the deepest sense and synthesised by Lawrence ‘as rupture through rapture’ (Lawrence 2003, 52). The loss, that is, of the possibility of hedonistic liberation from systematic policing and oppression, the invention of other forms of community, the reaffirmation of subaltern solidarity in the face of capitalist modes of economic and social control, the centrality of pleasure as a value, the spatial dimension of the discotheque and the temporal dimension of the night as one of improvisation and—hopefully— rehearsal of joyful modes of living otherwise. As Daphne Brooks and

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P.A.  Skantze have put it in a recent conversation about what they term ‘sonic encouragement’ in the wake of Black Lives Matters, we could categorise disco’s political élan as ‘ludic solidarity in the catastrophic: that’s the Black radical tradition, right there’ (Brooks and Skantze 2021). This establishment of an alternative value system and the collective labour entailed by its realisation carries with it a set of intents which Tim Lawrence singles out in the epilogue of this volume as also mapping onto the project of the Italian autonomia movement of 1977, which provides a parallel to disco as a social and political project. Antonio Negri notes that: In Italy—the only country in Europe—the [1977] movement affirmed itself as a social force for a long time, developing a potential which in time entirely demonstrated the meaning on the historical innovations of 1968. It carried an absolutely innovative strength. In 1968, other than words, all that was left of the deepening of cultural criticism, the modification of systems of life, the constitution of communities was a series of often ineffective declarations of intent: but all of this became reality in 1977. (Negri 1997, 632)

In asking questions about the movement’s demise, Negri continues: ‘we lost because of a lack of intellectual extremism. Whereas our adversaries were certainly extremist in how they used new productive possibilities to isolate us, marginalise us and destroy us’ (Negri 1997, 634). The theorisation of Italo as a dance culture in the wake of the autonomia movement is beyond the scope of my work here—although I do invite the reader to think back to the socio-cultural backdrop I sketched out at the start of this chapter as well as to move to Tim Lawrence’s reflections on the parallels between disco and autonomia at the end of this very volume. However I make this movement from technological and racial decoupling and from the New York dance floor to the experimental Italian Left to propose that more than a straight ‘aspirational’ music of newly found post-ideological pleasure, we might intercept the moving banality of Italo in the performance of a kind of felt loss: of body, of discourse, of community, of possibility; and its rigid rhythm, its synth-lines and, importantly, its faux-English lyrics as the modes by which this loss if made to be felt. Indeed, the Italo lyric is the one axiom of Martinelli’s which I have not explored so far and also the element of Italo disco which, in Adornian terms, supplies ‘the specific content of productions, the seemingly variable element’ vis-à-vis the almost wholly schematic, automised, modular ‘rigid invariants’ of the music. It is true that a great part of Italo lyrics reflects a

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tendency towards the meta-song in which the song ‘talks about itself and its social functions’ such as ‘invitations to dance, arguments in favor of the song’s rhythm, descriptions of the kinetic abilities of certain musical instrument, etc.’ (Martinelli 2014, 212), and key tracks in genre’s history such as Doctor’s Cat’s “Feel the Drive”, Fun Fun’s “Happy Station” and B.W.H’s “Livin’ Up” fall neatly into this description. But it is also true that, for the most part, a particular tonal quality is at work in how the Italo song talks about itself, and this is desiring and dejected in equal parts, marked by some kind of longing but also by some kind of ache. We might single out three principal thematic paradigms: (1) a spatial paradigm, about the sensorial space of the urban night and the discoteca, as well as various (foreign) geographical spaces; (2) romantic relationships, usually complex and unfulfilled because of either some kind of broken promise or looming threat; (3) downright social commentary, and pessimist and/or existentialist invitations to dance. 1. Spatial Italo We might group here songs about the dimension of night: Diego’s “Walk in The Night”, Brian Ice’s “Talking to The Night”, Valerie Doré’s “The Night”, Giusy Dej’s “Walking in the Night”, Mike Cannon’s “Voices in the Dark” but equally other lighting conditions such as Peter Richard’s “Walking in the Neon” or Limit Eccitation’s “In The Dark”, amongst many others. The night is varyingly presented as space of threat and mystery and of romantic (im)possibility and/or self-realisation: Giusy Dej’s walking is ‘walking far from you’, Mike Cannon remembers when he spent his time alone playing in the dark until ‘one night in the bar I saw something spark’, and Limit Eccitation provide the haunting chorus ‘In the dark/screaming to’. Indeed, RAF’s “Self Control” should also be mentioned here: ‘In the day nothing matters/It’s the night, time that flatters’. We can also add to this category tracks such as Ryan Paris’s “Dolce Vita”, Sandy Marton’s “People from Ibiza”, Helen’s “Zanzibar” or indeed Crusin’ Gang and Baby’s Gang’s respective songs titled “America”. In general the Italo lyric does not take place in the foreign location: it either wants to go there (Baby’s Gang want to go to the ‘wonderland’ of America, lamenting ‘I can see you only on my TV’) or is caught up in a game of make believe (Ryan Paris proclaims to his lover ‘we’re living like in la dolce vita’, and as

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the track progresses we realise this has a fast-approaching expiry date; Helen’s song alternates knowingly between situating its erotic action ‘deep down in Africa’ and proclaiming that ‘it’s just like Africa’). . Romantic Italo 2 Celebratory love songs do occur in Italo: Lamé’s “You’ve Got the Night” and, despite its title, M&G’s “When I Let You Down” are both songs of fulfilled and fulfilling romantic relationships (indeed, the fact of ‘letting down’ seems to be a good thing in the latter: ‘When I let you down inside/My soul will be your home/My heart will be your dome /Take me high/Take me baby/When I let you down). But most part love is unrequited, impossible or simply ‘difficult’ in the Italo lyric. In general, when the lyric is about love, it is also conscious of its horizon: the lover’s potential rejection haunts classics such as Savage’s “Only You” (‘Don’t push me aside/don’t leave me to die’), Gazebo’s “Masterpiece”, with its whiffs of 1950s Hollywood glamour (‘We had a tango too much/you said you’d keep in touch’), or “Do You” by Duke Lake (whose lover ‘breaks his lines of fantasy’: ‘But you won’t listen, won’t listen any late/There’s something missing, and now you just can’t wait’). Other times, some kind of vague catastrophe is on the cards: in Sensitive’s “Driving” an encounter ‘on the road’ with a ‘blondie blondie chick’ ends in the ominous ‘night is coming/all is fine if you/ got something to find’; in Fancy’s “Bolero” the lovers are ‘strangers down a lonely lane/driftwood on the stream of life’. More modern couple-type problems are the topic of Brand Image’s “Are You Loving?”, where a dispute about the evening’s plans ends in a questioning of the whole relationship (‘Weren’t you supposed to go to the discotheque and shake your body all the time/I would be glad to stay inside my living room, the sunny things far from my mind’); Ken Laszlo’s “Hey Hey Guy Guy”, one of the few openly gay Italo tracks, begins with a phone conversation between Ken and what must be a male prostitute. When asked ‘Yeah, hey guy, tell me about your manicure’, Ken simply answers: ‘I love you and I feel the groove’; finally, the two conclude that ‘everything is the same as all’.

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3. ‘Social’ and existentialist Italo Many of Italo’s invitations to dance exist on a backdrop of existential dread: Paul Paul’s “Good Times” are so necessary because ‘feelings can die’ and ‘illusions die without feeling’, and their “Burn On The Flames” laments ‘I’m waiting too much/I’m wasting my time/ Looking at shadows on the wall of my room’; Fokewulf 190’s “Body Heat” comes from a place in which ‘in the centre of the city/in the darkness of the night/there is no light’. Thematically ‘social’ tracks, usually dystopian, can also be inserted in this category: examples might be Den Harrow’s “Future Brain”, replete with a music video showing babies being given computer brains (‘It’s insane to program everybody’s love/But you’re to blame ‘cause you don’t know how stupid you are’) and Alex Valentini’s tale of pointless love in “Beautiful Life”, which charts a progressive disillusionment ending in misanthropy in which he falls in love, gets drunk and ‘fall asleep with a whole lot of griefs’. In the hugely successful “Vamos a la Playa” by Righeira (a La Bionda production), the seaside the listener is beckoned to is a place where ‘the bomb has exploded’ and ‘the radioactive wind messes one’s hair up’ and instead of ‘stinking fish’ there’s only ‘fluorescent water’.6 A special place here should be reserved to P.  Lion’s “Happy Children”, amongst the Italo canon’s sweetest, most famous and most ominous tracks. In the track P. Lion describes a world marked only by war, money and work, in which ‘the life runs without happiness’: ‘Everyday dreams/To go to a better life/But they remain only dreams’. The chorus recites: ‘You are the children/Your life will be very hard/You are the children/You’re singing every day’ before a playful, jolly saxophone seeps in. Of course these categories are fluid and overlap; but what emerges is that the most forcefully ‘meta song’ aspect of the Italo lyric is that it seems to know about the social and cultural world it inhabits and about its role within it: the Italo lyric knows about its own commodification, seriality, technological dependence, unoriginality, disposability. Two tracks of Gazebo’s are particularly interesting in this regard. In “Love in Your Eyes” the synthesiser has to compete with Gazebo’s lover, whose screams stop him from hearing the monitor, and a love story is only just a question of ‘input/output’: ‘You are just a damn Sequencer/Moving to the beat/Living with a synthesizer/Cold as a repeat’. The closing track on Gazebo’s album,

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surprisingly entitled “Gimmick!”, sees Mazzolini in crisis trying to finish a song for a market-driven label that wants ‘A gimmick here/And a gimmick up there/Just like a painting rule’. At the end he speaks the words ‘Well, this is my demo, I hope you like my songs …’. Just like a painting rule, the gimmick-character of the Italo track leaves no space for ego nor genius, adhering strictly to a predetermined representative and sonic order. The song is a self-propagating unit of signification, a ready-made, flat-packed, modular and adaptable to the context. Finally we should consider the single most ‘original’ aspect of the Italo lyric, namely the fact that it is for the most part in the English language, of which it makes a particular use. English is not the language Italo is made or even thought in, but it is the language it is performed in, consumed in and thus also felt in. This is crucial, because it is felt ‘as (an) other’, that is, in a language that its makers don’t really speak and that its dancers, for the most part certainly, don’t really understand. As such, Italo lyrics—so long and laborious, so full of images and tropes, so over-­ written—reveal themselves as also ultimately mute, since they can only very partially communicate in the world in which they come into being. English is essential to Italo and what we could term ‘Italo English’ is essential to Italo sounding like itself. On the one hand, it is a repository of endlessly creative subaltern linguistic invention, a kind of pidgin which might even bring with it some kind of political function: it invites itself to a globalised table. But at the same time, Italo English is the genre’s trait that most prominently shows up the cheapness of the copy, its position as wannabe, the tourist who sooner or later will have to go back home. Again the paradoxical situation here is that the Italo lyric develops its original trait by its being deeply unoriginal: as if the Italo track knew originality was no longer a possibility. Returning to Umberto Eco’s well-known adage of the question of irony in the age of lost innocence, which I posited at the beginning of this chapter, Italo might indeed be like the lover who wants to tell his cultivated other half he loved her madly but can’t ‘because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland’. Eco continues: Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. (Eco 1994, 67–68)

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The ‘all the same’ might be the affective dimension of Italo disco, what Dick Hebdige called ‘making do with the nonetheless’ typical of the post-­ utopian 1980s (Hebdige 2006, 239). As a dance culture now and then, Italo might be seen to overall provide a kind of comfort: it may not mean anything; it may already have been done better by someone else but it does the work. A dreamless art for dreamless people which just about contains enough to continue to dream, continue to love, continue to dance.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise stated all translations are henceforth the author’s own. 2. This definition was given by Giovanni Pellegrini, the president of a parliamentary commission instituted years later to investigate the events of the 1970s. The years of lead include a period that begins with a series of episodes in Rome and Milan between 1968 and 1969 (the most prominent being the fascist bomb attack in Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969) and ending with another fascist bomb attack on Bologna station on August 2nd 1980, which killed 85 people. While ‘black’ terrorism is responsible for most of the deaths of the years of lead, ‘red’ terrorism was also widespread; the most well-known organisation were the Red Brigades, who kidnapped and consequently executed ‘by popular tribunal’ the Demochristian President of the Republic Aldo Moro in May 1978. 3. The Italian radio landscape of the late 1970s and early 1980s is also fundamental to the rise of Italo Disco as a genre and as a business. Private radios, which have always been called radio libere, ‘free radios’, arose in the mid-­1970s after a liberalisation act passed in 1974 which curtailed RAI’s state monopoly on the airwaves, effectively opening up FM frequencies to private broadcasting. Hyperlocal but with names often sporting the terms ‘international’, ‘world’ or ‘sound’ (in English), these were funded by local advertising, their main feature was the phone-in, and they devoted enormous amounts of airwave to Italo records. It is worth also contextually mentioning that the precedent of the ‘free radios’ brought about another act which, in 1976, extended the liberalisation of the airwaves to the sphere of local television; this is crucial to the story of Berlusconi as tycoon, whose first venture was the hyperlocal Telemilano in 1978. 4. The spreadsheet is attributed to Discogs user Leon Pronk and its data is discussed under the ‘Italo Disco statistics & price trend research’ thread of the Italo Disco forum: https://www.discogs.com/group/ thread/536543#5301550 5. In view of Carr’s chapter we might annexe to this discussion Italo’s enduring influence and popularity in Eastern Europe, which has persisted con-

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tinuously in the time before Italo became appreciated in Western Europe and in the States. As Carr herself has pointed out, it is significant that Disco Polo’s first far-reaching hit was Top One’s “Ciao Italia”; released in 1989, it tells the story of a holiday romance in Italy and return to Poland, the ‘wind in the green hills’ communicating at a distance with ‘a pebble on the beach’. While the topic of how Italy is configured both ironically and unironically in Eastern European musics subsequent to Italo disco (a topic inaugurated by Martinelli’s previously cited work) deserves discussion beyond the scope of this chapter, we might see phenomena such as “Ciao Italia” as a third 360-degree swing of the heterotopian mirror, in which once again the image of Italianicity is refracted and made a locus of escapism ‘within and without’. In addition to this, at the time of writing, I feel it is important to at least mention popular Russian TV show Vec ̌ernij Urgant’s 2021 new year celebration: entitled Ciao 2020!, the programme was staged as a faux-Italian disco TV show of the 1970s/1980s featuring contemporary Russian hits re-arranged in Italo style and sung in semi-sensical Italian. The variety show as a whole, performed entirely in pidgin Italian, attests to an existing mainstream idiom and to a continuing interest and identification, though satirical, with Italo disco as a cultural object in Eastern Europe. 6. The lyrics, written by Carmelo La Bionda with Stefano Righi, are as follows: ‘Vamos a la playa/ la bomba estalló/ las radiaciones tuestan y matizan de azul. / Vamos a la playa, oh oh oh oh oh… / Vamos a la playa/ todos con sombrero. /El viento radiactivo/ despeina los cabellos./ Vamos a la playa, oh oh oh oh oh… / Vamos a la playa /al fin el mar es limpio./No más peces hediondos/ sino agua fluorescente./Vamos a la playa, oh oh oh oh oh…’

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 2002 (1944). The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, 94–136. Trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977 (1964). Rhetoric of the Image. In Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath, 32–51. London: Fontana. Benjamin, Walter. 1999 (1935a). ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (Exposé of 1935). In The Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann, ed. Trans. H. Eiland and K.  McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2008 (1935b). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Trans. J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin. Billboard. 1976. International Briefs. February 7. https://worldradiohistory. com/Archive-­All-­Music/Billboard/70s/1976/Billboard%201976-­02-­07a. pdf. Accessed 13 April 2021.

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Birgy, Philippe. 2018. “ZYX music”. Les dérives continentales de l’italo disco. Volume! 15 (1): 5–21. Brewster, Bill. 2008. Claudio Simonetti interview. https://billbrewster.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/claudio-­simonetti-­interview/. Accessed 13 April 2021. Brooks, Daphne, and P.A.  Skantze 2021. ‘LMYE Salon #4: Daphne Brooks & P.A.  Skantze—A Playlist for Encouragement’ (podcast). In Radosavljević, Duška; Pitrolo, Flora; Bano, Tim. Auralia. Space, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. https://www.auralia.space/salon4-­daphnebrooks-­paskantze. Accessed 13 April 2021. Carr, Daphne. 2007. Dancing, Democracy and Kitsch: Poland’s Disco-Polo. In Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music, ed. Eric Weisbard, 272–285. Durham: Duke University Press. Cataldo Verrina, Francesco. 2014. Italo Disco Story. Il dominio italiano sulla dance culture degli anni ’80. Perugia: Kriterius/ADV. Eco, Umberto. 1994. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Minerva. Fabbri, Franco, and Goffredo Plastino. 2014. An Egg of Columbus: How Can Italian Popular Music Studies Stand on Their Own? In Made in Italy: Studies in Popular Music, ed. Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino, 1–13. London: Routeldge. Fikentscher, Kai. 2009. What is Italian in Italo disco? In Proceedings of the 13th Biennial International IASPM Conference, 196–202. Foucault, Michel. 1984 (1967). Of Other Spaces. March 1967. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité 5: 46–49. Harrison, Angus. 2015. A Bullshitter’s Guide To Italo-Disco. Noisey (Vice Media) July 10. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ez7nbn/a-­bullshitter39s-­guide-­ to-­italo-­disco-­us-­translation. Accessed 12 April 2021. Hebdige, Dick. 2006. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London: Routledge. Lawrence, Tim. 2003. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Culture 1970–1979. Durham: Duke. ———. 2021. Decolonising Disco: Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco. In Disco Heterotopias and Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, ed. Flora Pitrolo and Marko Zubak. London: Palgrave. Magaudda, Paolo. 2003. Disco, House and Techno: rethinking the local and the global in Italian Electronic Music. In 12th Biennial IASPM- International Conference Montreal 2003 Proceedings, 535–551. ———. 2016. Un gioco di “specchi culturali”: popular music, italianità e la circolazione transnazionale dell’italodisco. Cinergie uscita 9: 94–102. Martinelli, Dario. 2014. “Lasciatemi cantare” and Other Diseases. Italian Popular Music, as Represented Abroad. In Made in Italy. Studies in Popular Music, ed. Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino, 209–220. London: Routledge.

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Monro, Martin. 2016. “Who Stole the Soul?” Rhythm and Race in the Digital Age. In sx archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis Issue (1), June. International Small Axe Project. http://archipelagosjournal.org/issue01/ munro-­soul.html. Accessed 13 April 2021. Negri, Antonio. 1997 (1988). La Sconfitta del ’77. In L’Orda d’Oro 1968–1977: la grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed esistenziale, ed., Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni. Milan: Feltrinelli. Pacoda, Pierfrancesco. 2012. Riviera Club Culture: la Scena Dance nella Metropoli Balneare. Rimini: NdA. Perniola, Mario. 2004a. Art and its Shadow. Trans. Massimo Verdicchio. London: Continuum. ———. 2004b. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic. Trans. Massimo Verdicchio. London: Continuum. Simula, Carlo. 2016. Disco! Intervista a Carmelo La Bionda. In Raro! Disco! https://discosegreta.it/wp-­content/uploads/2016/06/disco-­La-­bionda-­ intervista-­raro.pdf. Accessed 13 April 2021. Straw, Will. 2008. Music from the Wrong Place: On the Italianicity of Quebec Disco. Criticism 50 (1): 113–131. Tondelli, Pier Vittorio. 1985. Rimini. Milan: Bompiani. Zagor Treppiedi, Emanuele. 2014. Daniele Baldelli. Dal “metti-dischi” al dj come lo intendiamo oggi. Interview with Daniele Baldelli for Notte Italiana. http:// www.notteitaliana.eu/persone/daniele-­baldelli-­baia-­imperiale/. Accessed 13 April 2021.

Discography Alex Valentini. 1985. Beautiful Life. International RAI Records. B.W.H. 1983. Livin’ Up/Stop. House of Music. Baby’s Gang. 1985. America. Memory Records. Brand Image. 1983. Are You Loving?. Il Discotto Productions. Brian Ice. 1985. Talking to The Night. Memory Records. Crusin’ Gang. 1985. America. Cruisin’ Records. Den Harrow. 1985. Future Brain. Baby Records. Diego. 1983. Walk in The Night. Memory Records. Doctor’s Cat. 1983. Feel the Drive. Il Discotto Productions. Duke Lake. 1983. Do You. Memory Records. Fancy. 1985. Bolero. Metronome. Fokewulf 190. 1984. Body Heat. Market Records. Fun Fun. 1983. Happy Station. X-Energy Records. Gazebo. 1982. Masterpiece. Best Record. ———. 1983a. I Like Chopin. Baby Records. ———. 1983b. Masterpiece (LP Album). Baby Records.

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Giusy Dej. Unknown Year. Walking in the Night. Disco In/Durium. Helen. 1985. Zanzibar. Discomagic. Ken Laszlo. 1984. Hey Hey Guy Guy. Memory Records. La Bionda. 1978. One for You One for Me. Baby Records. Lamé. 1985. You’ve Got the Night. Golden Sound. Limit Eccitation. 1987. In The Dark. Technology/Discomagic. M & G. 1986. When I Let You Down. Sensation Records. Mike Cannon. 1983. Voices in the Dark. Memory Records. Mr. Flagio. 1983. Take a Chance. Squish. P. Lion. 1983. Happy Children. American Disco Paul Paul. 1983. Good Times. Discomagic. ———. 1985. Burn on The Flames. Market Records. Peter Jacques Band. 1978a. Fire Night Dance. Goody Music Records. ———. 1978b. Walkin’ on Music. Goody Music Records. Peter Richard. 1985. Walking in the Neon. Good Vibes. RAF. 1984. Self Control. Carrere. Righeira. 1983. Vamos a La Playa. Compagnia Generale Del Disco. Ryan Paris. 1983. Dolce Vita. Discomagic. Sandy Marton. 1984. People from Ibiza. Ibiza Records. Savage. 1984. Only You. Discomagic. Sensitive. 1984. Driving. Gong Records. Top One. 1990. No Disco No. 1. Caston. Valerie Doré. 1984. The Night. Merak Records.

Filmography De Iulis, Pierpaolo (Dir.). 2011. Italo Disco Documentary. Ascoli Piceno: Rave Up Multimedia. Urgant, Ivan et al (Dirs.). 2020. Vec ̌ernij Urgant: Ciao 2020! Moscow: Pervyj kanal.

Japanese Disco as Pseudo-International Music Yusuke Wajima

Introduction Compared to other foreign music genres such as jazz, rock, and hip-hop, disco music in Japan seems to have a striking and unique localised character. For example, disco tunes such as Boney M’s “Bahama Mama” (1979) and Yoko Oginome’s “Dancing Hero” (1985), a cover of Angie Gold’s Hi-NRG hit “Eat You Up”, have been enjoyed across the country during the bon dance festival in summer, a community-based traditional ritual centred around welcoming and celebrating the spirit of ancestors. Many kindergarten and primary school children have danced to the German act Dschinghis Khan’s homonymous song, and to Hideki Saijo’s cover of Village People’s “Young Man (Y.M.C.A.)” (1979)—oblivious to its status as a gay anthem—as a recreational activity on their sports days. No other foreign music has been accepted into these local and vernacular settings. However, unlike other imported musical genres in Japan, disco music has received scarce serious critical attention, and very few exhaustive record

Y. Wajima (*) Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_5

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guides or musician biographies are available. All in all, while disco music in Japan has enjoyed surprisingly widespread local popularity, it lacks the critical acclaim and the sense of authenticity that other foreign music genres enjoy. The aim of this chapter is to examine this apparent discrepancy, focusing on the historical and industrial contexts of disco culture in Japan, and taking two types of disco records as examples: the first group are disco records produced in Japan that were promoted and sold as if they were imported, and the second comprises imported disco records whose popularity was limited in Japan. I call these records ‘pseudo-international’ because although they were accepted as ‘international’ music by the Japanese audience, their status as ‘international’ music was actually only valid in Japan. By doing so, I not only add another account of the global diffusion of disco, but also offer a new viewpoint on the relationship between ‘foreign/international’ (yogaku) and ‘domestic/national’ (hogaku) music. I also address the related issues of authenticity and localisation that have characterised the narrative of popular music history in Japan. Most scholarly works on Japanese popular music have focused on the local reception of ‘foreign’ music, which has mostly been ‘Western’ music. Although English texts are limited, a substantial number of academic monographs and articles have been written on the Japanese reception of diverse music styles, from jazz (Atkins 2001), rock (Bourdaghs 2012), and hip-hop (Condry 2006) to reggae (Sterling 2010), salsa (Hosokawa 1999), tango (Asaba 2017), and Andean music (Bigenho 2012). In each of these cases, a strikingly similar process of reception is found (Wajima 2015b): a given musical style is introduced by a small group of aficionados, most of whom are highly educated, and a small number of whom occasionally become professional critics. Their opinions are frequently based on foreign literature, and often precede the importation of recorded music and live performances; they seek to aesthetically and intellectually ‘correct’ the understanding of music with culturally and geographically distant origins. These aficionados often act as mentors of musicians or as leading musicians who are often simultaneously curators and critics. They are concerned with addressing difficult questions about how Japanese people can appreciate and practice music of ‘distant’ origins (Bigenho 2012). Such a reception, which is largely based on written texts, often produces an attitude of devotion. It also almost inevitably generates a romanticised view of ‘foreign’ music that essentialises the difference

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between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’. Such a serious, self-reflexive, or even self-critical attitude to any ‘foreign’ music—whether it is Beethoven and Wagner from the nineteenth century or the techno and dubstep of today— is so common that it seems to be the most defining feature in modern and contemporary Japanese music criticism (Wajima 2015b, Minamida 2019). In contrast, I raise two points here concerning the relationship between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ music in Japan, taking ‘pseudo-international’ disco as an example. First, the spread of foreign music in Japan has been strongly conditioned by the availability of recorded music in the foreign music sections of the domestic record companies that formed oligopolies in local markets. These companies were the gatekeepers before large-scale international retail stores such as Tower Records and HMV penetrated the local market and major multinational record companies absorbed domestic companies in the 1990s. For those gatekeepers, ‘foreign music’ was principally a commodity aimed solely at the Japanese market, and thus it does not necessarily accurately reflect international trends. This led to the establishment of distinct cultures of foreign music that were relevant only in Japan. A well-known example of this has been the so-called big in Japan phenomenon (Lynskey 2010), referring to musicians who are hugely popular in Japan but not in other countries, the most remarkable examples include rock bands such as the Ventures, Cheap Trick, and Mr. Big. As I discuss in this chapter, Japanese disco had many ‘big in Japan’ (or even ‘only in Japan’) records/artists alongside those who ‘faked’ a foreign origin even though they were really made in Japan. In addition, a genre called Eurobeat, which would become the most popular style in Japanese disco culture in the mid- to late 1980s, a period often referred to as the second disco boom in Japan following the first boom in the late 1970s, can be seen as a specific case of a genre itself becoming ‘big in Japan’ (Wajima 2015a).1 In Japanese disco culture, several instances of ‘pseudo-international’ music—a term meaning either domestic productions faking foreign music or foreign music accepted only in Japan—are to be found. Indeed, the phenomenon interests disco music more than other genres such as jazz, rock, folk, or hip-hop, arguably due to the disco audience’s relative lack of interest in the intellectual pursuit of authenticity in the genre and their acceptance (or even enjoyment) of its hybridity and artificiality. In this chapter, I analyse this characteristic of Japanese disco not as a clue to inauthenticity, but as a product of the formative process of Japanese popular music culture in the 1970s and 1980s, a period when the dichotomy of

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the foreign and the domestic was questioned, challenged, and rearticulated. To a certain degree, these features of Japanese disco in the 1970s and 1980s might be related to the general characteristics of the genre itself. As it is most closely related to dancing and socialising, disco music does not fit contemplative listening patterns, and critics and fans of allegedly more ‘serious’ genres (most notably rock) have expressed disdainful opinions of disco as vulgar and musically simplistic. On the other hand, disco fans do not generally care about critics and in actual fact these specificities seem to apply to dance music as a whole and not exclusively to disco. However, the Japanese reception of the electronic dance music of the 1990s renamed ‘club music’ rather than ‘disco’, followed a more conventional pattern that focused on authenticity as derived from the place of ‘origin’, and was marked by sophisticated musical criticism from those with privileged access to certain musical scenes in the West—experiences that would often lead to subcultural elitism (see, most notably, Noda 2001). Therefore, the striking hybridity and ambiguity between the foreign and the domestic, and between the subcultural and the commercial, at play in Japanese disco of the 1970s and 1980s should arguably be considered in its own light. Thus, in this chapter, I elucidate some of the contexts that made Japanese disco a hybrid and ambiguous phenomenon, oscillating between the foreign and the domestic, by focusing on the cultural role of the music industry, or ‘the culture of production’ as popular music scholar Keith Negus put it (Negus 1999), to help to form specific youth subcultures. Thus, this chapter hypothesises that the disco records produced in the 1970s and 1980s in Japan significantly changed (and perhaps even overthrew) the conventional distinction between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ popular music, and challenged the supremacy of the former. This anticipated the structural shift in Japanese popular music which later occurred in the 1990s, where ‘J-pop’—the neologism referring to ‘highly Westernised’ pop (Ugaya 2005)—became an inclusive term for mainstream popular songs produced in Japan, replacing the older Japanese word ‘Kayokyoku’, and the allegedly highly Westernised domestic productions that overwhelmed foreign music both in commercial and ideological terms. I also show how highly localised dancing styles were established in close relation to Japanese disco, and that they intermittently reappeared even after the decline of disco culture per se.

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An Early History of Disco in Japan First, I should provide some background and summarise the historical and geographic characteristics of discotheques in Japan. The first venue, suitably named Discotheque, was opened in 1965 by a renowned veteran dance teacher, Saburo Nakagawa, which suggests that it was introduced and accepted as a conventional studio and hall for social dancing rather than as a nightclub (Nakagawa 1977). By the early 1970s, two Tokyo city districts began to characterise disco culture: Shinjuku and Roppongi. Shinjuku is still a popular entertainment district for young people, especially students, and it was regarded as the capital of counterculture and the student movement in the 1960s. The first discotheque in the area is said to have opened in 1966: The Other started as a music cafe that specialised in R&B but soon set up a dance floor for customers.2 Each cafe had a specific musical orientation and a specialist foreign genre, ranging from classical, tango, and jazz, to rock, and such cafes were indispensable sources of foreign music knowledge and music taste-establishers for young Japanese people. While discos were found almost everywhere near universities and colleges, the Shinjuku area had a much more diverse and popular clientele; located alongside Waseda University, one of the most famous and large private universities in Japan, it had hosted a black market in the early post-­ war period and was a prostitution zone until the end of 1950s. From the mid-1970s onwards, many discotheques began to attract teenage customers—who were often regarded as delinquents—with their inexpensive admission fees, often including free (but extremely low-quality) food and drinks. It is noteworthy that in these Shinjuku venues, various ‘step dances’ (choreographed dancing set to particular tunes) were invented by the staff and shared by visitors; although these often varied from one venue to another, they were occasionally designed in one venue and then transmitted to others (Korn 2002, Katsumoto 2006). These choreographed step dances, in contrast to ‘free’ or improvised dances, would become one of the most typical characteristics of disco dancing in Japan. In contrast, the Roppongi area has built up a reputation for its celebrity status, mostly due to its Westernised atmosphere which persists today. Many recollections both by industry insiders and by visitors point out the difference between the popular and teenage-oriented Shinjuku and the more sophisticated and relatively adult Roppongi (Korn 2002; Emori 2008; Iwasaki 2011; Nakamura 2018). The well-known Mugen club

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opened in 1968 in Akasaka (a 15-minute walk from Roppongi) and was frequented by celebrities including poets, novelists, and artists who were fascinated by its psychedelic artistic lighting, in-house female dancers, and live bands from the United States and the Philippines playing African American soul, funk, and R&B music. With the US and other foreign embassies as well as local US Army facilities, the area had a ready-­made international clientele; a few discotheques therefore emerged, including AI Emori’s Afro Rake Club and Don Katsumoto’s Soul Embassy Club— mentioned later, which were favoured by the African American customers who played a crucial role in importing and popularising brand new musical trends (Emori 2008). From the mid-1980s onwards, in contrast to venues devoted to ‘authentic’ African American soul music, luxurious and musically eclectic venues began to open in greater numbers, with older and wealthier customers than those of Shinjuku’s clubs. These places, which played Eurobeat, were often regarded as typical consumerist venues in the so-called bubble economy era. Both in Shinjuku and Roppongi, the relationship between disco and gay culture—especially its identity politics—went virtually unrecognised, except for a vague influence on appearance and dancing styles. This lack of recognition was in spite of the fact that Shinjuku had Japan’s largest gay population and reportedly even a few gay bars with dance floors as early as the late 1960s. It was not until the late 1980s that some clubs started hosting regular ‘gay night’ events. In 1994, the legendary Delight club was opened in Shinjuku, soon becoming an icon of the gay movement which flourished during the 1990s (Sunagawa 2015). As is discussed later, Japanese disco culture was often related to heterosexual promiscuity among so-called deviant youths in Shinjuku, interracial relationships between African American men and Japanese women, and the capitalist and consumerist dynamic between wealthy men and sexually active women in Roppongi (Iwasaki 2011). This obvious lack of attention to gay culture and identity, which was firmly at the centre of the disco movement in the United States, is arguably one of the most problematic aspects in the process of import and re-contextualisation of disco music in Japan.

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The Making of ‘Sexy Bus Stop’: The Industrial Context of Pseudo-International Japanese Disco An instrumental disco track entitled “Sexy Bus Stop” by Dr. Dragon & The Oriental Express was released by the Japan Victor record company (henceforth JVC) in March 1976, and became an instant hit. Though initially promoted as foreign music, it was actually produced in Japan, having been composed by a popular songwriter under a pseudonym, and performed by skilful session musicians using an ad hoc band name. The process by which the record was produced and promoted established the formula for other disco tunes produced in Japan. The track was born through the interaction of three different actors: the foreign music branch of the JVC label, the Tokyo discotheque scene, and a domestic record production system relying on newly emergent freelance songwriters. To understand the track’s significance in the history of popular music in Japan, the agency of each of these actors should be explored in detail. I particularly focus on the role played by a staff member of a record company in bringing them all together. Satoshi Honda, a young member of the section promoting foreign music in Japan Victor, played a key role in this production. He was born in 1947  in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, and remained there until he graduated from Hokkaido University. Although he had established a career as an amateur drummer in the bars and clubs of downtown Susukino, he entered JVC as an engineer, but soon moved to the music section upon an eager request to his boss. He then became a member of the section that promoted foreign music, where the main project at the time was promoting ‘new soul’, a music category invented by JVC to promote licensed Motown and Avco/H&L records. JVC’s foreign branch was ‘at the bottom’, as Honda later recalled (Shinozaki 2017a, 166), since JVC’s contracted foreign labels lacked any major folk and rock stars, the bestselling genres at the time. In addition, Japanese fans of African American music, who were enthusiastic but relatively small in number, had a strong inclination for ‘rootsy’ sounds such as country blues from the 1920s and 1930s3 and the so-called southern soul of Atlantic and Stax records (Sato 2015, 49). This meant that the smooth and sophisticated sound of Motown and Avco was largely ignored, and a new market had to be explored to sell their catalogue. Honda then identified the newly emerging discotheques as the targets of the new music’s promotion.

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The promotion targeting ‘new soul’ discotheques generated the first hit, in 1974: “The Bump” by The Commodores, along with the dance of the same name. This song marked the emergence of JVC’s marketing strategy, which was well informed by trends in discotheques. Though the track was included on the Commodores’ album, Honda insisted on releasing it as a single because of the popularity of the new dance, in which dancers bumped each other’s hips, among African American military personnel stationed in the Yokota Base in the western suburbs of Tokyo. Then, he started to promote the single in person to discotheques all around Japan to inform them of what was going on in Tokyo, and to glean information on local trends and preferences from the north to the south. His list of customer discotheques ‘started with 150 venues then counted 300, and reached 500 or 600 at the end’, as he recalls (Shinozaki 2017a, 167). Then, Honda started to approach mass media outlets. Rather than focusing on specialised music magazines, which were usually the most effective way to promote foreign records, Honda turned to the lifestyle magazine Weekly Playboy (a spin-off of the Japanese edition of the monthly Playboy in the United States), and to the evening TV show “11 P.M.”, both of which were popular among young male audiences due to their heterosexually suggestive content. To boost the popularity of both the track and the dance “The Bump” in the Tokyo disco scene, he emphasised sexy and voluptuous imagery of female disco dancers. Honda recalls that he was asked by the director of the TV show to ‘recruit topless Japanese female dancers and African American male dancers to be aired on TV’ (Shinozaki 2017a, 167). He managed to do that, after which discotheque and dance items became popular on the programme. This instance arguably demonstrates the highly racialised and sexualised undertones of disco culture in the early to mid-1970s. At around this time, the second key person entered the picture. Ai Emori, an illustrator who made the cover art for “The Bump”, which depicted a light-skinned female dancer and a dark-skinned male dancer with big afro-textured hair, was actually the person who informed Honda of the popularity of “The Bump” dance in the first place. Emori was also a skilled dancer and was the manager and DJ at the Afro Rake discotheque. Born in 1948  in Tokyo, Emori was an enthusiastic soul music lover who frequented clubs in Shinjuku and venues around Yokota Base during the early 1970s. In his day job as a comic artist, he occasionally drew and wrote articles that introduced African American popular culture

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to the Japanese youth. Emori first met Honda when he asked him for information and materials on the soul music released by JVC for an article he was writing (Emori 2008, 80). They instantly became friends, and when Emori began working professionally as the manager of Afro Rake in 1974, the venue was credited as a co-sponsor of the radio programme Soul Freak along with JVC. This innovative promotion of “The Bump” was the first fruit of their collaboration. Articles carrying Emori’s photo reported that Afro Rake was the home of the new Bump dance craze. Emori himself danced to “The Bump” on the “11P.M.” TV show. Although Emori left Afro Rake in 1975, he went on to establish the All Japan Soul Disco Association together with a few peers in the discotheque business, with the aim of sharing information and new trends on the scene, with Honda acting as ‘something like an observer’ (Emori 2008, 129). He also formed the Nesy Gang (later Nesy Gang Special) dance troupe to collaborate with Kool and the Gang when they visited Japan for the first time in 1975. This group became ‘the first professional soul dance troupe in Japan’ (Emori 2008, 133–135). Through these initiatives, his relationship with the record industry became even closer. Emori’s typical (stereotypical by today’s standards) illustrations were used as the cover art of various soul records, not exclusively for JVC’s ‘new soul’, becoming a distinct visual marker of the contemporary African American music in the mid- to late 1970s in Japan. Following the success of “The Bump”, Honda and Emori began promoting a new dance, “The Hustle”, to enhance the sales of JVC’s fresh disco releases like The Stylistics’ “Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and Van McCoy’s “The Hustle”. The former is considered to be the group’s signature tune by the Japanese audience, even though it has never been released as a single in the United States. Although the latter’s cover art was not drawn by Emori, instead using the art for the US single release, the liner notes on the flip side featured his illustrations of the basic steps of “The Hustle” dance. Using the All Japan Soul Disco Association’s network, they went on a nationwide campaign organising dance workshops and local dance contests. The winners of these contests competed in the All Japan Hustle Contest, which was held in Shinjuku. In the course of the promotion, Honda began to call himself Hustle Honda, and frequently appeared in the media under that nickname (Emori 2008, 145–149; Shinozaki 2017b, 175). Finally, after the great success of “The Hustle” came the “Bus Stop”, which would become the next disco fad prompted by the popularity of

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tracks like The Fatback Band’s “Do the Bus Stop”. The problem, however, was that JVC had no records in their back catalogue which fitted the rhythm of the new dance. Consequently, Honda decided to produce one himself, even though he was a member of the promotion section and not involved in musical production, a move that was quite uncommon (Shinozaki 2017b, 175). Honda asked Kyohei Tsutsumi, one of the most popular songwriters throughout the 1970s, to compose a suitable tune for a dance that could be performed to “The Bus Stop”.4 He was deemed to be the right composer for JVC’s “Bus Stop” project because he was regarded as one of the most Westernised songwriters: he had already worked with international soul/disco acts, gradually incorporating Philly-soul-tinged arrangements in his tracks and emphasising the lush strings and sophisticated harmonised vocals with a funky rhythm section. Tsutsumi’s sound hadn’t hitherto necessarily been targeted at discos, but was widely accepted in the mainstream pop scene of teenyboppers called ‘idols’.5 Produced by Honda in collaboration with Emori and Tsutsumi, “Sexy Bus Stop” was released in March 1976. A largely instrumental tune with sporadic female choruses, it was reminiscent of “The Hustle”. Although there were no claims that it was made abroad, nothing implied that it was made in Japan either. The cover art of a black female dancer was typical of Emori’s touch, and illustrated dance choreography instructions, again by Emori, were printed on the back with the liner notes—which was probably seen as virtual proof of a foreign music record since domestic music records usually lacked such details. The commentary by S.H. (perhaps an acronym for Satoshi Honda) largely explained the “Bus Stop” dance and its rivalry with “The Hustle” in the United States. The tune was only referred to in passing, as follows: “Sexy Bus Stop” was presented and favoured at the Disco Forum held at Roosevelt Hotel, New York at the end of this January hosted by Billboard. It features a catchy melody with the Oriental tinge which has recently been prevalent. All in all, the rhythm is most suitable for dancing “The Bus Stop”. It was recorded by studio session musicians similar to MFSB. It is composed and arranged by Dr. Dragon. (The Oriental Express 1976)

The list of proper names explicitly implies that “Sexy Bus Stop” is an American song. The statement that it was ‘presented and favoured at the Disco Forum’ might have been true, though perhaps a little exaggerated, since Honda participated in the Forum as a successful promoter who sold

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half a million copies of Van McCoy’s single “Hustle”. The reference to an ‘Oriental tinge’ is also noteworthy; musically speaking, the impressive intro riff and the main melody were played in a stereotypically ‘oriental’ pentatonic scale lacking the fourth and seventh notes, showing the obvious influence of Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” and Banzai’s “Chinese Kung Fu”, both of which were quite popular at the time as a reflection of the popularity of Bruce Lee’s movies. In addition, the middle part featured two Japanese traditional instruments, the koto (a plucked string instrument) and the shakuhachi (a bamboo flute). Interestingly, the popularity of stereotypically ‘oriental’ disco tunes in the West created a context which implied that “Sexy Bus Stop” was ‘foreign’ and ‘international’, hiding its Japanese origins. Another important characteristic of the “Sexy Bus Stop” record that might have greatly influenced Japanese disco culture was Emori’s illustrated dance instructions on the record sleeve. While “The Hustle” record sleeve only showed six basic beat steps, “Sexy Bus Stop” included a fully choreographed routine with seven measures (28 beats), which were to be repeated until the end of the song. As mentioned earlier, choreographed dancing to a particular song, called ‘step dance’ as opposed to ‘free dance’, was already common, but specific choreographies differed from venue to venue. In contrast, it was assumed that printed choreography would function as a form of authorisation, and would help to standardise the dance moves favoured by disco participants. Another important point in choreography is that the 7-measure length of the routine does not correspond to musical structures based on 4-measure musical elements; when a certain musical element is repeated, a different movement of the choreography is performed. This intended discrepancy between the music and the choreography is broadly found in bon dance. Though any direct connection between the two is unclear, an influential blog by a veteran DJ on Japanese disco history suggests that choreographed ‘step dance’ in Japanese disco was inspired by bon dance choreography, emphasising the fact that Don Katsumoto, another co-founder and the first chair of the All Japan Soul Disco Association, was born and raised in the city of Gujo, which is famous for its intensive all-night bon dancing.6 A month after the release of “Sexy Bus Stop”, a cover version with Japanese lyrics was released by Yuko Asano, a teenage singing idol who frequently appeared in Weekly Playboy pin-ups. While Japanese covers of foreign pop songs had been an important aspect of the simultaneous promotion of foreign and domestic records during the late 1950s and

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mid-1960s, the practice gradually declined after the flourishing of folk and rock, which were both regarded as forms linked with serious self-­ expression. After the release and success of the “Sexy Bus Stop” track, however, Japanese covers of foreign pop songs, many of which were linked to disco, were revived and became an important source of success in the mainstream domestic record market. Two months after its release, an article in a sports newspaper (Nikkan Sports, 11 May 1976) made the shock revelation that “Sexy Bus Stop” was actually made in Japan! The subheading text asking: ‘For fans who believed it is foreign music, is it a swindle? Or …?’ indicates that the question of whether the record was actually ‘foreign’ or ‘domestic’ in its origins was a matter of crucial importance to the audience. The article scandalously reported that the instant hit, which had quickly sold about 100,000 units, was actually composed by Tsutsumi. In turn, Honda adopted a ‘so what’ attitude, replying that the producers ‘have never declared that it is foreign music’. The article continued by explaining the rationale: a ‘pseudonym of “Dr. Dragon” was used aiming not at the Japanese market but the international one. The fact that offers for dealership from record companies from five Western countries have already poured in proved this.’ Furthermore, the song was stated to be ‘an antithesis to the supremacy of foreign music prevailing among the Japanese audience’, and Tsutsumi admitted this, saying ‘if the composer were credited as Kyohei Tsutsumi, I don’t think it could achieve such success’. A few days later, a similar article appeared in Weekly Playboy (1 June 1976). Considering the magazine’s close relation to Honda, the article may well have been prearranged by him to utilise this exposure as a promotional tool. Nick Okai, a colleague of Emori in the Nesy Gang dance troupe and a staff member in the well-known soul discotheque Get in Shinjuku who had actually invented the choreography for “Sexy Bus Stop”, commented that the track ‘is more sophisticated’ than other Oriental disco tunes, further claiming that it was ‘familiar with Japanese people’s feelings. In our venue, it’s very popular among youth between 15 to 18 years old.’ This was followed by a comment from a male high school student, who stated, ‘I don’t personally like domestic kayoukyoku (mainstream pop song) because they are childish, but some have wonderful instrumental intro before teenyboppers start to sing. “Sexy Bus Stop” has that exact feeling and it’s enjoyable to listen to.’ While his words show contempt for the ‘childish teenyboppers’ supposedly singing in Japanese, some awareness of the sophistication and excellence of Japanese sound

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production also comes through. Moreover, these comments show that adolescents under 18 years of age comprised an important group in the disco scene. Overall, this mini-scandal seemed to enhance, rather than damage, the popularity of the song. Honda’s production continued this trend later on. His next project was Funky Bureau, another Japanese band with a funkier sound than “Sexy Bus Stop”, fronted by a Jamaican lead singer who had lived for a while in Japan. The band’s output of three singles and an album from 1976–1977 was based on compositions by Tetsuo Suse. Unlike Tsutsumi, Suse was not a professional songwriter—instead, he was a professional musician who performed live with his soul band in nightclubs in Shinjuku, Akasaka, and in venues around the U.S. Yokota Base. The liner notes for the first two singles, “Boogie Walk” and “Disco Jack”, still hid the domestic project origins, and mentioned only that the lead singer was Jamaican. In contrast, the liner notes for the subsequent album, Boogie Train, proudly stated that the project was made in Japan: ‘Who can ever imagine that Funky Bureau which released two hits is a Japanese band? But it’s genuinely Japanese’. Similarly, the liner notes for the following single, “Clap Your Hands Together”, stated: Though the lead singer Mitchel Blackman is a black person from Jamaica, other instruments were recorded by excellent Japanese musicians. In addition, this and other songs from the album were composed and arranged by Japanese musicians. Since Japan is the second largest music market [after the U.S.] in the world, it is no wonder and in fact rather late that such an international band appeared. I believe that in the near future Japanese sound will create worldwide sensations in the disco and pop scene.

The liner notes for the album offered some context: ‘Once Japanese disco fans appreciated foreign music only. [But] the surprise of “Sexy Bus Stop” and following hits … seems to have broken the national border. Or rather, they are about to be imported to foreign markets.’ The remark was backed up by the fact that ‘since German based Silver Convention and Donna Summer conquered the American market, it is certain that the US record industry is highly interested in foreign products and waiting for them with open arms’. Though it is uncertain exactly when the Japanese music market became the world’s second largest, a position it retains even today,7 the interesting thing is that a large proportion of domestic musicians had a deep desire for international success.

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Thus, Honda began the next project to sell Japanese disco overseas in 1978. Under the names The Eastern Gang and Bella and the Original Eastern Gang, he produced five singles and two albums from 1978 to 1980. A smooth style featuring strings and female choruses reflected the obvious influence of the Silver Convention and European disco records. These works prompted Emori to take a different path from Honda due to the former’s loyalty to African American soul and funk. The artworks of the Eastern Gang records were not by Emori, and mostly featured illustrations and pictures of sexy white women. The liner notes of the album The Flasher, released in January 1979, proudly boasted ‘Breaking news!! Distribution confirmed in 19 countries in the world’ at the top, and stated that ‘Since “Sexy Bus Stop”, numerous Japanese products have been published overseas’—although none of these were ever hits in the US, so ‘as an insider of Japanese disco, I do hope Japanese products achieve big success in the US disco charts. To that end, I will support domestic production more than ever.’ Unfortunately, the Eastern Gang did not meet this ambition, but the fact that continuous efforts were made to sell domestic records overseas is quite important, since it greatly contributed to the ‘Westernisation’ of Japanese popular music in terms of the formation of a danceable, soft, smooth, and sophisticated mode of pop, which more recently enjoyed that long-awaited worldwide popularity under the newly coined genre term ‘Japanese city pop’. In the 1980s, the main composer for the Eastern Gang, Tetsuji Hayashi, would become a prominent songwriter in this style, writing Mariya Takeuchi’s first hit, “September”, and Miki Matsubara’s “Stay with Me”, both of which are now regarded as city pop classics. It is noteworthy that Hayashi started his career in the Eastern Gang, where he developed his own songwriting and arrangement style. In fact, what is now called city pop had a significant connection with Japanese disco. Or, to be more specific, some of the records produced in the context of Japanese disco in the late 1970s and early 1980s have now been recontextualised and reclassified as city pop. Tatsuro Yamashita, one of the most highly praised city pop artists, along with his wife, Mariya Takeuhi, and his former bandmate, Taeko Onuki, first gained popularity when one of his tracks, “Bomber”, rather unexpectedly hit discotheques in Osaka, the second largest city in Japan. Until this sudden breakthrough, his music had been accepted only by a small circle of music enthusiasts in Tokyo. However, following the success of “Bomber” in Osaka’s discotheques, his disco/funk-tinged tracks such as “Ride on Time” and

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“Sparkle” began to attract a wider audience. The theme of Mariya Takeuchi’s world-famous internet meme “Plastic Love”, which was originally released in 1984, was a casual love affair at a discotheque. Even though it is unlikely that those artist-oriented city pop tunes were all that popular in discotheques in Japan—because many DJs apparently held the view that songs played in discotheques had to be in English—it is certain that the music now known as city pop was largely informed and inspired by discotheques. Following Honda’s efforts, and certainly pushed by the popularity of disco culture in general since the success of Saturday Night Fever, other record companies started producing domestic Japanese disco while also promoting obscure foreign disco records exclusively for the domestic Japanese market. Many of these were novelty tracks like “Disco Otomisan”, a disco cover of an old 1950s Japanese-styled pop tune sung in Japanese with a heavy American accent by Ebonee Webb, an African American band from Memphis who had stayed for a while in Japan to perform at a nightclub. The Spinach Power’s “Popeye the Sailorman” is historically important, as the first hit by music producer Daiko Nagato. He established his own production company, Being, with the money he earned from that record and would later conquer the music market in the 1990s together with Avex records, as is discussed in the next section. The Being system thrived in the 1990s, when clients (in many cases advertising agencies) could order a specific type of music for commercial films or TV programmes (especially dramas and animes), and Nagato’s staff musicians would perform it under various pseudonyms (Ogawa et  al. 2005). As such, it was a system which resembled the project-oriented domestic disco production process led by Honda.

The Reception of European Disco: From Candy Pop to Eurobeat The success of Silver Convention and Donna Summer paved the way for Japanese disco to take a different direction than following African American soul and funk. Those electronic European disco records were promoted under the term ‘the Munich sound’, regardless of where they were produced, based on a strategy invented by JVC’s Sato Osamu, Honda’s boss and the originator of ‘new soul’ marketing. In 1978, Sato and Honda produced an enormous hit called “Hello, Mr. Monkey” by Germany’s

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Arabesque, which was obviously influenced by ABBA. The song was among those promoted by small publishers and labels at MIDEM, the international music networking event held annually in Cannes, France. Honda played the song at a discotheque named Chester Barrie in Shinjuku and received highly enthusiastic feedback; Sato then bought the distribution rights for Japan for US $2000 USD, and sold them for more than 20 billion yen (approximately US $400–500 million then), according to Honda (Shinozaki 2017b, 76–177). Another record Sato brought from MIDEM enjoyed huge success as well; this was Dschinghis Khan’s self-­ titled song, which was an obvious imitation of Boney M’s “Rasputin”, again from Germany. Following Arabesque’s unexpected and extraordinary success, other Japanese record companies started to promote similar pop disco featuring female vocals, mostly sourced from Europe: these acts included the Nolans from Ireland, the Dooleys from the United Kingdom, Santa Esmeralda from France, the Neoton Family from Hungary, and D.D. Sound from Italy, among others. This trend was given a new term, ‘candy pop’, to signify pop disco with a steady and light beat, catchy hooks, and flashy instrumentation, most of which was licensed relatively cheaply from small publishers and promoted only in Japan, outside their home countries. This method proved extremely lucrative, especially with a promoter like Honda who knew the scene well and had credibility among insiders in the business. It seems that by this point in time, the close association of disco and African American soul music, which had been crucial in the early to mid-­1970s, had faded away. Later, a retrospective book on the 1970s disco culture focusing on the African American influence lamented that it was a ‘truly cursed period for the real soul enthusiasts’ (Korn 2002, 120). The popularity of candy pop expanded from clubs to the streets. A distinct subcultural youth group called the Bamboo Shoot Tribe (Takenokozoku) emerged in the pedestrian precinct in Harajuku, two kilometres south of Shinjuku. They were named after the Takenoko (Bamboo Shoot) boutique, established in 1978, a shop which sold cheap but glittering outfits like oversized vests, extremely wide trousers made of neon-coloured polyester satin, and big ribbons or long headbands of similar material. These outfits were initially popular among disco-goers in Shinjuku, and soon they started to dance in the street near the boutique. It was not uncommon for people to dance on the street in Harajuku on Sunday afternoon, then head to discotheques in Shinjuku at night (Nakamura 2018, 44). At its peak, more than 2000 teenagers reportedly

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danced, attracting audiences of tens of thousands of sightseers on Sundays in the early 1980s, along with other subcultural groups such as American 1950s style dancers known as ‘rock ‘n’ rollers’ and, later, several amateur rock bands. The dancers were divided into discrete groups and each formed a circle to dance to candy pop and related domestic pop music, which they played on portable radio cassette recorders. Their dances were thoroughly choreographed to a particular song, and the choreography tended to emphasise the movement of the upper half of the body, differing from the ‘step dance’ of 1970s disco. While often seen as a social problem in relation to the prevalence of motorcycle gangs and school violence at the time—both because the motorcycle gangs’ organisation and appearance resembled those of the Bamboo Shoot Tribe and because there may have been a direct connection between the two—the Bamboo Shoot Tribe is unique in the history of youth subcultures in Japan in that virtually no direct influences from foreign cultural trends were to be seen in its music taste, fashion style, or dancing. Its remnants can be faintly traced in the contemporary Kawaii culture represented by, for example, Kyari Pamyu Pamyu, who emphasises the influence of the street culture in Harajuku. In addition, it is noteworthy that the affordable and portable technology of radio cassette recorders, mostly made in Japan, offered them their own convenient sound systems. From the mid-1980s onwards, disco music in Japan changed significantly with the emergence of Eurobeat as a genre of foreign music consumed almost exclusively in Japan. The term Eurobeat was actually not invented in Japan, but was derived from the category temporarily used in the United Kingdom’s Record Mirror magazine’s charts from November 1985, substituting for the term Hi-NRG. Even though the magazine abandoned the term and went back to Hi-NRG in May 1987, it has survived ever since in Japan. As the name suggests, it basically derived from the Hi-NRG and Italo disco songs that had achieved worldwide success in the mid-1980s; but, I argue here that it should also be understood as a direct successor of candy pop in various ways. Musically, the two share some common characteristics including their simple and catchy melodies, formulaic functional harmony, clear song structure with clear repetitions of verse and chorus, and steady four-on-the-floor beats without complex syncopation and polyrhythms. More importantly, they have much in common in the industrial context of their formation as genres, and in their shared cultural status as pseudo-international music. In both cases, the record industry almost fabricated these genres, at first making do with the

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available foreign musical material, then later deliberately generating the distinct dance subcultures of those genres. A discotheque chain, Maharaja, and two record companies, Alfa and Avex, were responsible for the formation of Eurobeat. The opening of the flamboyant discotheque Maharaja Tokyo in 1984 is often considered to be the symbolic moment of the second disco boom, associated as it was with the hedonistic and ostentatious culture of the ‘economic bubble’ of the late 1980s, in contrast to the first boom in the late 1970s that was often related to youth delinquency (Nakamura 2018; Iwasaki 2011). The association between Maharaja Tokyo and Hi-NRG/Eurobeat was so strong that the manager of the Masaru Narita venue released some Japanese covers of key Eurobeat tunes associated with the venue, including “Give Me Up”, “Into the Night” (both by Michael Fortunati), and “Turn Around and Count 2 Ten” (by Dead or Alive) as a singer in 1987. The venue was notorious for its celebrity-driven policy, in stark contrast to the teenage-­ oriented budget venues in Shinjuku. Located at Azabu Juban, near Roppongi but with no public transport nearby, customers were forced to come by taxi or private cars and were forced to follow a strict dress code (no jeans, no sneakers, no open-heeled footwear, etc.). Extremely expensive VIP rooms were filled with wealthy men, sometimes mockingly known as ‘bubble gentleman’, surrounded by ‘sexy ladies’. Up to 71 similar-­ affiliated Maharaja venues soon opened one after the other across the country. Maharaja’s adult-oriented policy might be interpreted as a reaction to the amendment of the Law Regulating Adult Entertainment Businesses in 1984, which strictly prohibited the entrance of anyone under 18  years, and banned operations after midnight. In contrast, venues in Shinjuku reacted to the law amendment in a riskier way, by modifying their opening hours to begin earlier in the afternoon and even in the morning over the weekend, to attract teenage visitors (Nakamura 2018). Here, the difference between Shinjuku and Roppongi was reorganised according to age rather than the respective musical tastes in each district. In spite of Maharaja’s celebrity-driven policy, the venues, and the music they played, Eurobeat seemed to be regarded as culturally and musically vulgar by visitors of the newly emerging small venues called ‘clubs’, which were distinguished from discotheques by their emphasis on the connoisseurship of newly imported dance music genres such as hip-hop, house, and dancehall reggae. In a sense, these smaller specialist venues were also products of the law’s amendment, as they were licensed not as

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discotheques or dance halls but as bars and restaurants, and as such were allowed to operate after midnight. This legal distinction between discotheques and smaller ‘clubs’ led to the decline of the former and the rise of the latter in the 1990s, after the economic bubble had finally burst. Maharaja also popularised a particular way of dancing called “parapara”, which resembled the dance of the Bamboo Shoot Tribe; however, the lower body movements were reduced to simple and monotonous sidesteps, and the upper body moves became more complicated. It was initially performed by the male staff of the venue as a kind of parlour trick and eventually spread among regular (mostly female) customers seeking to display their celebrity status in the venue. The term “parapara” is said to be derived from a chant yelled along with the synthesiser riff of Trans-X’s “Living On Video” (Nakamura 2018, 39), a track originally popular in youth venues in Shinjuku in 1984 which soon became associated with Maharaja and Eurobeat. Even after the decline of Maharaja-styled discotheques in the 1990s, “parapara” survived and was sporadically revived as a teenage girls’ subculture dance called gyaru (“girl” or “gal”). Turning back to the record industry, it was Alfa that first played an important role in popularising Eurobeat. Alfa was established by composer and music publisher Kunihiko Murai at the end of the 1960s, became a record company in 1977, and formed a business partnership with A&M Records the following year, not only selling A&M products in Japan but also promoting their domestic rosters in the United States, a strategy similar to Honda’s. Although the partnership with A&M records was a crucial source of income for Alfa’s foreign music section, in 1986, A&M broke it off after Murai left the company for unknown reasons, which led to a managerial crisis at Alfa. Then, remembering the unexpected but enormous success of Quincy Jones’s “Ai no Corrida” in 1981, the company fought back against its difficulties by contracting numerous independent labels specialising in electronic dance music, or anything sold as such, one after another, ranging from PWL of synth pop, FLEA of Italo disco, and even Mute of industrial/post-punk. The first hit to be produced by this new direction was Samantha Fox’s “Touch Me”. Then, similar pop tunes, most of which were obscure, were compiled and released on cassettes and CDs. The first compilation entitled That’s HI-NRG, released in 1985, was renamed That’s Eurobeat the following year and serialised, with a total of 44 volumes released up to 1994. Some of the tracks on these compilations were covered by Japanese singers to achieve mainstream success. This trend was initiated by “Dancing Hero” by Yoko

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Oginome in 1985 (a cover of Angie Gold’s “Eat You Up”, which was released under a Japanese title translated as “My Lovely Hi-NRG Boy”), followed by Akemi Ishii’s “Cha-Cha-Cha” (by Finti Contini, 1986), Babe’s “Give Me Up” (again by Michael Fortunati, 1987), and numerous others. The latter two were Italo disco, which became a main supplier of the Eurobeat pipeline in the 1990s. These covers emphasised choreography inspired by dance floor routines. In turn, Avex was responsible for the survival of Eurobeat from the late 1980s through the 1990s when an eclectic and pleasure-seeking disco culture was replaced by a more genre-conscious and authenticity-seeking ‘club culture’. It was also responsible for the emergence of a dance pop style within the ‘J-pop’ market, which was a new term popularised in the early 1990s signifying more ‘Westernised’ domestic pop music that has now become mainstream (Ugaya 2005). In 1985, Avex boss Masato Matsuura (born 1964), a university student and frequenter of discos in Shinjuku who was fascinated by Hi-NRG, started a part-time job in a record rental shop, an emerging form of music consumption, with the sole purpose of listening to as many disco music records as possible without paying money to buy them. He installed a counter specialising in imported disco records and started his original store chart. Soon, he had started a wholesale trading company specialising in imported discs. He directly contracted overseas (mainly Italian) disco producers to produce a mixed CD he would then sell wholesale to rental record chains. Instead of providing licensed dealership for foreign labels in Japan, his method of offering European producers original tracks aimed exclusively at the Japanese market and importing finished products broke the conventions of Japanese record companies. The new media of CDs also made it easier to import finished products, as they were lighter and easier to duplicate than vinyl records (Matsuura 2018). Avex soon started domestic production, with Tetsuya Komuro as the main producer/composer. He had been a leader of the synth pop band TM Network, which was quite popular in the late 1980s, but his numerous later works recorded sales of over a million in the mid-1990s. Komuro’s typical sound had much in common with candy pop and Eurobeat as it emphasised high-register female vocals and flashy synth riffs. In addition, Namie Amuro, who would become a pan-Asian pop diva, achieved her first success, covering the Eurobeat tune “Try Me” by prominent Avex-­ contracted Italian producer Dave Rodgers.

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Alongside its highly successful domestic production, Avex has continued its signature Eurobeat compilation series entitled Super Eurobeat, which by 2018 totalled as many as 250 volumes. As noted above, disco culture itself declined in the 1990s, and Eurobeat was played only in a few venues specialising in “parapara” dancing; however, Eurobeat found a new niche by the end of 1990s as a subculture of car customisation (Mizukusa 2001). Through intensive tie-ins to the highly influential animation and video game series “Initial D”, which had the theme of street racing in customised cars, AVEX’s Eurobeat tracks became a favourite soundtrack for members of that subculture, and thus became fairly popular in rural areas and suburbs. An “Initial D” anime series and games also powered the fast and powerful Avex vehicle’s advance into the East Asian market before other Japanese companies did. In the early 2000s, Eurobeat and “parapara” dancing expanded their popularity among other fan clusters, from the original devotees of the gyaru subculture: anime fans in Japan and overseas. The trigger for this was the opening theme of the anime series “Detective Conan”, which featured animated “parapara” dancing by the protagonist. The CD featured a diagram of the choreography by Hirokazu Miyaji, the manager of Twinster, and this was used as the basis of “parapara” dancing among gyaru tribes. The song “Love is Thrill, Shock, and Suspense” was produced by Being and sung by Rina Aiuchi (2000), who had formerly been associated with Avex. Following its success, various companies started to release many compilations of anime songs, old and new, for “parapara” dancing with Eurobeat arrangements, and these became known as “anipara”. Accordingly, as Japanese animation began to be seen as a typical Japanese cultural form, the “parapara” dance was performed in cultural events promoting Japanese pop culture overseas. Here, it seems that a complex interaction between local and global was at work: imported disco culture was domesticated by the mediation of the music industry and youth subculture to generate the dance of “parapara”; in turn, it was globally received as a typically Japanese cultural expression in relation to anime.

Conclusion This overview of Japanese disco has focused on the functioning of the music industry, the patterns of change in venues, and the relationship between the two. The gatekeepers of the music industry from the 1970s to the early 1980s shared two motivations. The first was the commercial

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aim to effectively promote their licensed foreign records, often independently of overseas trends. The second was a cultural aim: they pushed for Japanese products to be accepted abroad (especially in the United States), as the second biggest economic power in the world. On the one hand, this led to the production of domestic disco which ‘faked’ the foreign idiom, and, in some cases, was expected to be an export product aimed at the international market carrying the honour of being ‘made in Japan’. On the other hand, the deluge of ‘buy cheap, sell high’ Euro disco led to the new label of Eurobeat as a specific category of foreign music accepted exclusively in Japan. These instances paved the way for the establishment of J-pop in the mainstream—this Japanese popular music genre is highly Westernised, but does not necessarily slavishly admire, or have an inferiority complex towards, foreign music (yogaku) anymore. I have tried to show how Japanese disco production challenged the hierarchical dichotomy of the foreign and the domestic in the Japanese popular music world. However, the ambition to be globally accepted was often transformed into the badge of honour (or fantasy) that Japanese popular music had already been highly Westernised compared to music from other foreign contexts. Nevertheless, this self-confidence is meaningful only within Japan. This sort of inward Westernisation or internationalisation, which could easily become a cultural conservatism without historical perspective, seems to be one of the most significant characteristics, and flaws, in what has been called ‘J-Pop’ since the 1990s (Ugaya 2005). However, the situation is changing now. Japanese disco aimed at the international market and other disco-tinged pop tracks of the late 1970s and early 1980s have recently attracted an international audience under the new term of ‘city pop’, and Eurobeat as a domestically produced foreign music genre has found another international niche in Japanese visual culture. ‘Pseudo-international’ musical styles are now recognised as typically Japanese in ways which differ from what was originally intended. This has made us reconsider the authenticity of Japanese popular music not in terms of an imagined distinction between the foreign and domestic, which in reality is only valid within Japan’s borders, but in terms of transnational interaction, which is always reflexive and contingent between industry, discourses, and practices in historically and geographically different moments.

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Notes 1. Although the aforementioned romanticised foreign music discourse appears to oppose such phenomena, it is often complicit with them in inventing a distinctively Japanese foreign music culture, since critics tend to rely on idealised notions of a particular musical genre rather than on actual information and context about its real origins. 2. Ever since the 1920s, Japanese young people have favoured music cafes where recorded music was played on high-quality audio equipment for a relatively inexpensive admission fee (Hosokawa and Matsuoka 2004). 3. For example, the LP entitled The Classics of RCA Blues: 1927–1946, which was compiled in Japan under the supervision of famous critics, became an instant classic. On the Japanese reception of ‘rootsy’ African American music, see Higurashi (2010). 4. Tsutsumi first entered the music industry in 1963 as a director in the foreign music section of Japan Gramophone. By 1967, he had become a freelance songwriter when the local popular record production system underwent a dramatic change. Within the vertical integration management structure established in the 1930s, not only singers but also lyricists, composers, and session musicians were bound by exclusive contracts to a certain record company. This, however, was all about to collapse and be replaced by a new system wherein music publishers and entertainment agencies shared copyrights and co-produced master discs, employing freelance songwriters and session musicians to create them. Tsutsumi belonged to the first generation of the new system and is arguably the most successful example of it. 5. In 1974, Tsutsumi wrote the soul-disco track “Nigai Namida” (“Bitter Tears”) with Japanese lyrics, which was performed by the American female trio The Three Degrees. They had achieved considerable popularity in Japan with the song “When Will I See You Again”, which became an instant hit. This happened before their worldwide success due to their participation in the 1974 Third Tokyo Music Festival, a large international song contest aiming to be a ‘Eurovision in the East’ organised by Tokyo Broadcasting Service (TBS). Since they did not release a new single in the United States, CBS Sony, the Japanese agent of Philadelphia International Records, planned a project that would exclusively target the Japanese market. The novelty of African American women singing in Japanese on Japanese TV was probably at least partly responsible for the success (Shinozaki 2017c, 232–234). 6. The blog is accessible at https://funkydisco.jimdo.com/disco-­step/. 7. Azami suggests that this was already the case in the late 1960s when CBS in the United States and Japanese Sony established the joint venture CBS Sony (Azami 2016, 177). The phrase ‘the world’s second largest music market’

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was also used two years later in the title of the feature article in Billboard (May 26, 1979).

Bibliography Asaba, Yuiko. 2017. Tango in Japan: Digesting and Disciplining a Distant Music. PhD Thesis. Royal Holloway, University of London. Atkins, E.  Taylor. 2001. Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Azami, Toshio. 2016. 20 Seiki Nihon Record Sangyoshi: Global Kigyou no Sinkou to Shijouno Hatten [History of Record Industry in 20th Century Japan: The Invasion of Global Companies and the Development of the National Market]. Tokyo: Keiso Shobo. Bigenho, Michelle. 2012. Intimate Distance: Andean Music in Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bourdaghs, Michael. 2012. Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop. New York: Columbia University Press. Condry, Ian. 2006. Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Emori, Ai. 2008. Kuroku Odore!: Street Dancers Retsuden [Dance Soulfully!: A Series of Biographies of Street Dancers]. Tokyo: Ginga Shuppan. Higurashi, Yasufumi. 2010. Nomerikomi Ongaku Kigyou: Kokou no Independent Kigyou, P-Vine Sougyousha no Memoir [Enthusiastic Entrepreneurship in Music: An Memoir of the Founder of P-Vine, Proudly Independent Company]. Tokyo: Doyukan. Hosokawa, Shuhei. 1999. ‘Salsa no Tiene Frontera’: Orquestra de la Luz and the globalization of popular music. Cultural Studies 13 (3): 509–534. Hosokawa, Shuhei, and Hideaki Matsuoka. 2004. Vinyl Record Collecting as Material Practice: The Japanese Case. In Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan, ed. William W.  Kelly, 151–167. Albany: State University of New York Press. Iwasaki, Tomoaki. 2011. Tokyo Disco 80s and 90s. Tokyo: K&B Publishers. Katsumoto, Don. 2006. Soul Disco Dance no Subete [All About Soul Disco Dance]. Tokyo: Media Mill. Korn (Supervisor). 2002. Disco Densetsu 70s [The Legend of Disco in the 70s]. Tokyo: Ginga Shuppan. Lynskey, Dorian. 2010. What Does It Mean to Be ‘Big in Japan’? The Guardian, March 22. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/22/japan. Matsuura, Masato. 2018. Hakaimono [The Destroyer]. Tokyo: Gentousha. Minamida, Katsuya, ed. 2019. Watashitachi wa Yogaku to Dou Mukiatte Kitanoka [How Have We Faced to Foreign Music?]. Tokyo: Kadensha. Mizukusa, Takesi. 2001. A Dream. Tokyo: Sinpusha.

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Nakagawa, Saburo. 1977. Dance Gannen: Nihon Dance 113nen Zenshi [The First Year of Dance: The Whole History of 113 Years of Dance in Japan]. Tokyo: Gekijo Kopa. Nakamura, Yasuo. 2018. Shinjuku Disco Night: Toa Kaikan Grafiti. Tokyo: Tokyo Kirara Sha. Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge. Noda, Tsutomu. 2001. Black Machine Music: Disco, House, and Detroit Techno. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha. Ogawa, Hiroshi, Satoshi Odawara, Yoshiji Awatani, Kyoko Koizumi, Eiko Haguchi, and Satoshi Masuda. 2005. Media Jidai no Kokoku to Ongaku: Hen-yo suru CM to Ongakuka Shakai [Advertisement and Music in the Era of Medialization: Changes in Commercial Films and the Musicalization of the Society]. Tokyo: Sin-yosha. Sato, Osamu. 2015. Dose Konoyo wa Karizumai [Just a Little While to Stay Here]. Tokyo: Yu-unsha. Shinozaki, Horoshi. 2017a. Yogaku Man Retsuden No.87, Honda Satoshi (Zenpen) [A Series of Biographies of People Specializing in Foreign Music in the Music Industry, Satoshi Honda (The First Part)]. Record Collectors, July, 174–179. ———. 2017b. Yogaku Man Retsuden No.88, Honda Satoshi (Kouhen) [A Series of Biographies of People Specializing in Foreign Music in the Music Industry No.87 (The Latter Part)]. Record Collectors, August, 162–167. ———. 2017c. Yogaku Man Retsuden 1 [A Series of Biographies of People Specializing in Foreign Music in the Music Industry, Vol.1]. Tokyo: Music Magazine. Sterling, Marvin D. 2010. Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sunagawa, Hideki. 2015. Shinjuku 2-Chome no Bunka Jinruigaku: Gay Community kara Toshi wo Manazasu [Cultural Anthropology of Shinjuku 2-chome: Looking at Urbanity from the Viewpoint of Gay Community]. Tokyo: Taro Jiro Sha Editas. Ugaya, Hiromichi. 2005. J-POP toha Nanika: Kyodaika suru Ongaku Sangyo [What Is J-POP?: Music Industry Growing Huge]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Wajima, Yusuke. 2015a. Odoru Showa Kayou [Dance Music in the Showa Period]. Tokyo: NHK Publishing. ———. 2015b. Ongakushi no Kanousei [The Possibilities of History of Japanese Music]. In Iwanami Koza Gendai 5: Rekishi no Yuragi to Saihen [Iwanami Seminar of Contemporaneity: Disturbances and Reconstruction of History], ed. Takumi Sato, 269–292. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

Discography Aifuchi, Rina. 2000. Koi wa Thrill, Shock, Suspense. Giza Studio.

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Arabesque. 1978. Hello Mr. Monkey. Japan Victor. Dr. Dragon and the Oriental Express. 1976. Sexy Bus Stop. Japan Victor. Eastern Gang. 1979. The Flasher. Invitation. Ebony Webb. 1977. Disco Otomisan. Seven Seas. Funky Bureau. 1977a. Boogie Walk. Japan Victor. ———. 1977b. Disco Jack. Tokyo: Japan Victor. ———. 1977c. Boogie Train. Tokyo: Japan Victor. ———. 1977d. Clap Your Hands Together. Japan Victor. Genghis Khan. 1979. Genghis Khan. Japan Victor. Oginome, Yoko. 1985. Dancing Hero. Japan Victor. Saijo, Hideki. 1979. YMCA (Young Man). RCA. Spinach Power. 1978. Popeye the Sailorman. Seven Seas. Three Degrees. 1975. Nigai Namida [Bitter Tears]. CBS Sony.

Disco, Dancing, Globalization and Class in 1980s Hindi Cinema Gregory D. Booth

Disco in the Hindi cinema demonstrates two fundamental features, both of which emerge from the industrial and cultural position of popular cinema in Indian culture. First, the most widely recognized embodiment of disco in India was a combination of the image and dancing of actor Mithun Chakraborty and the music composed by and attributed to composer/ producer Bappi Lahiri. Second, although the musical content of the songs that India’s film and music industry categorized as disco was a mix of original content and borrowings from American or European models, any stylistic alignment with foreign versions of disco was purely coincidental. The first of these two features exemplifies one of the ways that Indian popular music culture has long been distinct from many popular cultures of the globe due to its dependent position within the framework of the Indian commercial cinema. The second feature aligns with one of this volume’s themes: that the sounds and meanings of disco, as a musical style and as a genre, were transformed every time the genre label and its received

G. D. Booth (*) Ethnomusicology, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_6

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meanings were taken up by another culture. This study of disco in India’s culture industry during the 1980s shows how these two features had their foundations in the unique popular-media culture of India. Disco as a popular fascination was absorbed into the practices and logic of the film/song industry; but in the hands and voices of a small number of musicians, it also represented the first modern challenge to the dominance of film song. This challenge was only partially successful; but it took place just as India was beginning to shed some of its post-colonial ideologies and just as it was beginning to emerge from its post-colonial economic (and cultural) isolation. In addition to these primarily musical issues, disco and disco dancing became enmeshed in the cinema’s constructions of masculine heroism and its representations of western popular culture. Finally, the conjunction of disco with India’s slow emergence from the shell of economic nationalism defined its place in India’s cultural history. This study reports the results of extended ethnographic and archival research in India in the field of popular music and culture.

Disco—The Label as Fetish Particular elements of disco’s western-based iconography and some of its musical features were fetishized in India as symbols of western-based modernity. Earlier stylistic features, and some of the ideological implications of jazz and of rock ‘n’ roll (or beat music as it was most commonly called in India), had preceded disco as musical manifestations of western modernity in Indian popular culture; but neither achieved the named, mass cultural presence that disco achieved in the 1980s. Disco’s Indian identity was located in the Hindi language and the lower socio-economic classes that came to dominate the Hindi cinema audience from the 1980s through the early 1990s. Because of these factors, disco achieved a much broader, mass-audience identity. Its appeal was such that one journalist, writing under the pseudonym ‘Ali’ in Volume 30 of the film industry’s trade journal, Screen in November of 1981, could argue that ‘disco also worked its magic in Gandhi-ji’s India. Within a short while it was disco, disco everywhere.’ As this journalist argued, disco was India’s ‘new religion’ and actor Mithun Chakraborty its ‘demi-god’ (Screen 1981). Given that ‘Ali’ was writing in the past tense in 1981, disco was clearly and already a popular culture presence, at least in India’s two (or three) major northern metropolises (Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata).

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The presence of disco in urban culture prior to 1981 is hinted at in a song scene from that year featuring Mithun Chakraborty dancing to music credited to Bappi Lahiri. The song scene, “Aao baadshah” (“Come on, king”) from Sahhas (“Courage”, 1981)1 introduces Chakraborty as a newcomer in a nightclub/discotheque who is inveighed into a dance contest with an opponent who, as another character explains, has won the title of ‘disco king’ for four years consecutively. The background music playing underneath this dialogue was performed on an electronic keyboard using the melody from the Rolling Stones’ 1965 hit, “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction”. In the song and dance scene that follows, Chakraborty— who had yet to master the dance moves of his primary western model, Michael Jackson—literally dances his opponent into the ground. Through the 1980s, the northern Indian metropolises had venues often called discotheques or discos. These were elite sites for social dancing, the normalized consumption of alcohol and a mixing of genders all of which were absent from the social realities of most Indians and which were frequently represented as outcomes of the influences of ‘the west’. Thus, whether Chakraborty defeats an early disco dancer or a dancer in a discotheque remains unclear; but for all practical purposes, the two meanings became increasingly conflated in later usages and manifestations. Many of the sets for the Hindi cinema’s disco song scenes are indeed nightclubs or discotheques, filled with flashing lights, elaborate dance floors and filled most often with young, frequently well-dressed Indians socializing in ways that were only dreams for many in the audience. Most had never been to a nightclub of any kind; a very large number would have had no experience with mixed-gender social dancing; even their experiences with and exposure to western popular music culture were minimal (Booth 2014). This meant that most Indians had never heard any foreign exemplars of disco. As long as the sounds were more or less those of western pop (any western pop) and as long as they were accompanied by the images of western dress, instrumentation and behaviour—the iconography of western exoticism and modernity—those sounds were understood to be ‘disco’ in the Indian context. It was the commercial cinema that constructed the music and, just as importantly, the images of disco. More than any specific musical style features, the word ‘disco’, along with icons gleaned from mediated representations of global popular culture, became fetishized symbols of western exoticism and modernity. The extent of disco’s popular fetishization was made clear in what might be considered the first formal declaration of the term’s importance:

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the title song from the 1982 film Disco Dancer. This film’s musical and cultural impact have been popularly attributed to composer Bappi Lahiri and actor Mithun Chakraborty. This pairing of actor and composer, with frequent changes in the identities of other key players, was one of the most consistent features of Hindi film disco. At the opening of “(I am a) Disco dancer”, a guitar-wielding Chakraborty, dressed in silver and black lamé, invites his audience to sing with him. The audience in this scene is seated in an auditorium-style space rather than a nightclub and gives every appearance of being a middle-class and explicitly family audience with married couples and children. The only dancing in the audience is done by a young girl who appears to be no more than ten years old. Many of the women wear saris (in this cinematic context, saris symbolize a likelihood that their wearers are married). Although it must have numbered nearly 1000 people, this is not an audience that is, or is intended to be understood as, a youth audience: it is not made up of single college students from whom film-makers might have generated romantic situations and imagery. After an instrumental introduction, Chakraborty begins by leading this group in what must be called a cheer, rather than a song. Beginning with ‘Give me a ‘d …’, Chakraborty leads the crowd in spelling out the word, ‘… i-s-c-o’, which is also spelled out in blinking, coloured lights across the back of the auditorium. The music of “(I am a) Disco Dancer” that follows this introduction features a prominent horn section and a funk-style bass line; a drum-set is audibly present, but less so than a set of congas. If one wished to align the song with a western musical style, one might suggest that it was in the style of upbeat funk. Chakraborty is accompanied by four male actors, in matching costumes, who begin the scene as guitar players but who—like Chakraborty himself—quickly abandon their guitars to dance. The horn section, in contrast, is all female. These actresses, dressed in matching shorts and blouses, provide a level of erotic display and like their male counterparts are also present to form the dancing chorus for the scene. One of the most important realities of music culture in India and in the Hindi cinema is that actors were rarely musicians. For the majority of the Indian audience, however, actors were the faces and bodies of the songs to which they mimed: “Disco Dancer” was, and still is, a Mithun Chakraborty song. It is not generally connected to the name and face of singer Vijay Benedict, who did not become a star as a result of his many disco recordings. In the 1980s, Benedict rarely performed the song in a live context or before an audience.

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In another early fetishization of the term disco, a fantasy Indian train station (complete with a dancefloor of coloured, flashing tiles) is transformed into ‘Disco Station’ in a song of the same name from the film Haathkadi (“Handcuffs”, 1982), once again with music composed by Bappi Lahiri. Actor Reena Roy is featured dancing in a modern, but unarguably Indian costume; she watches young couples embracing as they emerge from an arriving train, as if the very term supported the revolution in social mores that many younger Indians may have longed for. In this frankly bizarre picturization, Roy’s immediate chorus is made up of six male dancers, dressed in white singlets with black raincoats and hats and armed with flashlights who pursue and dance with her. A larger chorus is made up of actors initially representing college students, variously and casually dressed, as well as dwarves dressed as station staff (conductors, ticket takers, coolies), school children in uniform, and extras wearing distorted human and animal masks. Synthesizers play a more prominent role in “Disco Station” than they do in “Disco Dancer”; but once again, the music might be more closely aligned with funk (or perhaps rock) than with disco. Even at what must be considered the end of disco’s dominance, the idea and the genre label (rather than the sound) of disco were still being fetishized as the globalized modern. The last big disco hit in the Hindi cinema came in a song that allegedly combined disco with bhangara, an explicitly Indian folk/pop genre associated with Punjab. “Disco bhangara” (“Disco and bhangara”) from Gangaa, Jamunaa, Saraswathi (1988) highlights stereotyped and visual distinctions between bhangara and disco. When urged to dance to disco, actor Amitabh Bachchan’s character demurs: ‘what, in these clothes?’ referring to his sweater/jumper and trousers. Those urging him on provide him with black leather jacket, trousers and boots (partially referencing the imagery of Michael Jackson’s 1987 hit “Bad”) and the glittering sliver glove that had come to be associated with Jackson’s performances of “Billie Jean” (Thriller, 1982). In the song’s lyrics Bachchan boasts that he will show viewers a ‘new rhythm’ and a ‘new dance’ and also that he will sing ‘just like Michael Jackson’. Disco’s Indian ideology, based on western or global modernity and youth culture, and its iconography were more consistent than its sounds. When the sounds of Indian disco did align with those of western versions, this was often made possible, ironically, by the same situation that allowed the term to be used so broadly: the isolation of the Indian music and film industries of the 1970s and 1980s (at least) from the world economy of

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the global music/media industry. That isolation made it possible (if not technically legal) for Indian musicians to borrow freely (in all senses) from the musical content of western popular culture, including disco.

Disco in an Isolated Culture and Music Industry For much of the 1980s, India’s popular music industry was only remotely connected to the global music economy. Neither Hindi films nor film songs had a significant legal commercial presence outside India. A small export trade in legal discs and cassettes and in legitimate prints of commercial films took place primarily between India and the United Kingdom and the United States. Trade in the reverse direction, from the west to India, was equally limited and perceptible only in the major metro-centres and even then, primarily for a largely elite, English-speaking audience. Not only was the Indian mass audience largely unfamiliar with western popular music; many of the composers involved in the production of popular film music also had relatively little direct experience with the performance or production of the musical styles of British, European or American popular music. The first widespread impact of disco in Indian music culture was the result of these conditions, which (among other outcomes) completely had inhibited the development of a viable popular music culture in India (outside the context of the cinema) and suppressed the distribution of western popular music. These conditions also help us understand why the first explicitly disco hit in Hindi, the song, “Aap jaisa koi” (“Someone like you”) from Qurbani (“Sacrifice”, 1980), was the work of composer Biddu Appaiah who, albeit of Indian heritage, was making a living as a musician and producer in Britain’s pop music scene of the late 1970s. Appaiah made clear to me that, growing up in Bengaluru (Bangalore) in southern India, he felt very isolated from the western pop music he preferred. We didn’t have music in India in those days. There was one national [radio] station, called Akashwani, which nobody, but nobody listened to it. … If I wanted to hear foreign popular music, I had to tune into the Binaca Hit Parade on Radio Ceylon. I would spend six days in anticipation waiting for Sunday, and then more times than not all I would get would be static, or some faint echo of what was the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, or something. (Personal communication with the author, 2010)

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Although many people did listen to Akashwani—the government-owned All India Radio—Appaiah’s comments echo those of many others of his age whose preferences were for western pop. After an early attempt at a career as a pop singer in India, Appaiah moved to London in the late 1960s, where he worked his way into Britain’s popular music scene, producing recordings by the Japanese group, the Tigers, and by Carl Douglas, including the latter’s 1974 hit, “Kung Fu Fighting”. Appaiah had no connection to the closed world of the Mumbai film industry and no interest in the culture of the Hindi cinema. Nevertheless, when Hindi film producer and actor Feroze Khan sought him out and invoked mutual connections to Appaiah’s hometown to persuade him to work on Khan’s upcoming film, Appaiah composed and recorded one song, “Aap jaisa koi” for Khan’s Qurbani. The Qurbani soundtrack included five songs in total; but the other four songs were composed and produced by the very popular Mumbai music directors/brothers known as Kalyanji-Anandji. Those songs were recorded in Mumbai film music studios with vocals by playback singers including Mohammed Rafi, Asha Bhosle and Kishore Kumar. “Aap jaisa koi”, on the other hand, was composed and recorded in London. The song was sung by an unknown 15-year-old Pakistani/British girl named Nazia Hassan. The two creative processes could not have been more separate, as Appaiah has explained: ‘I never discussed this with Kalyanji-Anandji; I didn’t know them, or even know who they were. I was in England doing my thing. I wasn’t interested [in the Hindi cinema]’ (personal communication with the author, 2010). The “Aap jaisa koi” song scene featured actress Zeenat Aman as a nightclub singer in a red-sequined, backless gown dancing on a small nightclub stage complete with a coloured-tile floor and flashing lights. By 1980, Aman herself—who had studied at a United States university in the 1960s—was a symbol of a sexualized, western modernity, in the Hindi cinema of the 1970s, in films such as Hare Rama Hare Krishna (“Hail Rama, Hail Krishna” 1971) or Heera Panna (1973). The backing band that is shown on the stage with her consists of a group of female musicians (aside from the male set-drummer) who are dressed in silver boots and what can only be described as one-piece bathing suits. The drummer is shirtless and wears an “afro” hairdo or wig. Such hairstyles, always on male actors with dark or darkened skin, appeared from time to time in the Hindi cinema of the 1980s as symbols of an ambiguous exoticism emerging from

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Indian perceptions of a range of global popular cultures with roots in an African heritage. The musical and technical expertise that Appaiah had acquired in his 15 years in Britain and Hassan’s exposure to and absorption of western pop made “Aap jaise koi” unique in South Asian popular culture of the time. With its dance-based, 4/4 beat (approximately 108 BPM) and its synthesized effects and timbres, the song played a significant role in Qurbani’s success as the highest grossing Hindi film of 1980. While data on soundtrack sales are not publicly available, sales are understood to have been exceptionally high in India and in Pakistan (Hassan’s country of birth). Given the state of Indian film music recording studios in 1980, the song’s arrangement and production values must have been a revelation to most Indian ears. Appaiah composed songs for a second Hindi film (Star, 1982), again with vocals by Nazia Hassan and her brother Zoheb, which included the distinctive disco hit, “Boom, boom”. However, while the Indian film industry had always been prepared to import musical content and stylistic elements from the west, it was less prepared to tolerate industrial competition from South Asians living abroad. Star, featuring young and relatively unknown actors, was a flop and, despite Qurbani’s success, neither Nazia Hassan nor Biddu Appaiah was successful in penetrating the oligarchic world of the 1980s Hindi cinema. The success of “Aap jaisa koi” did raise public awareness of disco and industrial awareness of the appeal of the practices and norms of the western music industry, especially around the idea of what India called the ‘non-film’ album. Increased awareness led to increased borrowings from western productions and western practices; but the outcomes of these two different kinds of borrowings were quite distinct.

Western Content in an Indian Setting Shortly after the release of Qurbani, more sounds of disco appeared in Shaan (“Elegance” 1980). “Pyaar karne wale” (“One who loves”) is a late example of what the Hindi cinema historically called a cabaret song scene, in which an actress performs as a singer and sometimes dancer for patrons in a glamorous nightclub setting. Although it is something of a generalization, cabaret scenes are often distinguishable from later disco scenes by the behaviour of the audiences: cabaret audiences most commonly sat sedately at their tables watching the performer, who was almost always a female

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singer/dancer; disco audiences more frequently danced or at least stood before a stage listening with some signs of enthusiasm. R.D. Burman, the most popular and innovative composer of Hindi film songs throughout the 1970s, composed much of the music for “Pyaar karne wale”; but he also borrowed content from a western model. Burman had great interest in musical sounds from outside India and frequently borrowed content as well as style and instrumentation. The song’s synthesizer bass line and the 4/4 drum beat, along with aspects of song structure, appear to have been copied from Donna Summer’s 1977 release “I feel love”. The song’s melody seems to have been newly composed; it certainly has more melodic identity and direction than Summer’s original. “Pyar karne wale” exemplifies Burman’s successful integration of original and borrowed elements in the production of a song that certainly carries a western flavour, but that remains fully Indian. Commonly, when the sounds of filmi disco bore a close resemblance to western disco, such alignment was the result of direct borrowings. It is not clear what proportion of the Indian film audience realized that they were listening to copies or interpretations of western hits. My anecdotal research suggests that the proportion was quite small, at least outside Mumbai and Kolkata. Some in the press were aware of this practice, however, and Burman was sometimes criticized for his borrowings. Bappi Lahiri’s identity was still more explicitly connected in the Indian press with what some called “inspirations” based on western models. Two of Lahiri’s biggest disco hits used substantial amounts of musical materials borrowed from western pop songs. Two years after the success of Disco Dancer, Lahiri, Mithun Chakraborty and director/producer Babbar Subhash worked together again on the action film, Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki (“I swear by my mother”, 1984). This film featured the song scene, “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena” (“What is life without you”), which was picturized on Chakraborty dancing with actress and singer Salma Agha. Chaitanya Padukone, writing in the short-lived trade/consumer magazine Playback>>> and Fast Forward, has suggested that for Indians, the London-based Agha projected the ‘image of a liberated, totally westernized singer’ and that ‘in Salma, one saw the potential of bringing the Hindi music scene closer to the erotic western pop culture’. Nevertheless, Padukone continued by noting that ‘the industry effectively channelled her into films as a singing/actor’ arguing that in the mid-1980s an independent pop culture ‘had yet to emerge in India’ (Padukone 1988). It was through films and song scenes such as these that disco in India evolved

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into the dominant label for a culturally constructed ideology that was based on the adaptation of imported western popular culture. In the early 1980s especially, film culture remained the only platform from which the symbols of that ideology could be projected to an Indian mass audience. More importantly, the practices and structure of Indian film culture also determined the human and iconographic categories from which those symbols could be constructed. “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena” shows that Chakraborty had refined his dancing in the years since Disco Dancer, with increased attention to Michael Jackson’s dance vocabulary. This was particularly appropriate given that “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena” made direct use of the melodic and rhythmic materials of Jackson’s 1982 release, “Billie Jean”. From the introductory harmonic vamp onward, “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena” would be immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Jackson’s original. Nevertheless, the differences—the changes made to the borrowed material, the additions of new material and the changes in musical structure—are instructive and offer a clear example of the Hindi cinema’s need to adapt rather than replicate foreign musical content. Although “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena” moves at a faster pulse that “Billie Jean” (approximately 128 BPM and 116 BPM respectively), the former is still longer (5.5 compared to 4.9 minutes long). “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena” is a hero/heroine duet, sung by Lahiri and Agha. In the Hindi cinema, duets are often longer than solo songs simply because of the need to have both hero and heroine contribute, more or less equally, to what is effectively an emotional, musical dialogue. Structurally, “Billie Jean” uses a single melody that serves as verse and chorus; the underlying vamp that introduces the song also provides the basis for the long (80-plus seconds) coda or outro. Much of the music in the introduction and mukhda (the song’s primary melody, rather like a chorus) of “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena” replicates the accompanimental, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic material of the original. It nevertheless adheres to the standard Hindi film-song structure, which means that it also includes a second melody (an antara in the language of the Hindi film song) that contrasts with the melody borrowed from “Billie Jean” and that serves as a ‘verse’ (its two statements are set to different lyrics). The antara breaks out of the harmonic limitations imposed by the foundation vamp in “Billie Jean”, offering much greater harmonic movement. “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena” also includes two relatively long instrumental sections (44 and 36  seconds respectively) meant to highlight dancing. A standard feature of film songs from the 1960s

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onwards, such musical features continue to make sense in the visual, actor-­ focused practices of the Indian cinema and help us understand the industrial logic that made Chakraborty, rather than any vocalist, the symbol of India’s disco fad. After Kasm Paida Karne Wale Ki, the same core group collaborated for a final disco film, Dance Dance (1987), in which Chakraborty repeated his role as the beleaguered, lower-class musician/dancer struggling against industrial and class prejudice. “Zubi zubi zubi”, which appears as the opening scene of Dance Dance, was modelled on the Eurodisco content of Modern Talking’s 1986 hit, “Brother Louie”. The musical transformation is broadly similar to that described for “Jeena bhi kyaa hai jeena”. Again, the Indian version is faster (and longer) than the original. In many of his disco soundtracks, Bappi Lahiri took his inspiration from a wide range of well-known and obscure sources.2 Lahiri’s use of foreign materials aligned with the mass audience’s acceptance of Chakraborty as the image of Indian disco and made for a music-­ image pairing of unprecedented success. This process of borrowing, however described, was possible because of the protective cultural and regulatory bubble in which Hindi films and songs existed. Indian film composers were providing Hindi film songs with varying amounts of western flavour set to Hindi lyrics for an audience that had little access to the originals. I will discuss the changing the realities of ‘access’ below; but that lack of access made the sources of musical borrowings invisible to most of the audience. At the same time, the Indian results of such borrowings were invisible to the western industry that might otherwise have objected on legal grounds.

Disco, ‘Private Albums’ and India’s Incipient Non-­film Music Industry The enormous public response to the Qurbani soundtrack in 1980 was a revelation for both film-makers and music industry executives in South Asia. It led to three non-film pop albums on EMI featuring the combination of Appaiah’s music and the voices of Nazia and Zoheb Hassan. The catch-all label ‘non-film’, or sometimes ‘private album’, was routinely used within the Indian music industry to describe any popular song or recording not derived from a film soundtrack. There were very few such non-film recordings in the pre-globalization decades through the early

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1990s. In a 2010 interview, Appaiah explained to me that the concept itself was confusing: After Qurbani, not one person approached me till eighteen months later, when HMV [the Gramophone Company of India] sent one of their young men from London, who said they wanted me to make an album with Nazia Hassan. And he said, ‘we want it to be a non-film album.’ And I didn’t even understand what he meant, because I didn’t realize that all albums [in India] came from a film. (Personal communication with the author, 2010)

Like “Aap jaisa koi”, Appaiah and Hassan recorded the new LP in London. The first of the Appaiah-Hassan collaborations, Disco Deewani (“Disco Madness”), was released in 1981 and was literally South Asia’s first non-­ film pop hit recording. As a result of the album’s unprecedented success, Nazia Hassan and, to a lesser extent, her brother Zoheb emerged as South Asia’s first pop music stars outside the context of the film industry. The public response to the Qurbani soundtrack and to Disco Deewani inspired similar efforts by others; but most of subsequent albums had clear involvement from the film music industry and, again, made frequent use of content from foreign sources. Film playback singer Mahendra Kapoor was another early entrant into the non-film disco field. He followed closely on the heels of Disco Deewani in 1981 and also relied on a British recording studio. Along with Kapoor and female vocalist Musarrat, the third “M” in the LP’s title—M3 Disco Fantasy In Hindi (1981)—was Boney M., whose Magic of Boney M greatest hits collection (1980) had some impact in India based on its global popularity. The majority of the tracks on Kapoor’s release were simply Boney M. songs re-recorded with Hindi lyrics: “Tere hum, tere hain” (“I Am Yours”), for example, is a re-recording of Boney M.’s 1976 hit, “Daddy Cool”. The ‘in Hindi’ part of the title of Kapoor’s album explicitly markets a crucial aspect of this LP’s cultural meaning. By including this linguistic information in the LP’s title, the producers were clearly informing prospective buyers that they were buying songs whose lyrics they would be able to understand, unlike western pop, but like Hindi film song. This moved disco away from the largely elite listenership whose backgrounds included English-medium educations and who bought foreign pop recordings (sung in English) when they could and who listened to Indian rock and pop bands who performed English-language covers of

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western pop on the relatively sparse nightclub or dance-concert scene (an audience that, for the most part, disdained the Hindi cinema). The impact of the Boney M. greatest hits LP in India was considerable; Bappi Lahiri’s extensive engagement with the world of non-film popular music was also inspired by the ‘non-film’ orientation of the western music industry: ‘I saw that abroad non-film was very big, so I thought I should do that also’ (personal communication with the author, 2012). Lahiri specifically mentioned Boney M. to me in this context, implying the relatively small size of the sample of foreign music available for the Indian audience. Lahiri recorded the first of a series of non-film LPs in 1982, again using a London studio (EMI’s famous Abbey Road facility). SuperRuna—Bappi Lahiri Presents Runa Laila, featured another non-Indian South Asian vocalist (the Bangladeshi vocalist Runa Laila). For HMV and the Indian market generally, Disco Deewani and SuperRuna, albeit to a lesser extent, were big hits. Biddu Appaiah pointed out to me the commercial disparities, in the consumption of non-film recordings especially, between the UK and India that revealed themselves in the run-up to the release of Disco Deewani. I got a call from the secretary of Mr. Anil Sood (then the Managing Director of the Gramophone Company of India) saying they’ve heard the album, and everyone loves it and they think they can sell 25,000 copies. To me that sounded like peanuts, but to them was like ‘Wow! 25,000 copies!’. Just before the release, Mr. Sood calls me again, and says, ‘We’re going to do something we’ve never done before, we’re going to print 100,000 copies’ And I’m still like, ‘great, whatever. I’m 6,000 miles away, I don’t have any sense of the reality there.’ (Personal communication with the author, 2010)

Disco Deewani was South Asia’s first pop music hit. The LP sold in Pakistan and in the South Asian overseas communities (especially the U. K.) as well as in India itself. Biddu Appaiah told me, ‘that album sold 3,000,000 copies of the long-playing disc. And whatever Qurbani may have done, that album helped to solidify that kind of music and Nazia Hassan in India’ (personal communication with the author, 2010). Indian, Pakistani and British consumers had never heard non-filmi pop music, sung in Hindi, with the relatively sophisticated production values that Appaiah could bring to the process. Disco Deewani did establish ‘that kind of music’ in India; but the LP and disco generally were three to five years too early to benefit from the first substantial wave of Indian popular

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music and popular music companies that arrived in the mid-1980s, fuelled by the emergence of a legitimate audio-cassette economy. In 1981, India’s two music companies, The Gramophone Company and Polydor had been licensed to produce pre-recorded cassettes for less than 12 months; total legitimate cassette production is estimated to have been less four million units annually, and prices (for both cassettes and LPs) remained prohibitively high. The importance of disco in this context was not merely that it was the first western style of pop music to establish itself in India, but that it established itself through the medium and the ideologies of film song and did so in Hindi, rather than in English. Consequently, disco had an important audience base in the less-educated, lower middle- and working-­ class youth who became the primary in-theatre consumers of films and film song for much of the 1980s.

Conclusion: Disco, Class and Ideology in the Hindi Cinema The creative and appropriative processes than produced disco in the Hindi cinema of the 1980s and that led to songs such as “Disco Dancer” and “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena” were not qualitatively different than those that had produced songs such as “Kaun yeh aaya mehfil mein” (“Who is this who has come to our party”), picturized on actor Shammi Kapoor in the 1959 film Dil Deke Dekho (“If you give your heart, watch out”). That song was composer Usha Khanna’s borrowed version of the pop hit “Diana”, recorded in 1957 by teen idol Paul Anka. In India, “Diana” was largely unknown; but like “Jeena bhi kya hai jeena”, “Kaun yeh aaya mehfil mein” re-situated the primary melodies of the American original into a suitably filmi musical arrangement with Hindi lyrics. The melody brought the flavour of American popular culture to the song scene, in support of actor Shammi Kapoor’s growing career as a symbol of that culture. That symbolism was based on Kapoor’s physical similarity to Elvis Presley, who was widely known as a popular culture icon of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In his dancing, his hair style, his appearance and his song scenes, Kapoor enacted an approximation of Elvis for an Indian audience whose access to the original was severely or entirely limited by India’s protectionist regulatory framework and by poverty, either on a personal or on a national level. In the same way, Chakraborty’s physical appearance and his song scene performances made him India’s answer to Michael Jackson,

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who, in the 1980s, was again the one contemporary western pop star of which most Indians were aware. Mithun Chakraborty’s success as the disco hero of the 1980s, therefore, was in part the outcome of the well-established cultural and musical process that was one central feature of the commercial Hindi cinema, a process in which some producers sought to offer a vision of western (but increasingly globalized) youth culture for Indian consumption. That process had begun even before Shammi Kapoor’s production of an Indianized, Hindi-speaking Elvis. Although Chakraborty’s engagement in this process was broadly similar, the nature of disco itself, together with a shifting technological, regulatory and socio-cultural context of the 1980s, allowed disco to develop a much stronger presence in mainstream Indian culture. I have argued that disco was an explicitly deployed genre label and that in the Hindi cinema it was a fetishized symbol as much as it was a musical style. Hindi film music creators had less success with the musical style features of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, rock ‘n’ roll never achieved a position as a named, let alone fetishized genre label. Although Shammi Kapoor (and other actors) enacted versions of late 1950s/early 1960s rock ‘n’ roll performance style, I am only aware of one usage of the actual term ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ in the Hindi cinema of those years: the alleged ‘rock ‘n’ roll club’ visited by Shammi Kapoor and actress Vyjayanthimala as picturized in the song scene “Aaja, aaja, main hoon pyaar tera” (“Come on, come on, I’m your love”) from Teesri Manzil (“The Third Floor”, 1966). Ironically, it was the success of disco as a genre label in the early 1980s, that—together with the growing impact of globalization—led to songs that verbally referenced ‘rock’ or ‘rock ‘n’ roll’, in films such as Meri Jung (“My War”, 1985), Ilzaam (“Suspicion”, 1986) and Main Balwaan (“I Am Strong”, 1986). The irony, of course, lies in the fact that by that point rock ‘n’ roll was a historical genre, as a song in Main Balwaan (with music by Bappi Lahiri) made clear. Anjaan’s lyrics suggest that ‘pehele rock ‘n’ roll, phir aaya twist, phir aaya disco, ab break dance’ (“first came rock ‘n’ roll, then came the Twist, then disco, now break dance”). By the time Meri Jung was released in 1985, disco was beginning to be old fashioned, both in terms of developments in western popular culture and changes in India and Indian film culture. The relative success of disco as a named genre in the Hindi cinema was in part the result of its historical position relative to globalization. In the first half of the 1980s globalization, although still incipient, was advanced

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enough that disco as a foreign genre had more Indian impact than had rock ‘n’ roll. Nevertheless, the benefits of globalization were still confined primarily to upper-class Indians; widespread, mass-market access to western culture was still some years away. The impact of globalization on disco’s presence in India was amplified by the specific ideologies and the material and performative culture of disco, at least as perceived and reproduced in India. Disco’s constituent visual focus on tailored clothes, coiffed hair, glittering venues and carefully choreographed dance moves was more amenable to the tastes and aesthetics of mass popular culture in India than had been much of western rock or pop from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, which had been increasingly populated by relatively small guitar bands and long-haired musicians whose performances and visual images were often idiosyncratic and whose on-stage movements had little to do with dance as the Hindi cinema understood it. Disco offered Indian film-makers multiple opportunities to stage elaborate song scenes with glittering and often revealing costumes and choreographed lines of uniformed musicians and dancers. These scenes almost always produced a musical, exoticized and sexualized vision of modernity based on elements of western popular culture. Just as importantly, the explicit connection between disco and relatively structured social dancing made disco a more cinematic genre than the guitar bands of the rock era. Some of disco dancing’s most popular representations, such as the performative, exhibitionist and competitive masculinity shown in disco’s Hollywood manifesto, Saturday Night Fever (1977), entirely suited the strictly gendered, narrative and cinematic conventions of the Hindi cinema. The extent to which disco as a musical style focused on the song and its arrangement, the extent to which disco singing style was dominated by controlled vocal production, the frequent use of relatively larger ensembles and lush orchestral or synthesized accompaniment also made sense for the Hindi film music industry. Any oppositional or alternative ideological content that disco’s popular culture might have possessed in the west was subtle enough to be either invisible or dismissible in India. Overall, disco was a better fit for the Hindi cinema than any earlier western popular genre since the late 1950s/early 1960s had been, when Shammi Kapoor enacted Elvis Presley’s industrially structured mainstream stardom. Mithun Chakraborty’s heroism was more than an updated version of Shammi Kapoor based on new music however. Chakraborty’s hero-­ predecessors, Shammi Kapoor and actor Rajesh Khanna—who emerged as Kapoor’s successor to youth culture film stardom in 1969—embodied the

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Hindi cinema’s idealized understanding of the relationships between middle- and upper-class Indian youth and the music, fashion, dance and behaviours associated with western youth culture. Both Kapoor and Khanna routinely played heroes who were respectable, middle-class sons, but who somehow found themselves in questionable circumstances (orphaned, abandoned, betrayed etc.). They grappled regularly with the dilemmas of middle-class morality and with recuperating their families’ (and especially their fathers’) reputations. The conclusions of their films were either tragic or signalled a return to traditional, post-colonial, Indian, family values, as those were constructed in the cinema. When Khanna was, in turn, replaced by Amitabh Bachchan in the mid-­1970s and early 1980s, the latter’s heroism was more adult and often more violent—but also less musical—than those of his predecessors. Although Bachchan’s heroes were sometimes of explicitly lower-class origin, Vitali has nevertheless argued that Bachchan’s heroism was not actually representative of the ‘lumpen proletarian’ figures he sometimes played. She has further suggested that a key element of the audience for his films remained ‘the English-speaking, middle-class public’ (Vitali 2005, 128). The construction of male heroism in the Hindi cinema is a complex topic, well beyond the scope of this study. Nevertheless, Kapoor, Khanna and Bachchan, with their various connections to youth culture, western popular music, male heroism and socio-economic class, form the historical context in which Mithun Chakraborty’s fighter/disco-dancer hero must be understood. Chakraborty’s version of cinematic hero dominated the first half of the 1980s and was directly linked to disco; but it would be equally correct to suggest that disco was defined by the nature of Chakraborty’s performances. Compared to his predecessors, Chakraborty was a new kind of action hero. On screen, Chakraborty appeared smaller and slighter and darker than his predecessors. Although he himself was part of a slowly growing and increasingly educated Indian middle class, he was neither from the Panjab nor from the northern Hindi heartland of Uttar Pradesh, which had been the source of a great many of the Hindi cinema’s heroes, including the three discussed here. Although he was not the first to establish his heroism with his fists, the degree of apparent moral and social sanction for the violence he inflicted was greater than for any earlier hero. In addition, of course, Chakraborty frequently demonstrated his heroism through mastery on the dance stage, as a disco dancer.

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The cinematic world that Chakraborty inhabited was more cynical, violent, misogynist and sexualized than that those in which predecessors, even Amitabh Bachchan, had been situated. His characters were less frequently the sons of fathers who were explicitly upper/middle-class white-­ collar workers. Compared especially to Bachchan’s heroes, Chakraborty’s characters’ fathers—in films such as Boxer (1984), Kasam Paide Karne Wale Ki or Dance Dance—were often depicted as weak, failed figures. In others, such as Disco Dancer or Aandhi Toofan (“Howling Storm”, 1985), they are completely absent from the narrative. In films such as Pyar Jukhta Nahi (“Love Does Not Submit”, 1985) social imbalances are sharply drawn and are more clearly defined by the economic parameters of the socio-economic strata. Across the spectrum of 1980s action films (including many starring Bachchan) villainy was personal and victory frequently marked more by the violent deaths of those villains than by the reassertion of family status and/or the cleansing of a father’s tarnished reputation. In Kasam Paide Karne Wale Ki, for example, in which Chakraborty was featured in the Indianized versions of “Billie Jean” (above), he inflicts bloody death for bloody death on the villains, spurred on by actress Smita Patil who, as his vengeful, widowed mother, explicitly encourages him to violence and retribution. Following Mukherjee’s (2017) argument, Chakraborty (and the films in which he starred) was Amitabh Bachchan recast for an explicitly lower socio-economic audience. In the 1980s, the nature of Chakraborty’s heroism, the appeal of disco and the nature of its representation all became implicated in the disparities surrounding access to the benefits or privileges of globalization that were increasingly marked by the 1980s. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, post-colonial India was largely consumed with the struggle to build a new national identity and socio-­ economic infrastructure. The innovators and stars of India’s post-colonial commercial cinema were all at the height of their powers and Indian fascination with Hollywood was, if not fading, then increasingly overshadowed by the indigenous film culture, which—in the complete absence of television or commercial radio—was India’s primary source of glamour and excitement. Many of the country’s 3000 cinemas theatres were still prestigious social venues and direct access to western popular culture was largely for those at the very upper end of socio-economic spectrum. Shammi Kapoor’s heroism was constructed for a non-English speaking, inward-­ looking audience, one without direct access to Elvis Presley or western youth culture.

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By 1980, on the other hand, globalization was beginning to gather speed, its impact beginning to spread beyond the higher levels of Indian society. What is more, during the 1980s the Indian cinema began to face real competition for viewers: the country’s first television serial appeared in 1984, for example, on a national network that by then reached roughly 70% of the country and that was also broadcasting weekly films and film-­ song programmes. Videocassettes and players also made their appearance in these years and made possible an entirely new, global and rarely legal commerce in video-cassette versions of commercial films, both Indian and foreign. For the first time, the growing number of Indians who could afford to do so could watch movies at home (as well as on buses, in small ‘video theatres’ and other venues). In the context of an ageing movie theatre infrastructure, the absence of air-conditioning, the inconsistency of electrical supply and ongoing concerns in some sectors of Indian society about women in public spaces, family audiences stayed home in increasing numbers and had more alternatives for entertainment when they did so. For the young, mostly male audience that preferred not to watch relatively bland family programming or who were poor enough to be excluded from private options, movie theatres remained the common choice. For this often disenfranchised and largely lower or lower middle-class group, action, exotic modernity and the erotic display of female bodies were the primary attractions. In typically circular fashion, the subsequent growth of low budget, action films, to meet the demands of that audience further discouraged those family groups that were still inclined to attend cinema theatres. This dynamic contributed to Chakraborty’s position as the poor man’s hero—the ‘lumpen proletarian’ figure that Bachchan was not—and to the position of disco as an exciting, masculine and exotically modern means of defining heroism in the Hindi cinema. Because globalization had its greatest initial impact on upper levels of society, class became an increasingly important part of the definition of Indians who could not access the original artefacts of western culture. In the growing divide, language came to play an important role. As late as 1991, the Indian census was reporting that only 11% of the population identified English as a second or third language (Azam et al. 2013, 338); these authors have noted that lower socio-economic status and subsequent levels of education naturally made for lower levels of English comprehension. Those without access included those who could not enjoy the lyrics

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of English-language pop music; as an audience sector, it was a category subject to slowly sharpening class distinctions. Disco’s relatively ‘low class’ ideologies are reflected, at least indirectly, in other aspects of India’s monolithic film music industry. Vijay Lazarus was Managing Director of Music India Ltd. for much of the 1980s; this was the Indian-owned successor to the trans-national Polydor and one of the early developers of the non-film music market. He has argued that Music India’s early focus on ghazals (a light classical music and poetry genre) was an explicit bid for educated, middle-class consumers and that such consumers were growing tired of film song. In an interview conducted by Anil Chopra in the first issue of Playback>> And Fast Forward, Lazarus suggested that film song had become dominated by disco and (as he implies) Bappi Lahiri (Lazarus in Chopra 1986). Ghazals, or film songs in the style of ghazals, often featured in films made for an adult market, such as the two 1981 films, Silsila (“Chain of Connections”) or Umrao Jaan. Disco was the music of Indian youth culture, but mostly of that sector of Indian youth who were entirely dependent on Hindi and theatres for their entertainment. In another view of disco’s positioning within Indian popular culture, Mumbai’s film-makers may have accepted the necessity of disco and of Chakraborty; but the cinema establishment does not appear to have been impressed by it, or prepared to formally acknowledge, let alone reward, its popularity. The extent of the establishment’s negativity towards Chakraborty and disco is perceptible in the nominations and awards made by the juries for the Filmfare Awards, India’s equivalent to the Academy or BAFTA awards. Despite his domination of the Hindi box office throughout the 1980s, Mithun Chakraborty’s first Filmfare nomination (and first award) did not come until 1990. That award was for Best Supporting Actor, in a role he played alongside Amitabh Bachchan, who had been Bollywood’s reigning male hero of the 1970s, and who waged a fitfully successful comeback career throughout the 1980s. Although Chakraborty is now a respected elder of the Mumbai film world, he was never nominated for Best Actor. It is just as instructive that although Bappi Lahiri was nominated for best music director for five different soundtracks in the awards for 1981, 1982 and 1984, only one of those soundtracks—not a winner—was picturized on Chakraborty. Lahiri’s only winning soundtrack, Sharabi (“Drunk”, 1984), featured neither disco nor Chakraborty; it was picturized instead on Amitabh Bachchan.

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I have described Amitabh Bachchan’s foray into disco in one of his comeback films from 1988 (“Disco Bhangara”, above). In 1988, Amitabh Bachchan was 46  years old and had just returned to filming after two major health crises and a brief and unsuccessful venture into politics. His new films, and song scenes such as “Disco Bhangara”, primarily demonstrated his inability to portray the action hero he had been even five years earlier. What is more, by 1988, disco itself, as a distinct and distinctly meaningful genre, was being subsumed by the emergence of non-film Hindi pop music generated by a growing and diversifying cassette-based music industry. Simultaneously, disco’s exploitative and lower-class associations were beginning to seem out of place in a resurgent Hindi cinema that was developing a newly traditional orchestral sound and a new ideological vision of youth culture, one that would be suitable for an equally re-engaged family audience in an incipiently optimistic India of the 1990s. This study has demonstrated the extent to which Mithun Chakraborty and disco as a musical and performative genre were enmeshed in the production of 1980s cinematic heroism and more broadly the ways in which disco in India interacted with India’s position in a globalizing world. Chakraborty was the first actor since Shammi Kapoor to be defined so consistently in terms of his dancing and his connection to a western musical genre; but disco was also the first such genre to dominate the Hindi cinema. Chakraborty—who was 29  years old when Disco Dancer was released—was a hero for the 1980s, especially the middle years from 1982 through 1988. In these years of India’s waning economic, cultural and regulatory isolation from the global culture industry, the west, and primarily American popular culture, still represented modernity, glamour and exotic excitement and the Chakraborty-disco construction came to signify that ideology for a sector of the mass audience that had few options. The need for such a signification and its social and ideological position in India, changed, however, as Indian society as a whole responded to the growing impact of globalization, which had been held at bay in India throughout the 1950s to 1970s. As the technological, industrial, social and political results of globalization gained intensity, disco’s moment in the Indian sun declined. In the context of the popular culture of the Hindi cinema, I would be remiss to conclude this study of disco without noting the recent remake of Nazia Hassan’s 1980 hit, “Disco Deewani” in a song scene from the 2012 Hindi film Student of the Year. Remakes, in which old Hindi film songs are upgraded through a process of re-recording, have been a popular

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phenomenon in Hindi film music in recent years. The song scene, technically listed as “The Disco Song”, features the voices of two contemporary film singers, Benny Dayal and Sunidhi Chauhan, merged with portions of the original “Disco Deewani” vocal track sung by Nazia Hassan. As always, disco is located in the midst of behaviours that have their roots in western culture: in this scene, some combination of the reality television/talent contest format (complete with celebrity judges) and the high school ball/ prom. In globalized India, both phenomena were thoroughly indigenized by 2012. Under a brightly lit theatre marquee, with a flashing “Disco Deewani” headline, the song begins with an electronic vamp that accompanies electronically enhanced, vaguely hip-hop style vocals. This leads to a newly composed melody that is really more a verse in the western sense than it is a Hindi filmi mukhda. After the verse, a break leads to the invocation of a cinematic version of audience participation: ‘You know, so sing it; now throw your hands up and say’. The break in turn introduces Hassan’s opening “disco deewani” vocal line, speeded up and auto-tuned to fit with the new material. This is the only portion of the original that is used here; but as South Asia’s first pop hit, it is very recognizable and acts as the song’s chorus/refrain. It is symbolic of the degree of social change in India that the scene includes a dancing couple who are explicitly gay; but it is also ironic, if not unexpected, that disco, which began as a symbol of western modernity for the lower, non-English-speaking sectors of Indian society during the opening days of widespread globalization, should reappear here as a symbol of South Asian prestige and nostalgia.

Notes 1. Hindi song and film titles are translated on first appearance except where the titles consist of proper nouns only. All translations are by the author. When not referred to in the text, the titles of the films in which a song appears follow the song titles, in brackets. The songs referred to in this study can normally be found on YouTube. 2. The website produced by Karthik S., http://www.itwofs.com/, traces the sources of a large number of Hindi film songs, by nearly 20 different composers. The site notes that Lahiri was inspired by musical content from the Buggles, Ottawan and UB40 as well as those mentioned above.

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Bibliography Azam, Mehtabul, Aimee Chin, and Nishith Prakash. 2013. The Returns to English-Language Skills in India. Economic Development and Cultural Change 61: 335–367. Booth, G.D. 2014. The Beat Comes to India: The Incorporation of Rock Music into the Indian Soundscape. In More than Bollywood—Studies in Indian Popular Music, ed. Gregory D. Booth and Bradley Shope, 216–237. New York: Oxford University Press. Chopra, Anil. 1986. Interview with Vijay Lazarus. In Playback>> And Fast Forward Issue 1, June. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2017. Music, Sound, Noise: Interposition of the Local and the Global in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur. In Music in Contemporary Indian Film: memory Voice, Identity, ed. Jayson Beasteer-Jones and Natalie Sarrazin, 176–191. New York: Routledge. Padukone, Chaitanya. 1988. Playback>>> and Fast Forward 3. Vitali, Valentina. 2005. Hong Kong–Hollywood–Bombay: On the Function of “Martial Art” in the Hindi Action Cinema. In Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, ed. Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li, and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, 125–150. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Discography Appaiah, Biddu. 1981. Disco Deewani. The Gramophone Company of India. Boney M.. 1980. M3—Disco The Magic of Boney M. Sony BMG Music Entertainment. Jackson, Michael. 1982. Thriller. Epic/CBS. ———. 1984. Bad. Epic/CBS. Lahiri, Bappi, and Runa Laila. 1982. SuperRuna—Bappi Lahiri Presents Runa Laila. The Gramophone Company of India. Musarrat & Kapoor, Mahendra. 1981. M3 Disco Fantasy In Hindi. Multitone.

Filmography Ali, Muzaffar (Dir.). 1981. Umrao Jaan. Anand, Dev (Dir.). 1971. Hare Rama Hare Krishna. ———. 1973. Heera Panna. Anand, Mukul S. (Dir.). 1986. Main Balwaan. Anand, Vijay (Dir.). 1966. Teesri Manzil. Badham, John (Dir.). 1977. Saturday Night Fever. Chopra, Yash (Dir.). 1981. Silsila.

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Desai, Manmohan (Dir.). 1988. Gangaa, Jamunaa, Saraswathi. Hussain, Nasir (Dir.). 1959. Dil Deke Dekho. Johar, Karan (Dir.). 2012. Student of the Year. Khan, Feroze (Dir.). 1980. Qurbani. Mitra, Shibu (Dir.). 1986. Ilzaam. Mohan, Surendra (Dir.). 1982. Haathkadi. Nagaich, Ravikant (Dir.). 1981. Sahhas. Pande, Vinod (Dir.). 1982. Star. Sadanah, Vijay (Dir.). 1985. Pyar jukhta nahi. Sippy, Raj N. (Dir.). 1984. Boxer. Sippy, Ramesh (Dir.). 1980. Shaan. Subhash, Babbar (Dir.). 1982. Disco Dancer. ———. 1984. Kasm Paida Karne Wale Ki. ———. 1985. Aandhi Toofan. ———. 1987. Dance Dance. Subhash, Ghai (Dir.). 1985. Meri Jung.

Dancing Desire, Dancing Revolution: Sexuality and the Politics of Disco in China Since the 1980s Qian Wang

The year 2018 marked the 40th anniversary of China’s political and economic reform. Whether contemporary China is seen as operating under state capitalism or under socialism with Chinese characteristics, there is no doubt that the country has transformed into a new nation. Over the course of the past four decades of change, popular music as a cultural form has become embedded into the daily lives of Chinese people, critically recording the country’s social progress. Among various popular music genres and styles, Chinese disco has so far failed to receive as much attention as rock, with the latter generally seen as more politicised (Brace and Friedlander 1992; Jones 1992; de Kloet 2001; Huang 2001). However, while so-called Chinese rock actually refers to Beijing’s local scene during the 1980s and early 1990s, disco became a national phenomenon in the early 1980s, when it generated a profound social impact on the country. According to the government newspaper Guangming Daily (Schell 1988),

Q. Wang (*) The School of Literature and Journalism, Yibin University, Yibin, P. R. China e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_7

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disco became a symbol of political reform. When a group of university students associated with the Tianjin Communist Youth League discussed the image of Chinese youth in the 1980s, a student offered the bold observation that: ‘[youth league] party member = progress + disco’. The reporter explained that ‘progress’ referred to the continuity of reform, while ‘disco was a metaphor for practitioners and leaders of modern lifestyle’ (Schell 1988, 356). But Chinese disco did not develop exactly how the student hoped. A disco fever swept through China between 1985 and 1989. These were years marked both by a surge in the production of disco music (the ‘Disco Queen’, Zhang Qiang, released 19 albums from 1985 to 1989, and was listed amongst the most popular female singers in the world by Time magazine in 1986), and by a proliferation of interest in disco (Zhang 1985; Xu 1987; Liao 1989). Although most criticism saw it as a vulgar entertainment phenomenon (Jiang 1985; Han 1986; Chen 1987) disco in these years served as an invisible catalyst, triggering the sexual revolution and the development of indigenous popular music. This chapter thus aims to discuss how disco has functioned and continues to function both as a music form and as a social and cultural drive vis-à-vis the social transformation of China; in particular, we will look at what the politics of disco were, how they evolved, and how the sexuality of disco transformed from the 1980s to the present.

Chinese Definitions of Disco The Chinese word for disco is Disike, a term which immediately displays western roots—because effectively, Disike does not mean anything.1 Each character has its multiple meanings, but in general, Di means ‘to enlighten’, Si means ‘this’, and Ke means ‘science’. These three terms together display no cultural logic underpinning a link between this western popular music form and Chinese traditions. Elderly people used to think that disco was called Tisigou (‘dance of kicking the dog to death’) because of the leg-­ kicks that featured in the dance. Corrected by the young, older generations later used another term, Choujinwu (‘cramp dance’), which was a reference to disco’s twisting body movements. As disco rapidly won over the urban youth across the nation, Bengdi (dance disco) and Diting (disco ballroom) also became popular terms. Beng means ‘to jump up and down’; this spontaneity of body movement symbolised a freedom of expression which offered a release from decades of ideological and bodily discipline.

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Disco and disco ballrooms not only represented a modern and cosmopolitan lifestyle, but were also a political gesture in the pursuit of long-banned individualism and liberalism, and thus embodied the tensions between modernity and tradition, politics and economy, gentility and lust. The social turmoil of 1989 showed how these factors clashed together in the process of globalisation and in the campaign against westernisation. Disco in China was never just a musical genre or dance style; rather, it was a complex cultural site within which social forces competed against each other, producing different effects and variations in order to serve their political, economic, cultural, and ideological purpose. While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when disco was first formally introduced to the Chinese public, the publication of the collection of short stories The Person Who Can Dance Disco in 1981 proves how quickly disco emerged in China.2 But despite its rampant popularity—for the sake of public security and ideological control—disco was criticised for being a symbol of artistic decadence in comparison to Chinese classical music. Some scholars (Zhou 1981; Huang 1982; Yu 1983) labelled disco a lowbrow music harmful to arts and culture. Others blamed it for damaging health from the perspective of medical science (Song 1983). There was even a report claiming that a young man’s life had been completely ruined by disco, a culture supposedly linked to hooligans, gangsters, gambling, and crime (Hangzhou Daily 1983, 3). A widespread enthusiasm for western democracy and political reform had already triggered student movements in Shanghai and Beijing prior to the 1989 upheaval, and the fact that many students were passionate fans of disco implicitly and inevitably politicised the genre. In the years of the disco fever, however, the government altered its strategy of control by incorporating disco into the official culture to serve its propaganda purposes. While this experiment failed to tame disco into a government-­ approved music and style, it nevertheless obliged disco to diversify, producing unexpected variations and effects. These can be roughly divided into three categories: political, cultural, and lifestyle-related. These were interconnected with each other, and left distinctive legacies. Each is now discussed in turn.

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The Political Assimilation of Disco in China Disco in China was subject to a process of political assimilation which aimed to revise its value and meaning, manage its cultural consumption, and reduce conflict between control and resistance. This kind of process often takes advantage of large-scale events that can act as a context for assimilation, and the 1979–1989 Sino-Vietnamese War provided the perfect opportunity to press disco into service as a form of official propaganda. Frontline soldiers loved dancing to disco music, and although this phenomenon effectively demonstrated how influential disco had become, it also made it possible to stage disco as a symbol of military spirit and masculine patriotism. In his 1988 anthology Disco of Fighting for Life and Death, the poet and writer Zhou Liangpei, who worked at the Yunnan branch of the state-owned China Writers Association, used terms such as Pinming Disike (‘Disco of fighting for life and death’), Maoerdong Disike (‘Foxhole Disco’), Shouqiang Disike (‘Pistol Disco’), and Niu Jin Disike (‘Sprain Disco’), conceptualising them as terms jokingly used by frontline soldiers (Zhou 1988). In his poetry, Zhou portrayed the brutal war in hyperbolic and poetic language: Dance the Disco of fighting for life and death Dance Disco madly Rockets fly in supersonic speed, leave bloody trajectories Cannons colour clouds red in the skies Rhythm in the roar, roar in the rhythm Disco music is resounding in the battlefield … Fight with no fear If we are scared to death, we will not fight We dance the Disco of fighting for life and death We dance the Disco of fighting for life and death Attack, seize positions Fight guns against guns, bayonets against bayonets We truly dance Disco madly We dance Disco to fight for life and death. (Zhou 1988, 23–24)

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The kind of rhetoric we encounter in Zhou, which binds disco to the military spirit needed to win the war, is an example of how the propaganda apparatus used disco to establish a link between modern lifestyles and patriotism. The journalist Wang Heping also juxtaposed the image of a ‘Disco Prince’ with the image of a commando captain in order to portray a valiant and modern soldier (Wang 1986). Although many may find this kind of parallel unconvincing, it is interesting to note that these images continue to circulate in contemporary China; for example, when a dance art school in Yancheng recently remade “Battlefield Disco” (Zhandi Disike) into a children’s dance programme and performed it at the local Spring Festival Gala in 2016, the official website People’s Daily Online wrote that ‘sometimes, original creativity is an attitude: its value lies in the concept, faith, and intellectual impetus behind that creativity’ (People’s Daily Online 2016). This kind of comment illustrates how the 1980s legacy of politicised disco still lingers in contemporary Chinese culture, and it is likely that it will not disappear anytime soon.

The Cultural Assimilation of Disco in China For centuries, the richness of Chinese culture has offered psychological compensation to its citizens for the country’s political, military, and economic turbulence. Although in his famous 1949 opening address at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Mao had signalled the end of the western military presence, by announcing that ‘the Chinese people had stood up’, this was not the end of western influence, especially as throughout the 1980s foreign languages, western philosophy, global politics, and popular culture all proved to hold great appeal for the masses. Enthusiasm for the West was seen as a threat to the communist regime, and disco was portrayed as evidence of China’s westernisation in terms of eroticism, immorality, and vulgarity. The scholar Le Yi even accused disco of risking the (hypothetical) disappearance of traditional arts and culture, such as the Peking Opera (Le 1985, 32). Because it was impossible to eliminate disco from China, a strategy of cultural assimilation was also employed, which sought to belittle its value and assert the government’s discursive authority over cultural production. A notable example of this was the invention of ‘Qigong Disco’, a hybrid form which linked disco to martial arts and ultimately to a form of exercise, with the dual aim of embedding disco into traditional Chinese culture while lowering its status as a cultural product. Qigong (meaning ‘life

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energy cultivation’) is regarded as the most mysterious part of the martial arts due to the invisibility of Qi (energy), which is deeply interlinked with Chinese tradition and culture. It was introduced as a method of Chinese medicine from the 1950s to the 1970s during a crisis in medical facilities,3 and became extremely widespread in the 1980s and 1990s, with over 60 million followers who practiced it every day, including politicians and scientists such as President Liu Shaoqi and Qian Xuesen, the father of Chinese rocketry (Cai 2017). Palmer has argued that the religious dimension was an important factor for the formation of ‘Qigong Fever’, and that at its apex it essentially became a spiritual movement (Palmer 2007). The fact that the ‘Qigong Fever’ overlapped with the disco fever provided a reasonable excuse to link the two together, thus downgrading disco in the hierarchy of arts and culture and balancing the conflicts between tradition and modernity, and local and global culture. Qigong tutor Wen Jiaxiu, for example, received governmental research grants and presented papers on Qigong Disco, lecturing hundreds of trainees in Guiyang, which was being reported as an innovative method of exercise in 1989 (Tian 1989, 70). Another striking example of the attempted integration of disco into Chinese culture can be found in some Peking Opera artists, who understood that young people in China were attracted to western popular music because of its melody and rhythm, and thus tried to win them back by modernising the art-form, quickening the rhythm, and adding stereotyped disco beats. These kinds of experiments were often condemned— some critics argued that they provoked the disappearance of the Peking Opera’s ‘aura’ and damaged its authenticity and heritage—but they were still pursued on an official level (Enxiao 1986, 46–47). The 1990 CCTV Chinese New Year Gala featured a children’s programme, Peking Opera Disco, which demonstrated the extent to which the government wanted to incorporate disco into official culture. Likely following official instructions, the wood drum dance drawn from the Miao culture was referred to as Dongfang Disike (‘Oriental Disco’) by Chen, who saw the dance’s performance in the USA as a victory of Chinese culture (Chen 1990, 175–179). Other comparisons were more absurd; Fu used the same ‘Oriental Disco’ label for Sa’erhe, a drum-beating dance performed at Tujia nationality funerals, positing a similarity between the two (Fu 1994, 43). Unsurprisingly, the creation of this kind of concept only looked like an attempt at political correctness, and generated no real cultural impact.

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Disco Lifestyles In the 1980s, disco symbolised the lifestyle of the wealthy West to Chinese people. Lin praised the diversity and modernity of the lifestyle in Guangzhou, where disco ballrooms and musical bars provided advanced cultural consumption in daily life (Lin 1985, 35–36). The modern disco lifestyle required that fans wear their best clothes when visiting Shanghai’s Disco ballrooms, where working-class people could dream of experiencing the atmosphere of expensive hotel discotheques (Schell 1988). Shen believed that disco—along with, incidentally, blue jeans—should not be regarded as signs of decadence from the West, but that instead the Party and society at large should try to understand the public’s wish for a change of lifestyle (Shen 1985, 34). Indeed, ten textbooks on how to disco dance were published in the immediate aftermath of its introduction into Chinese culture (Shi et al. 1985; Hua 1985; Sun 1986). However, the emphasis on how to dance soon shifted to how to exercise by dancing to disco, a shift mostly aimed at middle-aged and elderly women. Between 1987 and 1989, over 20 books on disco, disco exercise, and health were published with names such as Jianshen Disike (‘Fitness Disco’) or Yundong Disike (‘Exercise Disco’) (examples are Zhao and Deng 1987; Wang 1988; Zhang et al. 1989). While this glut of publications might not have transformed the image of disco from a lustful westernised form of entertainment to healthy local exercise, the campaign—which crucially passed disco from the urban youth to the elderly—planted the seeds for the eventual transformation of Chinese disco in the 1990s and 2000s. The government thus facilitated the progressive desexualisation, de-­ romanticisation, and ageing of Chinese disco. Disco exercise programmes were broadcast on TV, with their associated CDs produced and circulated throughout the 1990s. All these phenomena played a part in disco’s subsequent correlation with Guangchangwu (‘square dancing’) in the two decades that followed: a form of communal exercise organised in public spaces every morning and evening, square dancing grew into a national phenomenon practiced by middle-aged and elderly women across China. In spite of these developments, disco remained a driving force in liberating ordinary people’s lives in terms of their gender, sexuality, and relationships. As such, it was a force feared by the government but welcomed by the general public. Sexual politics had been tightly controlled by the government since 1949: relationships and marriage status were scrutinised at work, and any public discussion of sexual pleasure was prohibited as a

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sign of dangerous capitalist degeneration, leading to a highly desexualised and de-gendered society. Three decades of sexual repression had made people desperate for love, romance, and physical contact, and disco offered them the chance to experience these things, for the benefit of both the body and the soul. Borrowing a phrase from the title of Tim Lawrence’s pivotal volume on the history of American dance music culture in the 1970s (Lawrence 2003), we could say that in China too, love saved the day.

The Sexualisation of Disco Disco initially came to China as a heterosexual culture, and indeed the term ‘homosexuality’ was unknown to the general public of the 1980s.4 By the 1990s, gay disco ballrooms temporarily provided spaces for homosociality in few cities (Fu 2012). While disco did not produce an LGBT subculture in China, it did have a significant impact on the changing sexual cultural landscape of the 1980s. Ferrer (1999) argues that disco and ballroom culture enabled the Shanghainese to join the global sexual spectacle in the consumption of ‘foreign sex’—musically, culturally, and physically (Ferrer 1999). Zhu offers a portrait of China’s disco scene in his novel Disike Gongzhu Zhi Lian (‘Love of the Disco Princess’, 1987), where the story is framed by symbols of the West: disco, ‘sexy ladies’, ballroom singers, Marlboro cigarettes, cafés, wine, western cuisine, painters, art, museums, exhibitions, Romain Rolland, Michelangelo, New York, and so on. This was an imaginary world, which ordinary people at the time had no opportunity to travel to experience themselves, but which fuelled a strong and widespread desire to ‘reach out’. In these terms, disco became a medium, a bridge, and a magic mirror providing a form of entrance into the global community. The names of some of China’s ballrooms—Kiss, Dream of Love, Buyecheng (‘Sleepless City’), Haomen (‘Rich and Powerful Clan’), New York, and Barcelona—also attest to this desire. Turning to the music, Chinese disco was a simple combination of completely western disco music paired with Chinese lyrics. In comparison with the masculine vocal and symphonic style of revolutionary or propaganda songs, disco was fresh and modern, a feel epitomised by Zhang Qiang’s high-pitched, soft, girly voice, the use of electronics, and delicate melodies. The rhythm of disco awoke long-suppressed physical instincts, and its

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intimate, seductive, erotic movements invisibly accelerated the sexual revolution and challenged the sexual politics of China in the 1980s. Pan and Huang identified that changes in this decade manifested in sexual philosophy, sexual representation, sexual behaviour, sexual relations, and feminism (Pan and Huang 2013). Disco, dance culture, and ballrooms played a unique role in redefining attitudes to music, the body, and social life in this sexual revolution, in ways which fundamentally rewrote the rules of romance, marriage, and family for subsequent generations. Perhaps the power of disco can even be traced in what Wu has singled out as four surges in the number of divorces between 1949 and 1989: while the first three were politically driven by the government, the last one, in the 1980s, was driven by ordinary people whose desire for love and freedom might have been nurtured in discos, and who needed to act upon it in their everyday life (Wu 2006). Following the desexualised and de-gendered environment of China from 1949 to 1979, disco music became the song of the siren, seducing the masses to follow a path to their own heaven and to enjoy the long-lost voluptuousness of music, sexualising their mundane lives to ready them for a new world. Chairman Mao’s famous Yanan Talk in 1942 set the tone of a cultural policy whose primary task was to strengthen the new communist state’s ideological control. Music and dance were revolutionised and masculinised to serve patriotism and nationalism, in the form of Geming Gequ (‘revolutionary songs’) and Yangbanxi, the Modern Peking Opera. The song and dance epic Dongfanghong (‘The East is Red’), which played in cinemas from 1965 onwards, also offers a perfect example of the official marriage between music, dance, and politics in China at this time. It was not until the 1980s that the first incarnations of a more seductive popular music were introduced to mainland audiences, via Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng was criticised for being ‘decadent’ and ‘voluptuous’, but she still became a national idol. However even going beyond Teng’s melodic and soft ‘voluptuousness’, disco was aurally, bodily, and visually sensual, and portrayed a strong sense of lust which greatly appealed to the urban youth. The gathering of people in public spaces mainly for social dance in couples (Jiaoyiwu) became a perceived threat for the government at the time. In June 1980, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of

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Culture prohibited all dance parties in public places, such as parks, squares, restaurants, and streets. The announcement stated: This type of dance parties has caused many problems to public security. Some people dance disgracefully, lustfully, and immorally. Dancing places are disordered. Hooligans fight with each other, molest and insult women, and steal other people’s belongings, which often leads to the dancers’ death. The general public are firmly against it, and ask for prohibition (…) cheek to cheek, chest to chest, and body rubbing against body must be prohibited. (Li and Zhu 2009)

This attempted prohibition of dance culture was ill-advised, and in any case, the increasing popularity of disco effectively made it impossible. In May 1983, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Culture made another announcement which attempted to contain immoral and indecent dancing, by which work units and individuals were banned from organising dance parties. As was to be expected, however, this prohibition was inefficient, and only served to transfer such parties from the public to the domestic sphere. Here, erotic dances such as Heidengwu (‘dancing in the dark’, where people could freely and safely grope each other in the dark) and Tiemianwu (‘cheek-to-cheek dancing’) rapidly proliferated, in turn stimulating an increase in extramarital affairs and sexual freedom. Perhaps realising that it was unable to take control over these practices in a practical sense, the government was eventually forced to change its policies: the ‘Notification on Strengthening the Management of Dancing Parties’, which was jointly released by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPC and by the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Culture, shifted the tone from prohibition to limitation, and allowed four ballrooms to open for foreigners and overseas Chinese in Beijing. In April 1985, the municipal government of Tianjin released the ‘Interim Procedures for the Management of Dancing Parties’, which finally acknowledged the legitimacy of ballroom businesses and dance culture. At this point, ballrooms mushroomed all across China, giving disco the opportunity to reach its peak. Ballrooms and dancing parties officially became a social place for dating, and work units organised weekly dance parties for their employees. A well-known dance tutor, Yang Yi, recalled these changes in Beijing: Many young ladies did not dare to dress up and get made up in daily life. At work units, a fashionable hairstyle was enough to make people class you as indecent. They had to wait for a dancing party organised by their work unit.

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Then they could then dress up and get made up casually for the party, but in fact, this casualness was the result of several days of careful planning. (Li and Zhu 2009)

Regardless of whether ordinary people were fully aware of what was happening, disco music, dance, parties, and fashion functioned together to boost sexual drive and public foreplay and to ‘sex up’ their mundane lives in the 1980s. This sexualisation was natural and personal, but also social and political, and as such, the multi-level nature of its process reflected the complex overall transformation of China.

Desexualisation of Disco On the opposite side of the spectrum, disco was being desexualised in relation to traditional morality, indigenous culture, and communist ideologies. Because it was impossible to change the music and still call it disco, a practical approach was to control the lyrics in order to filter out indecent content. Three Chinese covers of Modern Talking’s 1986 hit “Brother Louie” exemplify how disco was desexualised and rebranded as a music of love and romance in order to mask its overtly sexual content and still make it entertaining to the general public. The original, released by the German duo, spoke about two men competing for a woman’s love. Sandy Lam, “Liansuo Fanying” (“Chain Reaction”, 1986) As China’s window to the outside world, Hong Kong was the hotbed of Chinese disco in the 1980s. Local DJs Alex and Patrick Delay remixed western disco hits (especially Italo disco), which since 1986 had been released by Face Records in the highly influential series Hollywood East Star Trax (Hedong) and Master Mix (Mengshi), and imported into China by the Guangzhou branch of the China Record Corporation since 1987. Hedong and Mengshi educated and entertained mainland musicians and audiences, and left indelible marks on society and on individuals. Mixed with another hit by Modern Talking, “Cheri, Cheri Lady” (1985), “Chain Reaction” was a Cantonese cover performed by the female pop star Sandy Lam. Written by Richard Lam, the lyrics expressed a feminist attitude towards love and lust, with the female voice taking control over her desire.5 In the 1980s Cantonese popular music dominated the mainland market, and almost every Hong Kong pop star could have easily

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won millions of mainland fans; however, “Chain Reaction” was only popular in the Cantonese-speaking Pearl River Delta metropolitan area. Li Yong, “Nüwu” (“Witch”, 1987) The disco album Nüsheng (“Goddess”) was released in March 1987  in China, with its predominant themes of sexual liberation and burning lust. The track “Witch” is about a fairytale-style romance; it was performed by the male singer Li Yong, and was never a hit. While in comparison to other songs “Witch” was not explicitly sexual, in the title track “Goddess” and the track “Lust”, lyricist Wang Jifu explicitly stressed the pleasures of love and sex.6 “Goddess” portrayed a romantic picture of making love, and metaphors about breasts and genitalia could not hide its sense of sensuality; “Lust” appealed to the general shift towards sexual freedom and acceptance which had taken place during the period of reform in the country. The theme and content of this album were explicitly focused on love, lust, and freedom, a stance which was tolerable during the ‘utopian’ period of the 1980s, but later seen as evidence of westernisation and ideological corruption in the later campaign attempting to eliminate the obscene, the indecent, and the erotic from Chinese popular culture. “Lust” was sung by Liu Huan, one of China’s leading popular musicians and also the performer of “You and Me” with Sarah Brightman, the theme song of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Liu is famous for his gentility, a key quality in Chinese tradition and classic aesthetics. His involvement in the 1980s with a rather ‘lustful’ strand of disco is just one of the factors that, in retrospect, demonstrates the pervasiveness of disco fever three decades ago. Deng Jieyi, “Ludeng xia de Xiaoguniang” (“A Little Girl Under the Streetlight”, 1987) The female singer Deng Jieyi’s “A little girl under the streetlight” was one of the biggest disco hits of the 1980s. This song appeared on the compilation album Fever 1987 I (1987), which stayed in the top three of the album charts for three years. Musically, it was sexy and seductive with a stereotypical disco beat, rhythm, and electronic sound; the lyrics, however, were completely desexualised, describing a gentle relationship of care, love, and responsibility between a kind stranger and a little girl.7 The

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mismatch between the ‘sexy’ music and the desexualised lyrics did not hinder this song’s popularity. The different levels of popularity of the three covers discussed here cannot easily be explained from the perspective of style or taste, but it is obvious that the story of a little girl under the streetlight would have no problem with the censorship and promotional systems controlled by the government, which might have been the reason for its prominence. The desexualisation of disco was not solely engineered via the elimination of erotic lyrics; its function and market were also reset, as the aforementioned promotion of disco as a form of exercise for middle-aged people demonstrates: this was the age group who had earlier experienced the politicisation of dance in the form of loyalty dances to Chairman Mao (Zhongziwu) during the Cultural Revolution, and who were later involved with the emergence of square dancing in the 1990s. The year 1989 marked the sorrowful end of a golden age of liberty and diversity, and the social trauma of 1989 drove the younger generations away from political interests. Disco music, dance, and ballrooms were still popular, but the disco fever dwindled in cities, moving to less densely populated metropolitan areas, such as county towns. The introduction of other forms of entertainment, such as Hollywood blockbusters, also distracted young people away from disco in the 1990s. In the aforementioned context of square dancing, middle-aged and elderly women became the loyal practitioners of a form of disco—but this was no longer the same disco that had kindled desire in young people in the 1980s. Indeed, popular music, ethnic music, and propaganda music had been remixed in the disco style for square dancing; examples of this are Zuixuan Minzufeng (‘the most dazzling folk style’), Zouxikou (‘Go West’), and Nanniwan (‘Nanni Bay’), which were played for square dancers all over China every day, much to the disgust of the club dancers, who regarded western disco as the original and authentic form of disco music.

Resexualisation of Disco The accumulation of cultural exchange and a flurry of academic studies since the 1990s have allowed Chinese people to gain a better understanding of western cultures and homosexuality, including the LGBT origins of disco (Li and Wang 1992; Li 1998; Zhang 1994; Fang 1995). Although homosexuality was deleted from the state’s list of psychological diseases in 2001, Shanghai Pride was approved in 2008, and LGBT communities

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have challenged the government’s position through different approaches, LGBT politics are still not legal in China (Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015). In this climate of political restructuring, cultural activism with a political edge is a practical, and more importantly a safer, approach to push forward the LGBT agenda, and disco offers gay men a method of performativity which is both a form of nostalgic entertainment and an act of political protest. In some Chinese cities, disco-themed nights are currently being organised on a regular basis by bars and clubs such as REDDOG and the cosmopolitan Sanlitun Soho in Beijing, which runs its ‘Disco Fever’ party every Friday. REDDOG’s LGBT Parties are promoted with ‘we are proud of LGBT’ posters, making it clear that the establishment does not hide its identity. Empowered by mobile media platforms such as WeChat, REDDOG attracts a group of Chinese and foreign clubbers, and also provides free courses offering to teach clubbers how to dance sexily and fashionably every month. The creation of a scene which strives for sexiness, fabulousness, and glamour aims to reclaim disco, taking it back from its middle-aged domain which younger clubbers consider mechanical, boring, and lifeless; now, fashionable men and women, and stunning drag queens, are trying to remake it as energetic, passionate, and sensual as it once was. The government allows these parties to happen, but also keep a close eye on the public and private spheres in which they exist. In order to control LGBT influence in public, police officers and IT company employees monitor online information constantly, sensitive topics and content are deleted swiftly, and the government takes action to terminate any offline activities whenever it deems it necessary. Consequently, business owners and activity organisers have to exercise a degree of self-censorship to avoid prompting raids and crackdowns. The performativity of LGBT identities thus often becomes a kind of self-entertainment in places which are open but also underground. REDDOG, for instance, is open to everyone, but it is also underground in the sense that it is not widely publicised, and therefore not well known to the public. The fact that businesses such as REDDOG keep a low profile and do not involve themselves with political movements as a general rule has accelerated the development of a depoliticised pink economy in China. While disco has become an important part of the contemporary LGBT lifestyle, the pink economy also drives this lifestyle towards a kind of depoliticised consumerism rather than a set of politicised cultural activities. A notable example of this is the Beijing Queer Film Festival, which

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had strong activist slant, and which has been banned since 2015. Artists and activists still organise it, but at present, the festival can only be hosted in the arts centres of foreign embassies. This cultural policy produces a bizarre situation in which disco is simultaneously a mass culture (in the form of square dancing) and a subculture (in the form of club parties), and the government has employed administrative means to treat these two groups differently: square dancing is actively promoted as a positive lifestyle, a dedicated square dancing TV channel broadcasts daily, and local, regional, and national square dancing contests are organised. Meanwhile, the club scene remains excluded from governmental events or support.

Conclusion: Waiting for the Next Revolution Disco has been intertwined with the politicisation of Chinese popular culture since the 1980s, and given its current status, it is likely that it will continue to engage with future social movements. Although its western origins are no longer a political issue, its sexual politics remain contested; a clear example of this are drag queen performers borrowing the concept of Fanchuan (‘cross-dressing’) from Peking Opera to enter into the mainstream market, then being criticised for staging a ‘perverted’ cult of male femininity. The main political difference between the 1980s and the 2010s is that while the pursuit of sexual excitement in the 1980s was part of a process of naturalisation, aiming to liberate the long-repressed enjoyment of love and sex, today’s pursuit of sexual stimulation is a process of socialisation which demands the recognition of the equal human rights of LGBT communities. Disco remains unable to escape from the restrictions of heteronormativity inherent to communist ideologies and traditional moralities and cultural practices, but it continues to challenge this hegemony in order to achieve potential social change. Zhao’s children’s book Xiage Jiemu Disike (Next Programme Disco, 1997) allows us to look back and reflect on the unpredictable fate of disco in China. In it, Zhao employs disco as a symbol of western modernity in order to subtly belittle its power and stress the importance of the Chinese tradition, which the book urges children to inherit in the name of devotion and patriotism. The year 1997 was deeply significant because of the UK’s handover of Hong Kong back to China and the related shift from capitalism to socialism. By then, the disco fever was long gone, and the new wave had not yet flared up, but disco was still being referred to as an important marker of the era, in areas ranging from children’s education to

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political ideologies. In this sense, disco has been deeply rooted in China’s culture and society for decades. Disco will always have opportunities to thrive, as has more recently been evidenced by pop star Yang Kun’s album Disco in 2010, Zhang Qiang’s comeback album No Question of Disco in 2013, and the 2015 vocal hit “Ordinary Disco” (Putong Disike). By now, the Chinese government is highly experienced in managing cultural politics. Under the circumstances of tight control over LGBT and queer politics, the question of whether disco has the power to help to bring the next sexual revolution is unanswerable as yet; however, as the earliest Chinese disco hit Platform (Zhantai) has it, disco is a ‘long, long platform’ of sexual revolution—a place where passengers come and go, and where the next journey is always about to start.

Notes 1. The term Disike has been translated as Dishigao in Hong Kong in the Cantonese dialect. 2. This book is a collection of 12 short stories aiming to portray the new look of China since the economic reform. The use of the title of one story as the book title demonstrates how novel and exciting disco was to the general public at that time. For more details, see Xie (1981). 3. For examples on theories on Qigong as medicine, see the theories and methods outlined in Zhang and Sun (1988). 4. There were plenty of terms referring to homosexuality in mandarin and dialects for centuries, but referring to homosexuality as Tongxinglian and gay as Tongzhi/comrade did not become common terms until the second half of the 1990s. 5. The lyrics of “Chain reaction” are as follows: Because I met you, my heart could no longer be calm Because I met you, I felt reaction with my eyes, ears, nose, throat, and skin … Don’t you fight it baby, love is chain reaction, like an explosion … Every time when you kissed me gently, I felt my body temperature burning up for you I felt my pulse screaming for you Fire alarm was going to ring, I saw stars in my eyes … I could not control the chain reaction My little finger and my mind were reacting constantly I could not control the chain reaction My nevi and my pelvic bone were reacting strongly. (Lam 1986)

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6. The lyrics of “Witch” are as follows: Hey, you are an innate witch, not a fairy in disguise You have that mysterious charm Hey, you are a true witch with ultimate self-confidence You never care about other people’s praise Whenever you say those charming spells I feel that the world is such a wonderful place. (Li 1987a) The lyrics of “Goddess” are as follows: Night, enchanted night Moonlight is like the flowing spring I am reading misty poetry in front of bed When you slowly take off your thin clothes Goddess, my Goddess, you look like a white jade sculpture … Snow mountains stand tall and erect, glittering and bright The land is fertile, flat, and soothing. (Li 1987b) The lyrics of “Lust” are as follows: Primitive adolescence awake It hits the heart of human beings It brings eternal hunger from the uncivilised age Oh lust, It had been condemned long long time ago It had been judged as an original sin Oh lust, It had been repressed a long long time ago It had been defined as a principal sin Poor human beings struggle in depression And want to be freed from all restrictions. (Liu 1987b) 7. The lyrics of “a little girl under the streetlight” are as follows: Hey, there is a little girl crying under the streetlight Nobody knows where she comes from Hey, the little girl is crying sadly Nobody knows whether she was abandoned by someone Or where she should go now? Dear little sister, please stop crying Where is your home? I will send you back Dear little sister, please stop crying

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I will warm up your heart with my love Oh, do not be sad and do not cry, your mom is waiting for you at night Oh, do not be sad and do not cry, I will send you home at night. (Deng 1987)

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Women de Qishi: Duo Woguo Shengyue Yishu Ruogan Wenti de zai Renshi). People’s Music (Renmin Yinyue) 4: 18–22. Zhou, Liangpei. 1988. Disco of Fighting for Life or Death (Pinming Disike). Yunnan People’s Publishing House (Yunnana Renmin Chubanshe). Zhu, Yuqi. 1987. Love of the Disco Princess (Disike Gongzhu Zhi Lian). Yellow River Arts and Literature Publishing House (Huanghe Wenyi Chubanshe).

Discography Deng, Jieyi. 1987. “Ludeng xia de Xiaoguniang” in Various, Fever 1987 I. Inner Mongolia audio and video publishing house, cassette. Lam, Sandy. 1986. “Liansuo Fanying” (“Chain Reaction”) in Sandy Lamb [de luxe edition], Warner Music, cassette. Li, Yong. 1987a. “Nüwu” (“Witch”) in Various. Goddess, Mongolia audio and video publishing house, cassette. ———. 1987b. “Goddess” in Various. Goddess, Mongolia audio and video publishing house, cassette. Liu, Hong. 1987a. “Platform” (Zhantai), in Various, Fever 1987 I. Inner Mongolia audio and video publishing house, cassette. Liu, Huan. 1987b. “Lust” in Various. Goddess, Mongolia audio and video publishing house, cassette. Luo, Tianyi, and He Yan. n.d. “Ordinary Disco”, released online at http://www. bilibili.com. Various. 1987–1994. Master Mix (Mengshi), Guangzhou branch of China Record Corporation, vol. 1–9, cassettes. ———. 1987–1995. Hollywood East Star Trax (Hedong), Guangzhou branch of China Record Corporation, vol. 1–10, Cassettes. Yang, Kun. 2010. Disco, Asia Entertainment Media (China), CD. Zhang, Qiang. 2013. No Question of Disco, Modern Sky, CD Album.

Non-stop, I Want to Live Non-stop: The Role of Disco in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia Jakub Machek

For the entire state socialist era in Czechoslovakia, which lasted from 1948 until 1989, the authorities viewed all cultural—and especially musical— influences from the West as suspicious, if not downright dangerous. New popular Western music was generally condemned and banned, and its fans were sometimes even persecuted. In contrast, disco music was positively received by musicians and critics. Moreover, from the time it was first heard in Czechoslovak discos it was tolerated by the authorities, who regarded it as a kind of controlled diversion with an educational purpose. As was the case elsewhere in the world, the global genre was localised, but its global scope also played an important role in disco’s local popularity. For participants in the scene, this was a chance to experience a cosmopolitan and global culture that was often cordoned off from local practices. Big discos were places where young people could taste both the high life and this global culture (Farrer 1999, 149–150). In this chapter, I show why disco was so readily accepted by the Czechoslovak authorities and wider society, and illustrate its role in the late socialist period. At the same time, I explore the meanings that disco J. Machek (*) Department of Media Studies, Metropolitan University Prague, Prague, Czechia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_8

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took on, and how they were negotiated among the authorities, musicians, and young, enthusiastic crowds of dancers and listeners. My analysis focuses on the discourses about disco which are to be found in Czech music and popular magazines, as well as in official cultural policy journals1 and administrative guidelines and regulations. I also draw on interviews with individuals with first-hand knowledge of the Czechoslovak disco scene. Following Richard Dyer, this chapter assesses whether his three important characteristics of disco—eroticism, romanticism, and materialism— also apply to Czechoslovak disco. Hence, the discussion explores whether the socialist disco can be seen as ‘a riot of consumerism, dazzling in its technology, overwhelming in its scale, lavishly gaudy in the mirrors and tat of discotheques’, where dancers can access a world beyond the everyday through this experience of materialistic excess and romance (Dyer 2006, 104–108).

Post-Invasion, ‘Normalised’ Czechoslovak Society in the 1970s During the de-Stalinisation era of the 1960s, political and cultural restrictions had gradually been relaxed in Czechoslovakia. While the public welcomed Western culture, the authorities were slow to allow it into the country. Nevertheless, the continued easing of restrictions resulted in a blossoming both of high art and of popular culture in line with broader world trends. This culminated in the late 1960s, when Czechoslovakia had fully opened up to Western influences and quickly adapted to the latest developments, especially in popular music. This path was suddenly blocked in 1968, when Warsaw Pact troops invaded the country and installed new authorities. Their goals were to restore communist order, subdue the public, and prevent free development. Quickly sensing the impossibility of restoring the old Stalinist model, which had relied upon repression and public enthusiasm for building socialism in the 1950s, the authorities sought to build a new consensus in order to regain the support of the people. As Paulina Bren writes, the regime opted to give ‘its citizens a modicum of self-realisation within the area of consumption’ (Bren 2002, 126). As ‘compensation for the lack of independence permitted in politics (…) [c]itizens were encouraged to define and locate themselves in a private world’ (Bren 2002, 126–127). Western-inspired popular culture was thereby used as a tool to establish

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some degree of popular acceptance of enforced domination. Propaganda shifted its focus to modes of popular culture production, which were carefully prescribed and controlled. Although some participation in communist rituals and ceremonies was still required, the core of each person’s existence was their private life. A substantial gap therefore arose between the official ideology and private lived experiences of materialism and (restricted) consumerism. Tight controls were again imposed on the media, and all cultural production was carefully planned to suit the government’s ideological needs. Musical activities were regulated and restricted, and musicians had to obtain official permission to perform publicly. Cultural policy writers negatively described the history of music up until that point as overly influenced by Western capitalism. The pop music of the 1960s was dismissed as nihilistic, commercial, anarchic, escapist, and displaying Western, anti-­ socialist tendencies (Železný 1977, 161, 225). In 1974, all professional musicians had to undergo a ‘retraining examination’: this involved being examined in musical theory, but they were also questioned about their personal political views (which were expected to be in accordance with official Marxism-Leninism), and had to perform part of their repertoire before the commission. The examination shrunk the national musical scene considerably, with only just over half (about 53 per cent) of all active musicians passing the test (Vaněk 2010, 392). The Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party repeatedly turned its gaze to popular music: its members discussed and attempted to decide the course that popular music should take, and to shape its role in society. Their demands stressed the overcoming of negative Western models, as the chairman of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers and Concert Artists, Lubomír Železný, explained: ‘In the long run, we must strive to create musical entertainment that remains popular because it is creative and fresh-sounding and does not compromise on the need for artistic value and ideological engagement’ (Železný 1977, 161).2 Socialist popular music, he argued, should promote ‘feelings of optimism as well as higher human and social values such as love for one’s native land, nature, socially beneficial work, and the pursuit of human knowledge’ (Železný 1977, 225). However, these requirements only really existed at the level of repeated official declarations—in practice, no-one had any idea how they could be met. Uncertainties about the prescribed form of post-invasion popular music, alongside the fear that their songs would stray beyond the abstract

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remit of socialist entertainment, led musicians to produce what was labelled ‘bubble gum’ music in the early 1970s. These songs had simple catchy melodies, and childish, nonsensical lyrics. As the new regime was consolidated and musicians grew more accustomed to mandatory state involvement by the mid-1970s, mainstream pop output became more predictable. Pavel Klusák offers a taxonomy of the main types of pop songs that dominated radio and television programming and record labels’3 releases in the 1970s: songs with explicitly political lyrics, odes to happiness, the joys of living, and the glory of the nation, and—most popular of all with audiences—songs promoting resignation, passivity, and a placid existence (Klusák 2018). At the same time, the country’s music critics, audiences, and even the musicians themselves regularly observed a Czechoslovak pop music industry in crisis due to its loss of contact with Western musical development, the limited access to it for younger musicians, and the featureless nature of its lyrics. In short, mainstream music production had lapsed into a period of dullness and stagnation. In this context, the emergence of disco, which was instantly popular with young disco-goers, was seen as a much-needed breath of fresh air. The disco sound was welcomed and quickly emulated by almost all mainstream pop music stars across the generations. The notoriously slow-to-adapt recording industry started releasing disco EPs, and radio and TV programmes broadcast disco beats. The rapid acceptance of a new Western genre so closely linked to capitalist and consumerist ways of life, and carrying an eroticism forbidden by puritanical authorities,4 may seem quite surprising today. Disco, after all, did meet none of the state’s prerequisites for socialist popular music. Moreover, it emerged between two repressive campaigns targeting musicians and fans of other new Western genres. In 1976, members of the underground music scene centred around the band Plastic People of the Universe were arrested and put on trial, and some were imprisoned for months. Later, in 1983, the punk and new wave boom of the early 1980s was stifled through more moderate repressive measures.

The Disco Decade The first to discover disco music were young disco-goers. As had been the case elsewhere, the popularity of this new kind of venue preceded the creation of the genre. Discos started to appear in Prague in 1967 in venues like Reduta, Music F club, Arocola club, and D-club. They played a wide

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variety of music ranging from rock (and later hard and glam rock) through actual pop hits to old Schlager music. At first they were organised by youth groups and university clubs, but they later found a home in cafés and wine bars, where they pushed out existing bands. The first disc jockeys were mainly music publicists and critics who owned personal collections of actual foreign recordings (Tůma 1985, 8), and over the next few decades this would remain the most important qualification for all aspiring DJs. Access to foreign products was limited, and most means of obtaining Western recordings were of dubious legality (Havlík 2012). By the mid-1970s, disco music had taken over discos. Reports of the trend in the music press described young disco-goers as enthusiastic early adopters: people who ‘immediately grasped that this was entertainment geared to their needs. They influenced the playlist and determined disco music’s basic features’ (Tvarohová 1986, 58). Period surveys also suggest that discos were mainly the domain of the youngest generation; the most frequent attendees were aged between 15 and 17, with attendance rates dropping sharply among those aged 25 (Hepner and Mar ̌íková 1975, 87). As the popularity of discos and disco music soared among young people, disco became central to their identities as something that distinguished them from older generations. The trendy Western music and dance style offered them a hidden pocket of post-invasion normalised society where they could leave the reality of a late socialist society and culture into a world resembling the West. The Czechoslovak youth welcomed the new dance style as the antithesis of the mainstream culture that pervaded the media and public space. Disco’s deep role in these young people’s lives is made clear by the personal listings in the youth lifestyle magazine Mladý sve ť (‘Young World’). These listings began to appear in 1979 and were a mainstay of the publication over the next decade. Advertisers generally mentioned disco in their personal introduction and positive attributes: it was clearly regarded as a sign of hipness. Disco thus formed a key part of personal identity (e.g. ‘Disco-boy, 21/175 [cm], seeks a girl for shared adventures’), and was the most important aspect of leisure time and social gatherings (‘Two good-­ looking [guys], 20 years old /167[cm], 168 [cm], who love to dance, seek 2 good-looking disco-devils. Photos essential’). Occasionally, the word boldly appeared on its own with a seemingly self-explanatory meaning: ‘Two [guys] looking for two girls from Prague under 20. Disco’ (Mladý sve ť 1979). It was not until the second half of the 1980s that listings mocking disco began to appear. These were posted by heavy metal

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fans in particular as disco’s appeal faded, at least for members of other subcultures. To illustrate this point, we can compare two Mladý sve ť personals: the first is a 1979 advertisement which included disco in a list of hobbies linked to other music genres (‘Two sincere [guys], 18/170 [cm], civil engineering students, seek cool friends. Hiking, guitar but also disco’ (Mladý sve ť 1979), and the second is from 1988 expressing open disdain for the genre: ‘Don’t let it bite, disco’s a parasite’ (Mladý sve ť 1988). As most of the mentions of it in the examined periodicals show, disco’s popularity with the younger generation was a spontaneous grassroots phenomenon. Music journalists observed the disco fever sweeping through the Czechoslovak youth. Their reviews of disco tracks often alluded to young tastes, particularly their preference for Western music: ‘Young people in discos will confirm whether Discobolos’s rhythms are as good to dance to as the foreign originals’ (Melodie 1977, 297). Indeed, musicians and critics were generally positive about disco’s appeal to the young, in sharp contrast to their views on the popularity of local hard rock bands like Katapult and Citrón among young apprentice labourers. That the fans of these local bands were mostly male teenage apprentices was seen to confirm the crudeness and poor quality of their recordings, which apparently appealed only to uneducated, ignorant listeners. Reviewers and other musicians derided these bands for their unsophisticated music and lyrics. To track the duration of the disco craze, we can draw on the Kramerius digital archive, which includes scans of Czech periodicals and some books from the time. As shown in Graph 1, searches for the word ‘disco’ in individual years revealed only a few references in the Czech press in 1975 and 1976, followed by sharp rises in 1977 and 1978 and a continuously high frequency from 1979 until about 1987. A significant decline then set in as the disco scene died out in the late 1980s. The first references to disco music described the genre abroad and its popularity among dance-crazed Czech teenagers, along with reflections on what disco’s rise could mean for the Czechoslovak music industry. Critics expressed their hopes of change and the reinvigoration of the local scene: ‘Modern [i.e. disco] bands and singers could replace the dominant mainstream sound’ (Melodie 1978, 233). After the 1968 invasion, the official stance had been to reject Western commercial models and seek inspiration from other socialist states, a position reinforced by the deliberate lack of coverage of Western music in the Czechoslovak media. Later, however, Western disco was hailed as a positive development, and as something

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Řada 1

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1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989

Graph 1  Appearances of the word ‘disco’ in newspapers and journals in the Kramerius online archive5

which might reverse the aforementioned decline in mainstream music production, as František Horáček stated in a review of a Discobolos EP: Wherever the disco wave is headed, the fact is that its arrival in our mono-­ culture has contributed significantly to the exposure and criticism of its opposite, which is still stagnating on our recording scene, regardless of any musical developments. (Melodie 1977, 297)

The First Generation Unsurprisingly, disco soon caught on among many singers and musicians, who saw it as a potential way to resolve the crisis in the mainstream music industry. Almost all of them were quick to board the disco train. Particularly in the early years of the Czechoslovak disco craze, the vast majority of disco music consisted of locally produced cover versions. This followed an established trend, as since the 1960s, Czechoslovak singers had often recorded covers of popular foreign hits with alternative Czech lyrics. Since the original foreign recordings were inaccessible to most of the population, this use of their melodies guaranteed local artists a measure of popularity. It also ensured airplay by broadcasters, who could not play the originals because of strict quotas on Western content.

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The oldest track of the period to be considered a disco song is Alena Tichá’s 1976 cover of Abba’s ‘Mamma Mia’. The main output started to follow in the spring of 1977, when almost every pop star of the era recorded a disco number. Most of these mainstream performers—from the country’s most popular singers, Karel Gott, Naďa Urbánková, and Hana Zagorová,6 to the rock bands Olympic and Bacily—had launched their careers in the more liberal 1960s. A few newborn stars of the 1970s, including Jir ̌í Schelinger and Jana Kratochvílová, jumped on the bandwagon as well. Even Milan Chladil and Yvetta Simonová, who had both originally found fame back in the 1950s, released disco songs in 1978. The number of disco recordings rose and rose over the next few years, but despite this trend most late 1970s disco output brought no real change to mainstream Czechoslovak pop. The new disco songs did not significantly depart from previous releases by their performers, whose broad repertoires ranged from cantilenas to folk-style music. At best, the disco sound slightly enlivened and diversified their range. The only new elements were the addition of the four-on-the-floor disco rhythm and disco-­ characteristic Philly strings and synthesiser sounds. Other features, including performance style and staging, remained unchanged. The new lyrics, which were mostly sourced from the same few authors, covered the same neutral, upbeat, or humorous topics as in the pre-disco era; they were entirely divorced from life on the dance floor and the experiences of the younger generation. This is perhaps clearest in the 1979 television performance of ‘Jsou to nervy’ (‘It’s nerves’), a cover of The Village People’s ‘In the Navy’, which featured four singers who had been stars in the early 1960s (Silvestr 2012). The whole performance was shot in the style of an Estrada-type TV show, with the older men in tuxedos surrounded by cabaret dancers, singing about the problems of ageing. Only the groove hinted at the disco origins of the song.7 During these years, the Czechoslovak pop music star system remained closed, with only a small select group of entertainers allowed to appear on air and release recordings. The small number of approved popular artists meant that their releases tended to sell well and occupy the airwaves from morning to night. Large audiences were guaranteed, a situation that changed little over time. Under these conditions, there were very few chances for new disco specialists to break through. Indeed, because of the need for expensive and hard-to-obtain Western recording equipment, new talent could not directly emerge from the disco fan scene; the only possible path involved gradually emerging through established structures by

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playing in the backing bands of individual stars. This was the route taken by all the singers and projects who were interested in producing disco music in the 1970s and 1980s. For the purposes of the present work, we will identify the artists of these two eras as the first and second generation of Czech disco singers and producers, respectively. In fact, the first generation consisted mostly of older mainstream pop stars, and only two successful projects focused specifically on disco, ORM and Discobolos. The appeal of disco sounds, especially cover versions, led to the heavy radio rotation of Czechoslovak disco songs (Melodie 1978, 78), but it did not ensure their positive critical reception. While reviewers appreciated young disco dancers and their favourite Western hits, they had little respect for the local recordings. Cover songs were seen as particularly questionable, as critic František Horáček commented, referencing their overabundance: [Producers] doggedly believe that the young listener, perfectly familiar with the original of this new global release (it has long been available on reel-to-­ reel tapes), has been eagerly awaiting local covers, but at best they’re an embarrassment if not a joke. (Melodie 1978, 233)

For these reviewers, the main problem with Czechoslovak disco was the low-grade technical quality of local studios whose obsolete recording equipment could not achieve a similar sound to the originals. Added to this were composers and arrangers focused solely on slavish imitation. The endless attempts of almost every pop performer in the country to use disco to preserve or revive their career prompted more jabs from Horáček: The others are caught up in the labyrinth of ideas of local producers and performers about what modern disco should look like. In practice, the drummer beats four-on-the-floor, and the old warbling organists boast that they already master the synthesizer. Pavel Novák is now performing like this and maybe we’ll soon see the Moravanka [a famous brass band] as well. (Melodie 1978, 9)

In the second half of the 1970s, the Munich sound flooded discos across Europe, including Czechoslovakia (Tůma 1985, 36), with the band Boney M becoming especially popular in Eastern Europe. Critics, however, detected a certain brass band quality to songs like ‘Rivers of Babylon’ (Melodie 1978, 247), a tendency even more pronounced in the Czech

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version sung by Karel Gott (Melodie 1979, 105). This is likely to have made the recording feel more familiar to central European audiences. Only two disco projects of the period were regarded as acceptably produced and edging closer to foreign disco. The first, Discobolos, was a studio band formed by brothers Karel and Jiří Svoboda. Karel was an important songwriter and hit-maker of the 1960s whose success later continued right into the twenty-first century, while Jir ̌í mostly composed film soundtracks. The two joined forces just as disco was emerging in Czechoslovakia to produce disco songs that combined live recordings with electronic mixing and mastering. Discobolos was the backing band on several EPs and also released two albums under its own name. The first, an eponymous record which came out in 1978, featured original songs by the brothers, while the second, Disco/Sound (1979), presented disco arrangements of Karel’s older pop-style songs. These recordings won critical praise for their technical flair and originality. Even the professional music journal Hudební rozhledy, which specialised mainly in classical music, commended their use of technology in their version of disco (Hudební rozhledy 1979, 507). The highest compliments were reserved for the approach to recreating a Western sound, but in fact, in 1979 their records were already considered rather outdated compared to Western disco development (Melodie 1979, 65). Despite the acclaim, these songs were more likely to play on the radio than in discos, as later commentators on disco would point out (Tvarohová 1986, 26). The same was true of the duo known as ORM (an acronym for Organisation, Recording, Music), who have recently been rediscovered by crate diggers and restored among the all-but-forgotten pioneers of Eastern European synthesiser music. Members Petr Dvořák and Pavel Růžička launched their music careers in backing bands, which in turn allowed them to purchase Western electronic equipment and build their own modern recording studio. They created instrumentals for radio, short scientific films, TV programmes for children, and commercials before experimenting with disco sounds under the moniker Petr and Pavel ORM (Tůma 1979, 212). Rather than forming another backing band for popular singers, they eventually recorded their own compositions with guest singers from Kamelie, a female duo with whom they also made several albums in the 1980s. Their debut LP, Discofil (1979), featured original instrumental and vocal compositions, combining synthesisers with live recordings. There was also the positively welcomed LP Hve ž dolet 06 (‘Starship 06’, 1979), on which several singers and bands from the first disco generation

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recorded compositions by Bohuslav Ondráček, a songwriter, hitmaker, and innovator associated with the top tier of popular music in the 1960s. He was especially well known as a founder and producer of the trio Golden Kids (Blüml 2017, 217, 123), who for a while had digressed from his more rock-oriented efforts. Despite these achievements, subsequent writers on disco observed that the Czechoslovak projects that focused on disco in the late 1970s suffered from various limitations. Writing in the official handbook for future disc jockeys in 1985, Jaromír Tůma, a disc jockey and member of the committee for selecting new DJs, noted that ‘[these] recordings […] were not entirely satisfying artistically or sometimes even technically’ (Tůma 1985, 28). The move to create a ‘Czech disco sound’ in the late 1970s had led, he claimed, to disenchantment, as many Czech songwriters turned away from disco in annoyance (Tůma 1985, 28, 29), because the Czech version never gained sufficient popularity among dancers (who preferred foreign tunes) or listeners (who preferred foreign tunes and the local cover versions).

The Second Generation The group referred to here as the second generation of Czech disco performers consisted of singers and (to some extent) producers who were mostly newcomers in the 1980s. This generation was closer in age to actual disco fans than the first generation had been. By the time these performers shot to fame, disco had overtaken the mainstream music scene and popular culture in general. It was recognised as the dominant form of entertainment for young people and was fully accepted as part of youth culture by the authorities and the public; it also featured in the official festivities at the Spartakiad, the giant gymnastics event that drew more than half a million gymnasts. When Pioneer, the state youth organisation, announced it was holding a contest for a new song, it requested entries in the form of two-part choral arrangements or disco songs for children aged 10 to 13 (Mladý sve ť 1983, No. 14, p. 2). The newspaper Naše pravda (‘Our Truth’) (1986) reported that many older people felt they were living in a disco era (1986, 18. 11., p. 2). By 1982, there were 150 professional and about 300 amateur DJs across the country, who organised around 20,000 disco events annually for 5 million participants (Tvarohová 1986, 59). Another survey in the second half of the 1980s confirmed

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disco as the favourite music genre of young people in the 15–18 age group, with the support of 63 per cent of those surveyed (Č ísla 1988, 330). ‘Disco’ was clearly a buzzword of the era. It appeared in the context of everything from spas to organised holidays and was used to name a wide range of new products from cigarettes to perfumes, a vegetable-flavoured yoghurt, and a popular brand of biscuits. During the 1980s, state and cooperative companies began producing disco wear, and disco dancing was also promoted as a healthy sport that accelerated weight loss. Starting in the early 1980s, the initial inspiration from Germany was replaced by a style commonly labelled Italian disco which, according to Tvarohová, combined traditional Italian melodies with disco rhythms (1986, 23). The resulting mix was so popular and seductive that it dominated the Czechoslovak music industry and discos throughout the 1980s. The new generation of Czechoslovak disco performers continued to form part of an established pop music ‘mafia’ in which unofficial managers surrounded singers and musicians and ushered them through the media and recording industry (Matějíček 2012). These managers were on the lookout for talented young artists who might be transformed into the pop stars of tomorrow. The way these disco stars’ personalities, performing styles, fashion sense, and sometimes even song-writing were represented in the media reflected the younger generation’s ideas about the disco world, and was expressed in the colloquial language of the younger generation. They sang over a disco beat about topics like being on the dance floor, love, and enjoying life—all despite the constraints of late socialism. The most successful of this group of newcomers were the duo Stanislav Hložek and Petr Kotvald, whose biggest hit, ‘Holky z naší školky’ (‘The girls from our kindergarten’, 1983), reeled off a long list of girls’ names, accompanied by a catchy melody. But the key figure of 1980s disco with the so-called Italian sound was Michal David, who had spent a few years in Italy as a child and later become an accomplished professional jazz pianist. David quickly joined Kroky (‘Steps’), a popular band led by František Janeček, known as one of the godfathers of Czechoslovak pop. From there, David rose to pop stardom, becoming known as the voice of the younger generation and a high-profile communicator of its ideas, desires, and laments under late socialism. Many of David’s lyrics in the 1980s addressed a range of experiences common among the young generation, from drinking Coca-Cola (only available in limited supply) to pursuing a happy life and falling in love. Two of his hits are worth highlighting here since they distil the themes

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common to his lyrics. The first, ‘Non-stop’ (1983), focuses on the recurring misunderstandings between young people and their parents, capturing the anxieties and desires of the generation that wants to ‘live non-stop, beautifully and non-stop’. As the 1980s have been described as a period of crisis—marked by the growing disappointment of the youngest generation in particular, who were not intimidated by the experience of the 1968 occupation which they were too young to remember—the lyrics can be perceived as an attempt to present the younger generation’s dissatisfaction with late socialist society as a regular generational gap, rather than a specific problem with the whole establishment. This generational gap is expressed in terms of family alienation: ‘I must not cross my dad, I’m just a disco idiot to him /I’m just a baby to my mum/ My brother only cares for his job/he’s became a big boss and snob/ They have no idea who I am’. The song was included in Vítr v kapse (Wind in the pocket, 1982), the most popular of a series of films reflecting, more or less critically, the lives and situations of young people. In the lyrics David played the role of commentator, explaining what was going on in accordance with the authorities’ careful control of the tone of the film. The second major hit was directly commissioned by authorities to accompany the girls’ exercise routines at the 1985 Spartakiad. ‘Poupata’ (‘Flower buds’), a song which remains popular today, blended disco with brass band music and lyrics that described the bright future awaiting Czechoslovak youngsters: ‘Today you have a beautiful fate, walking into tomorrow, living and blooming’. The ageing mainstream pop stars of the 1970s mostly used the disco sound to revive their stagnant musical production. Their disco repertoire was based on covering global hits supplemented with new lyrics which were unrelated to the younger generation and their lifestyle. In contrast, the music industry of the 1980s followed up on a few unique experimenters seeking to create their own original disco compositions. With the help of new, young singers, they came up with music which was convenient for the young mainstream audience, and which shaped the disco sound as youth-related music that could be utilised both commercially and propagandistically, as well as for entertainment. Unlike most of the previous generation’s disco output, these 1980s songs are still popular with audiences today, probably thanks to their less artificial expressions of the everyday feelings of ordinary listeners compared to the 1970s songs. That said, the overall attitude of Melodie’s critics to the two periods can be summed up as running in the opposite direction, rejecting of most Czech attempts to make disco. The 1980s songs were particularly rejected, and indeed were usually not reported at all. Meanwhile, the real life discotheques went their own way.

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Discourses About Socialist Disco As we have seen, acceptance of Western musical genres was by no means automatic in socialist Czechoslovakia. It is possible to identify two discourses that shaped disco’s treatment in the national media. While the first emanated from the authorities, the second came from journalists, including those outside the music press. Surprisingly, there was no cross-debate between these discourses; they played out in parallel in the pages of newspapers and magazines without interfering with one another. In addition, as we will see, there was the reality of discos themselves, which differed from the claims of either discourse. My approach to these different discourses about disco is based on Alexei Yurchak’s critical account of life under late socialism, with particular reference to his notes on the shift from semantic to pragmatic discursive regimes, when the form of representation is replicated but its meaning is changed (Yurchak 2003, 481–482). In practical terms, it was necessary to perform unavoidable and ritualised formalities in post-invasion Czechoslovakia, in the sense that music critics were periodically expected to produce texts—specifically editorials and features—which fulfilled the state’s demands for renewed proof of a magazine’s ideological correctness. Once these pure formalities had been met and the ideological space had been marked out, however, authors could start to probe a work’s meaning in the way that Yurchak (2003, 498) describes. In other words, they were able to write about music relatively freely, offering criticism or praise at their discretion. Hence, their writing was not strictly ‘ideological’, but was ‘often explicitly linked with some ideological symbols and meanings’ (Yurchak 2003, 499). The authorities’ positions were presented in the pages of official cultural policy journals and across all kinds of other magazines. Readers were updated about the findings of the meetings of official bodies, including the boards of the Communist Party central committee and the organisations charged with arranging the national or local musical life based on the authorities’ decisions. Shortly after the disco boom began, the official cultural journal Tvorba (‘Creation’) set out an official interpretation of disco music based on Western Marxist theory. In it, disco was seen as ‘a way of stunning and fooling young people’; as such, it was claimed to instill a false

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sense of freedom. Disco was also seen as a symptom of the spiritual crisis in American society: ‘The young […] are drunk on commerce, and disco music’s monotonous rhythms become a drug for them’ (Tvorba 1979, No. 4, 14; No. 29, 19). The same publication went on to share ideas about how socialist disco might be different. In a letter published in its pages, reader Miloš Vojta argued that socialist discos should not be commercial enterprises where human beings were subject to market forces; rather, they ‘should serve humanity and enrich emotional life and spiritual wealth’. Discos were to be measured by socialist aesthetics and ethics. Their role was to engage, educate, and nurture young people and to help shape their taste (Tvorba 1979, No. 38, 24). On the other side of the non-existent ideological debate were music magazine editors, who were constantly attempting to defend and protect the disco genre, which they believed had the power to resuscitate the ailing domestic pop music scene. With this goal, they described the positive impact of disco using well-known ideological jargon, or what Yurchak (2003, 501) called ‘recognisable pragmatic markers that unmistakably linked these texts with the space of ideology’ (Yurchak 2003, 501). Disco was thus claimed to be the music of young working-class Americans (without any reference to its supposed lulling of young people or instilling of a false sense of freedom in them). Similarly, the dance floor was presented as a space of rejuvenation after a busy working week (Melodie 1978, 308), while discos offered entertainment for young people that was fully controlled by the authorities: ‘Well-contained youthful fun’ (Kve ť y 1976, No. 21, 37). Going to the disco, these editors argued, gave ‘young people the chance to introduce themselves, not just dance’; the ‘diverse sounds undoubtedly help[ed] create a relaxed social atmosphere’ (Hudební rozhledy 1979, 527). Moreover, dancing developed physical skills. Disco music’s novelty and innovation were always emphasised in these editors’ pieces.

The Real World of Discos The discos of communist Czechoslovakia were part of a larger movement to defend and promote the undisturbed operation of Western-influenced entertainment. As such, they were part of an ideological game taking place in the country. At a time when musicians and singers had to undergo the retraining examination described earlier in this chapter, the spontaneous

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development of discos did not escape state management, and careful efforts were made to control disco spaces. The operating guidelines prepared in 1977 included a qualifying examination for DJs similar to the one devised for musicians. As a result, only certain approved and officially registered disc jockeys could hold disco events. Unauthorised, underground discos were liable to be shut down, a goal that was never fully achieved, especially in the countryside. DJs who had received the state qualification were known as ‘announcers of social entertainment’ (Blüml 2016, 13), and had to complete relevant training courses, including exams on music theory and Marxism-Leninism, as well as demonstrating their practical skills. They were only allowed to play original recordings, a rule that barred the use of music recorded from foreign TV or radio shows (as was the practice in other socialist countries), and disregarded the difficulty and expense of obtaining Western recordings. Domestic reissues of those recordings were sporadic and delayed. All DJ selections also had to be drawn from an approved repertoire list (Tůma 1985, 4, 5). One important way of promoting disco was to emphasise its educational potential, presenting it not only as a dance style but also as a sophisticated form of education and entertainment, where education took precedence. To meet these standards, the ideal socialist disco needed to do more than stream music continuously; it had to offer a range of edifying and entertaining activities. Newspaper and magazine reports on various venues recommended various ‘enhancements’ including reading out the latest news and hosting quizzes on current political and social issues or discussions of the recordings being played (Krůta 1976, 9). Other tips for organisers included inviting guests from interesting occupations (e.g. actors or firefighters), screening geography-themed documentaries on the stage as backdrops (Kotlář 1979, 45), and running sports competitions. In one example of the latter addition, one of the most popular Prague discos awarded a prize (free entry to the next event) to the disco-goer who completed the most push-ups (Mladý sve ť 1977, No. 6, 3). However, these ideals likely substantially departed from the reality. Even the official handbook for future disc jockeys stressed that some requirements were hard or near impossible to fulfil. In particular, the duty to ensure that more than 50 per cent of the playlist came from local recordings or recordings from other socialist states was questioned (Tůma 1985). Various authors note the shortage, if not complete lack, of good-quality local disco recordings. Czech songs might have been played in the slow-­ dance part of the programme, but they would not have been suitable for

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the fast-tempo disco section. The exclusive use of music from an approved list is also doubtful, as following this rule would have compromised both the uniqueness and cutting-edge modernity of DJs’ live sets. The following general notion of how Czechoslovak discos actually operated under late socialism is based on a small sample of former scene participants who were surveyed by the present author and his  students. Even this inconclusive data reveals the existence of a wide range of discos. Furthermore, the survey results suggest that the ideal socialist disco was most likely a pure abstraction, rather than a reflection of reality. The consensus among the respondents was that Czechoslovak recordings were quite rarely played at discos. If they featured, then this was most likely to have been in the slow-dance sets. The only places where Czechoslovak tracks might have received more play time were rural discos, whose unofficial DJs were more likely to have lacked access to foreign recordings. Sometimes, in order to meet the compulsory socialist music quota, DJs played these songs quietly during intermissions. Rural DJs also sometimes relied on tapes of foreign records. None of the interviewees remembered quizzes or competitions, let alone readings from newspaper articles at discos. They recalled that very occasionally there were guest performers or skits depending on the type of disco involved. Disco events organised by the Socialist Youth Union took place in the afternoons, and were closely supervised and alcohol-free. Other discos were run for profit out of nightclubs, bars, and restaurants; participants drank Coca-Cola if it was available, or else lemonade. Alcohol consumption was more likely at rural discos or at late night discotheques in bars, cafes, and hotel restaurants. Discos in larger cities were so popular that it was not possible to enter without paying an extra entry fee (a bribe) to staff on the doors. The most renowned discos attracted not only a young crowd, but also a layer of society representing a sort of socialist nouveau-riche made from semi-­ legal and illegal business, along with foreign tourists, and prostitutes. On the other hand, the discotheques organised by the Youth Union and the small town venues were the domain of young people under the age of 18, as people in slightly older age groups were already starting families at that time. Small town discos were attended by teenagers with all kinds of musical preferences (from hard-rockers, through mainstream pop, to highbrow) as there were usually no alternative entertainment options in these places. Also, the style of the visitors showed a wide range of inspiration, from long-haired hippies to mainstream fashion trends based on denim, loose

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shirts, and fashionable T-shirts whose slogans were ideally complemented by a plastic bag with Western advertising. According to Petr Bílek, a comb and ID should stick out of the pocket. Since most fashion goods were unavailable to ordinary citizens without Western currency, discotheque fashion was usually made or refined at home, from sewing and dyeing garments to setting hair using water mixed with sugar. Unlike American DJs who tried to immerse dancers in a continuous flow of sound and rhythm, their Czechoslovak counterparts interspersed disco tracks with announcements, repeating the name of each song and its interpreter, often giving extensive information. Some disc jockeys even chanted slogans or made wisecracks. The disco music was also interrupted by breaks for drinking and socialising, and by slow-dance sets. This was in line with the practice elsewhere in Europe, where calls for all-night, non-­ stop discos only made an impact very slowly (Lawrence 2006, 138).

Conclusion This chapter has outlined the most important features of the disco craze that gripped Czechoslovakia during the late socialist period. Clearly, acceptance of this Western genre was linked to the nature of the post-­ invasion society, which was open to the culture of materialism that disco embodied. Materialism and consumerism were part of the lived experience of this society, even though they ran contrary to the official ideology. At the same time, the conservative authorities were more likely to accept mainstream popular culture than other, more radical genres, and the copied mainstream European disco sound was seen as a safe way for the population to be inspired by Western trends without necessarily negatively influencing youth, as the authorities feared in relation to punk and new wave music. Disco’s roots in gay and Afro-American communities remained unknown to most Czechoslovak audiences. In one sense, disco was the new youth culture that promised to revitalise the local pop scene with just a hint of Western capitalist entertainment. However, it was also seen by the state as a safe form of entertainment that could be contained within certain tolerated limits, something that was not true of punk or new wave music. Moreover, while there were materialistic and hedonistic elements to Czechoslovak disco, its hedonism was relatively tame, and a far cry from New York’s disco extravaganza. Further, disco was adapted to the conditions of socialist Czechoslovakia and to local cultural traditions. In this form, it was simultaneously a way of

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defining the youngest generation and part of an official mainstream culture that was accessible to all generations, even being paired with traditional brass band music. Finally, it is probably most accurate to talk about two different Czechoslovak disco scenes. The first took place on the dance floor, where nearly all tracks were foreign and almost no local disco music was played. The second scene encompassed the local recordings that were—and in some cases still are—popular with audiences. These formed part of the mainstream pop that existed outside Westernised discos. Acknowledgements  This chapter is the result of the Metropolitan University Prague research project no. 68-01 ‘Political Science, Culture, Media and Language’, which was conducted in 2019 supported by a grant from the Institutional Fund for the Long-term Strategic Development of Research Organisations. The author wishes to thank Honza Blüml for his ongoing willingness to share his extensive knowledge of Czech popular music as well as all interviewees, especially Jaromír Tůma and Petr A. Bílek.

Notes 1. Tvorba (‘Creation’), the main journal of this kind, was a politics and culture weekly published by the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The journal played an important role in promoting party policy. 2. All translations from the Czech are henceforth the author’s own. 3. As a result of the federalisation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, three state-­ owned record labels existed: the main, federal Supraphon, the Czech Panton, and the Slovak Opus. 4. These same authorities had denounced the pop music of the 1960s as vulgar and pornographic. 5. The Kramerius collection does not include issues of Mladý sve ť from 1982 and 1986, which significantly affects the results for these years. The spike in references to disco in 1987 is partly due to the premiere of the local disco film Discopr ̌íbe ȟ that year. The affected columns are shown here in grey. 6. These three stars were the winners of the Zlatý slavík (‘Golden Nightingale’) music award in 1976 and 1977. The award, based on a survey of Mladý sve ť readers, was and remains the most important nationwide ranking of pop stars. 7. It is worth contrasting this cover version with the original version of the song recorded by the Village People in 1978 (Village People 2008).

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Bibliography Blüml, Jan. 2016. K problematice tzv. diskoték v československé populární hudbě s přihlédnutím k olomoucké scéně. Musicologica Olomucensia 24: 7–17. ———. 2017. Progresivní rock: sve ť ová a c ě skoslovenská scéna ve vybraných reflexích. Praha: Togga. Bren, Paulina. 2002. Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp, and the Politics of Private Life in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia. In Socialist Spaces. Sites of Everyday Life in Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, 123–140. Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers. Dyer, Richard. 2006. In Defense of Disco. New Formations 58: 101–108. Originally published in Gay Left (Summer 1979). Farrer, James. 1999. Disco ‘Super-Culture’: Consuming Foreign Sex in the Chinese Disco. Sexualities 2 (2): 147–166. Havlík, Adam. 2012. Západní hudba v Č eskoslovensku v období normalizace. Master diss., Charles University Prague. Hepner, Vladimír, and Iva Mar ̌íková. 1975. Pru ̊zkum postojů c ě ské verě jnosti k populárním zpe v̌ áku ̊m. Praha: Ústav pro výzkum kultury. Klusák, Pavel. 2018. Podivný showbyznys: Propaganda, agitace a absurdita v české pop-music 70. a 80. let. Č eský rozhlas Vltava, 13.7. [Streaming Audio]. https:// vltava.rozhlas.cz/podivny-­showbyznys-­propaganda-­a gitace-­a -­a bsurdita-­v -­ ceske-­pop-­music-­70-­a-­80-­let-­6951623. Kotlář, Alois. 1979. Diskotéka: nejen tanec. Zápisník 23 (21): 45. Krůta, Jan. 1976. Mystérium diskoték, aneb Máme guláš, co s ním. Mladý sve ť 18 (37): 9. Lawrence, Tim. 2006. In Defence of Disco (Again). New Formations 58: 128–146. Matějíček, František. 2012. Č eskoslovenské hudební elity na prě lomu osmdesátých a devadesátých let dvacátého století. Master diss., Charles University Prague. Tůma, Jaromír. 1979. Z hudby půjde hlava kolem. Co skrývá pojem Petr a Pavel ORM. Melodie 17 (7): 212–213. ———. 1985. ABC diskotéky. Praha: Ústav pro kulturně výchovnou činnost, KKS Ostrava. Tvarohová, Ivana. 1986. Disco-music jako důležitý vývojový proud moderní populární hudby 70. let. Master diss., Charles University Prague. Vaněk, Miroslav. 2010. Byl to jenom rock ‘n’ roll?: Hudební alternativa v komunistickém Č eskoslovensku 1956–1989. Praha: Academia. Various Authors. 1975–1989. Articles and entries from Melodie. Praha: Orbis. ———. 1975–1989. Articles and entries from Mladý sve ť . Praha: Mladá fronta. ———. 1976. Articles and entries from Kve ť y. Praha: Rudé právo. ———. 1979. Articles and entries from Hudební rozhledy. Praha: Panorama. ———. 1986. Articles and entries from Naše pravda. Zlín: Okresní vedení KSČ ve Zlíně.

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———. 1988. Articles and entries from Č ísla pro každého…. Praha: SNTL. Yurchak, Alexei. 2003. Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (3): 480–510. Železný, Lubomír. 1977. O populární hudbě na II. sjezdu SČ SKU. Melodie 15 (6): 161, 15(7): 225.

Discography David, Michal, and Kroky Františka Janečka. Poupata. Praha: Supraphon, 1985, 7” single. ———. Non Stop. Non Stop. Praha: Supraphon, 1983, 7” single. Discobolos. Discobolos. Praha: Supraphon, 1978, LP. ———. Disco/Sound. Praha: Supraphon, 1979, LP. Hve ž dolet 06. Praha: Supraphon, 1979, LP. ORM. Discofil. Praha: Supraphon, 1979, LP. Tichá, Alena. Mámo, zle je. Praha: Supraphon, 1976, 7” single.

Filmography Silvestr 1979 – Milan Chladil, Karel Štedrý, Milan Drobný, Waldemar Matuška – Jsou to Nervy. YouTube video, 3:12. Posted by ‘MonikaJanka,’ January 23, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ncEiGXoSZw. Accessed January 2020. Soukup, Jaroslav (Dir.). 1982. Vítr v kapse. Village People – In the Navy OFFICIAL Music Video 1978. YouTube video, 4:01. Posted by ‘Village People,’ September 22, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=InBXu-­iY7cw. Accessed January 2020.

Yugoslav Disco: The Forgotten Sound of Late Socialism Marko Zubak

‘I didn’t expect this from Yugoslav television!’ exclaimed Swedish TV presenter Åke Wihlney while announcing the screening of Ružic ̌asti žur (Pink Party), an exceptional late socialist Yugoslav TV production, a sort of video-soundtrack based on Boban Petrović’s disco-funk LP Žur (The Party, 1981) which was partly recorded in New York. The nocturnal shots of lascivious dancing where attractive young bodies responded to syncopated grooves had apparently caught the experienced presenter slightly off-guard. Swedish television had just acquired the broadcasting rights for the show at the Cannes Midem festival, a leading trade show for the music industry. This seemingly tiny step in Yugoslav-Scandinavian relations proved important for the preservation of this quintessential product of Yugoslav disco, whose status, effects, and legacy lie at the heart of this chapter. In a move that symbolised the general fate of the Yugoslav disco era stretching from the late 1970s into the early 1980s, the original production was ultimately erased from the archives of TV Belgrade, now Serbian Television.

M. Zubak (*) Department of Contemporary History, Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_9

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Caught unawares, surprised, Wihlney summed up the wider lack of knowledge of this interesting episode in Yugoslav popular culture, which transcended Cold War borders. Western ignorance of exotic music scenes situated at the other end of the ideological spectrum should hardly come as a shock, even though, as was the case in 1980s Yugoslavia, that ideology was already diluted. What is surprising, however, is that this disco scene is nowadays virtually unknown even in the milieu in which it originated, in the former Yugoslavia and its successor states. Whereas typical connoisseurs of Yugoslav pop music are familiar with the kind of images that baffled Wihlney—which were common in the late socialist mediascape—the label Yu disco would give them reason to pause. If anything, the period is remembered for a different music, for punk and new wave, which are widely accepted as the artistic peak of Yugoslav rock. Willingly left out of the popular canon and of collective memory—in an intellectual climate which favoured punk and new wave as carriers of the country’s self-­ representation—Yugoslav disco fell into oblivion quite soon after its emergence. It was rediscovered only recently by a community of vinyl archaeologists who picked through stashes of second hand vinyl looking for forgotten dance records. Listening to thousands of tracks, they found signs of a disco beat across various Yugoslav productions from the late 1970s and early 1980s—tracks which had previously been largely ignored or placed under different labels—and consequently coined the retrospective term ‘Yu disco’. In fact, a lot of these tracks are what across this chapter I term ‘disco-ish’: crossover tunes that were obviously influenced by strands of Western disco music but often only half-adopted them, blending the disco sound with the musician’s own stylistic background. In any event, these ‘archeological’ discoveries raise important questions: To what extent is the retroactive reappraisal of a musical heritage useful? Can it tell us something about the actual music and its context? The present chapter provides a positive answer to this dilemma by tracing this long-forgotten sound back to other cultural and social traits of the era. With the help of archival material and personal testimonies, I draw a line from these scattered sonic traces to the historically existing scene, even one as fragile and unsure of itself as Yugoslav disco was. Far from being a mere fashionable genre tag invented by local hipsters driven by the desire to find yet another area of ‘retromania’, this chapter argues that Yugoslav disco is a sound around which a wider narrative can be constructed, designating a whole culture consisting of all of the key elements which the notoriously complex term ‘disco’ in its original form requires. Namely, it refers respectively to the historic musical style marked by a 4x4

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beat (as found in disco music), to the specific spaces designed for the reproduction and collective enjoyment of disco music (discotheques), as well as to the practice of free-style dancing cultivated therein (disco dancing) (Lawrence 2006, 128). In fact, it is possible to go further and treat the elusive genre of Yu disco as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk with many associated expressions, which in addition to the music include a distinct aesthetics and worldview. Contrary to the prevalent local tendency of treating disco as a superfluous or meaningless fad, I argue here that Yugoslav disco can be seen as a reflection of major late socialist transformations: a ‘musical box’ of sorts, which conveyed the era’s aspirations and neuroses, decadence and contradictions. In this chapter I will reconstruct this ignored moment in Yugoslav popular culture, treating disco as a musical niche and a lifestyle practised in the unique settings of discotheques. It is a moment full of remarkable characters, many of whom were quickly forgotten at the time, while others remained associated with other artistic styles—ranging from Roma dance champions to opera singers-turned-disco stars, from hostile music critics to ambitious disco managers. Indeed, the story of Yugoslav disco is largely one of its oblivion and recent rediscovery, and this chapter follows that same structure.1 I begin by dissecting the conflict inherent in the term ‘socialist disco’, and root its amnesia in existing discourses of socialist popular music, arguing that uncovering the mechanisms that stand behind this amnesia is all the more important since they reveal inadequate approaches to the socialist era as a whole. I then demonstrate the manner in which disco was rediscovered, and celebrate those who came across it and have aided its re-circulation. The second part of the chapter turns to the manner in which local disco unfolded. After first sketching the import of Western disco, I follow the dynamics by which it was appropriated on two distinct levels, in the music scene, and on the dance floor, always keeping in mind the culture’s embedded pairing of music and visuals, real experiences and media constructs.

Contextualising Yugoslav Disco: A Contradiction in Terms? Writing under a telling pseudonym in 1980, a young journalist from Zagreb youth union’s weekly Polet unwittingly pointed to the contradiction with which every study of socialist disco must begin. Unlike its contemporary punk or even rock ‘n’ roll counterparts, disco had little in common with the original egalitarian values of socialism.

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We have a phenomenon of a sort. Poor kids choose the cultural values of quasi-intellectual hippies, while the well-to-do youth identifies with the populist disco sound. Zagreb dance floors provide grotesque scenes where one becomes the “star of the night” not because of dance moves, but due to the cubic inches of the car parked outside…. (Fiksi Travolta 1980, 19)

Recent readings of disco have rightly pointed to its early, progressive origins, and appreciation of its sexually and ethnically empowering features is by now a given (Lawrence 2003; Echols 2011). Yet, the disco which captured Yugoslavs in the late 1970s was by and large the one which new readings oppose, and which, for that matter, also opposed socialist ideals in almost every way, as a hierarchical, celebrity-driven, consumerist emanation of the exploitative capitalist music industry. How, then, was disco domesticated so smoothly in a setting with which it allegedly had so little in common? In truth, late socialist realities were far from the outdated Cold War notions of the communist world across the whole of Central and Eastern Europe, let alone just in Yugoslavia, a country which was always considered to present a sort of exception to the rigid communism found elsewhere in any case. Due to its early detour from the Soviet Union’s control, the country embarked on its own distinct socialist road, guided by a new ideology of self-management that aspired to return power to the workers (Mezei 1976). While essentially a variant of Marxism-­ Leninism, self-management proved semantically elastic, which made it an effective weapon in the gradual democratisation of the country. Ideological relaxation was paired with the economic reforms of the 1960s which included market mechanisms within the state-planned economy, creating a hybrid economic structure. The country’s unique geopolitical status as a non-aligned country also led to a great openness to the West, whose imprint was further boosted by freedom of travel and a growing Yugoslav workforce doing temporary work abroad, mostly in Germany. An ever-­ stronger federalisation, in turn, highlighted regional and national differences which were already strong, effectively decentralising the country. Belgrade was the capital, but other important political, cultural and entertainment centres also existed, including Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Sarajevo. All these radical changes have led some scholars to approach Yugoslavia as if it were a capitalist state (Katalenec 2013). To do so, however, ignores the strict one-party rule by a leadership not afraid to exert political power over its citizens. In fact, the ongoing liberalisation resulted in turmoil in the early 1970s, when democratic reforms similar to those of the ill-fated

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Prague Spring were abruptly halted by the indisputable authority of President Tito. Youth politics in particular came under attack, as student movements echoing the global 1968 uprisings were suppressed, setting clear limits to possible political action. Yugoslavia thus entered the decade of disco in a sort of schizophrenic state in which Marx and Coca-Cola went hand in hand (Jelača et al. 2017; Vučetić 2018). Only not conjointly, as Jean-Luc Godard envisioned in his epic cinematic portrayal of the post-­ war Western generation Masculin Féminin (1966), whose inter-title ‘Children of Marx and Coca-Cola’ encapsulated the youth’s ongoing simultaneous pursuit of politics and pop-culture. Instead, in Yugoslavia, there were two realms: one in which it was hard to deviate, and another hosting deviations which were not only tolerated, but actively pursued, often using official jargon which made their acceptance easier. If direct politics stood for the former, pop culture epitomised the latter. Popular music, in all its variants, was among its most important elements from early on. By the late 1970s, all the ingredients needed for the warm reception of disco were thus already in place in Yugoslavia, some for well over a decade. The country’s rich and ever-expanding music industry (Vuletic 2011) was heavily influenced by market forces and pro-Western tastes. Next to estrada, the term that designated the mainstream musical and entertainment scene and industry with its major festivals, stars, and glamour, several strands of rock also had their own events and ethos (Škarica 2005). From 1961, Yugoslavia also participated in the Eurovision Song Contest, and foreign artists occasionally visited on tour (Vuletic 2007). Record labels spread across the country, a sign of a growing appetite for Western styles, and radio and TV gave music ever-growing airtime. A range of print media outlets, from cultural glossies to tabloids, covered music in a manner that illustrates this aforementioned schizophrenia (Zubak 2018b, 35). Since their income depended on sales, publishers were almost forced to attend to their readers’ evolving interests, creating a range of commercial magazines similar to their Western counterparts whose profits were used to subsidise socially responsible journals, published according to the letter of the law. Seen from this perspective, Wihlney’s surprise at Ružičasti Žur perhaps seems a little naive. Had he spent a summer holiday on the Adriatic coast among the flocks of foreign tourists who danced on hotel terraces, drinking foreign spirits and engaging in sexual encounters, he would have been far less shocked. Indeed, disco provided a typical soundtrack for such summer extravaganzas, as a distinguished Belgrade journalist observed in 1978:

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The disco sound is the real deal—for losing one’s sense of self. The end result is that at the best place for having fun, on our beautiful, blue Adriatic, you have the worst nights out. Outside there’s moonlight reflected on the sea, cheap wine, and the prettiest girls ever; but none of this matters when the disco sound leads us under the nearest hotel roof, crowded like a railway station… we leave that little part of ourselves that we brought along on holiday (…) Maybe it’s just that we don’t know how to have fun anymore. Being one of a crowd is a virtue. (Tirnanić 1978)

Tirnanić’s comments, flavoured with the scepticism typical of a highbrow take on disco, reveals the ubiquitous presence of disco at the time— which today has been forgotten and is revealed only through media archives. This amnesia is embedded in the existing discourses, both local and Western, of socialist popular music.

Neglect and Rediscovery of Yugoslav Disco It was March 1980, and the disco fever that shook socialist Yugoslavia had already passed its peak, but Belgrade photojournalist Dragan Timotijević thought it was not too late to jump on the bandwagon. ‘Belmondo’—as he was known due to his resemblance to the actor and to a brief biographical interlude in Paris—decided to up the ante. In an exemplary showcase of late socialist cultural entrepreneurship, he gathered together four high-­ school teenagers to form a female vocal-dance group called Cice-Mace (Pussy Cats). The fact that none of the group excelled at singing or dancing did not bother him. On roller skates, wearing glittery jackets and shiny shorts, they looked fabulous and captured what disco should represent. Cice-Mace staged a few photo sessions, including a spectacular ride in an open-air jeep through the centre of Belgrade, to promote their upcoming album, which contained a few forgettable disco-ish songs. This brief spell of media attention never bloomed into a successful career, however, and Cice-Mace disappeared from the scene as fast as they emerged, becoming no more than a bizarre incident in local popular culture. Around the same time, talented Skopje trombone player Kire Mitrev commenced on a musical journey of his own. After spending the early 1970s at Belgrade Musical Academy and playing in the Radio Television Belgrade Big Band he went to study composition and arrangement at the famous Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA. He returned to Belgrade eager to test his newly acquired knowledge with local audiences. He

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formed the KIM band, assembling a talented group of musicians and singers, which went on to release two exceptional disco-funk albums in the early 1980s, labelled ‘jazz-rock’ at the time. Their richly produced sound, which was filled with horns, dense jazzy arrangements, and delicate backing vocals, was of an exceptional quality that worked far beyond the bizarre appeal of Cice-Mace, for whom Mitrev had arranged a couple of songs. KIM’s groove has also aged well, as evidenced by the new life of ‘Frka’, a track that Mitrev originally composed for rhythm and blues veteran Zdenka Kovačićek and which a few years ago became an unexpected regional club hit in a version by Nipplepeople. At the time it was created, though, KIM’s sound failed to live on the dance floor, perhaps because the country was already in love with another sound, that of punk and new wave. In many respects, the stories of Cice-Mace and KIM illustrate the story of Yugoslav disco more broadly, which encompassed media stunts as well as skilful musicians. Coming from diverse backgrounds and with different ambitions, these two acts demonstrated a great sonic diversity of local disco that was certainly among the reasons that made it difficult to identify. Populating contrasting musical landscapes, Cice-Mace and KIM also shared one common trait in that until recently, both were largely forgotten, left to gather dust in the obscure corners of record collections and popular history. The extent to which disco is missing from the conventional accounts of Yugoslav popular music makes it legitimate to ask if it ever really existed at all. The local discourse on popular music developed across several streams, none of which featured disco prominently. Despite the early translations of music scholars like Simon Frith (1986) dating back to the socialist days, Yugoslav popular music scholarship remained relatively underdeveloped; its place was taken by a strong tradition of music journalism which had been going strong ever since the emergence of the first specialised magazines in the 1960s (Vučetić 2010). With privileged access and inside information, music journalists were in the best position to produce knowledge, and from early on took the lead in this process, often breaking new ground. In fact, the now-standard narrative of Yugoslav pop-rock history was established within this circle. It charted the rise of rock culture in a familiar three-stage progress, from direct importation through imitation to the creation of a genuinely local idiom. After breaking out of the initial narrow milieu of privileged youth with access to Western goods, rock culture gradually acquired a mass following, and peaked at the end of the 1970s with the rise of punk and new wave, when it finally caught up with the

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West, as creative individuals married artistry with social commentary and were met with an appreciative audience and the support of the music industry (Glavan 1983, 15). This narrative set in so firmly that it remains valid and recognised to this day. An entire generation of music critics have given their best efforts to conserving punk and new wave’s legendary standing in the collective memory. They learned their trade from the UK publications New Musical Express and Melody Maker, available first by post and increasingly via retail. Educated in this tradition, they also proved willing to adopt the tropes of their Western mentors, adjusting them to local acts—whether reprimanding them for not keeping up with global trends or praising them when they did. For example, self-fashioned Malcolm McLaren wannabes claimed in the late 1970s that the best punk east of London was being played in Yugoslavia (Zubak 2018b, 230), and this view received occasional confirmation from abroad. Their views on the subversive potential of punk were given theoretical (and, conveniently, Marxist) buoyancy by volumes such as Dick Hebdige’s subcultural classic Subculture. The Meaning of Style, translated only a year after the original  (Hebdige 1980), giving strong impetus to the local subcultural studies which emerged from the 1980s (Tomc 1989; Prica 1991; Perasović 2001). Those music critics who dictated the musical discourse and would occupy key places in the industry drank from these same sources. Coinciding with the creative highs of the Yugoslav scene when punk and new wave matched musical innovation with social relevance, disco never stood much of a chance to gain their respect, particularly when they were impressed by the dismissive tone of early Western commentators who initially approached US disco with hostility, snubbing it for its alleged anti-intellectualism and lack of subversive potential. With its progressive, sexual, and racial aspects still unknown, disco was often treated with disdain and portrayed as an exploitative product with no artistic value. At the same time, academic research on socialist popular music was traditionally framed in oppositional or counter-cultural terms. Rock was praised for its major contribution to the downfall of the regime, and acknowledged as the core ingredient of a subversive youth culture which challenged authoritarian rule and the supposedly hostile state (Ryback 1990; Ramet 1994). Such a biased perspective, that prioritised lyrics over music and experience, left much of the scene outside of the focus of interest, thus cutting out not only disco, but the entire culture on which it rested: the mainstream music scene, the so-called estrada. Of academic

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interest were subversion and engagement, not entertainment or fun, with Western experiences somehow deemed inapplicable (Mazierska 2017, 3). As a result, the rift between the rock scene and the mainstream deepened, with the latter supposedly serving the regime and faithfully reflecting official views of what socialist music should be like. In truth, scholars ascribed to pop-rock music an overly political dimension that it didn’t necessarily carry in all of its manifestations. While this observation holds true for the whole of socialist Europe, it is particularly the case with Yugoslavia, where the authorities facilitated the proliferation of pop music styles and accepted rock as their ally. This paradigm has only recently been challenged by a new wave of studies which paint a more complex picture of how mainstream scenes changed attitudes and affected tastes (Mazierska 2017; Beard and Rasumussen 2020). With these traditions, both local and Western, working hand in hand, disco’s recognition had to come from the outside. Finding and understanding Yugoslav disco required a fresh approach free from the biased notions of those who had historically been its gatekeepers. The initiative came from below, as unexpected actors managed to circumvent existing discursive constraints. In what is now an over a decade-long project, a group of ex-Yugoslav music aficionados, colloquially known as ‘crate diggers’, have acted as informal researchers to breathe new life into a plethora of lost and neglected disco tracks which had hitherto remained under the radar. The work of crate diggers differed from what had come before. They uncovered unknown and literally unheard-of tracks by marginal artists, but also looked for atypical tunes by acclaimed musicians which had been recorded in their early careers and in weird artistic excursions. They searched through production scores and soundtracks seeking recognisable disco beats. Apart from adding new elements, they re-evaluated existing traditions according to new preferences. In this endeavour, they enjoyed a great advantage as, unburdened by previous knowledge and value judgements, they were able to re-contextualise old tracks, and place them in new contexts, under previously unused labels. Disregard for traditional rules and an affinity for different musical qualities than those imposed by the gatekeepers allowed them to absorb tracks from seemingly unrelated traditions into the same canon (Vályi 2013). Such unorthodox takes on the old repertoire, which effectively re-configured Yugoslavia’s musical past, created strange yet sonically meaningful entities.

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This fresh ethos, which is interested in distinct rhythmic patterns, has helped diggers to discover not only disco, but other genres as well, including funk and electronica, that had remained outside the histories of Yugoslav pop-rock for similar reasons. Depending on the selected criteria, a new canon of Yugoslav disco has thus been created, filled with a variety of dance tracks. A number of new channels have helped to disseminate and popularise these findings. First on the internet and increasingly in official releases, this elusive genre has been effectively codified because online music services have facilitated the uploading of these personal genre narratives from below, both anonymously and by those adding their own curatorial stamp. YouTube thematic channels, Mixcloud playlists, DJ sets, and edits have all worked to legitimise the genre. Music databases such as Discogs, in turn, have implemented those new tags, taking the lead from record stores in spreading new classifications. Today, this process of legitimisation is almost complete. With compilations such as Jugoton Funk Vol. 1—A Decade of Non-Aligned Beats, Soul, Disco and Jazz 1969–1979 (2020) and Socialist Disco. Dancing Behind Yugoslavia’s Velvet Curtain 1977–1987 (2018) in particular having now been released by historical and re-issue record labels, it is time to write Yu disco’s cultural and social history.

Importing Disco Disco arrived in Yugoslavia in waves, taking much less time to take root than rock ‘n’roll had previously. Its narrative picks up pace in the summer of 1978, when two intertwined events—a tour by Boney M and the Yugoslav premiere of Saturday Night Fever—turned both public and media attention to the new phenomenon, causing a flood of reflections and comments. None of this was in fact new, as both information on disco and the actual music were already available before, sometimes even in real-time. The country’s rich music industry had opened up to various strands of dance sound from the mid-1970s. It soon became clear that disco constituted a profitable niche if not a goldmine, prompting record companies to release a variety of licensed editions from the likes of Van McCoy and Isaac Hayes through to the heroes of Euro and space disco, such as Giorgio Moroder and Magic Fly. Dance orientation was confirmed by exclusive contracts with specialised labels. The Sarajevo label Diskoton signed an agreement with Tamla Motown and Ljubljana’s ZKP RTV did the same

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with specialised disco label Casablanca, which led to the release of long-­ awaited albums by Donna Summer in 1980. For less demanding consumers, there were (semi)-official compilations that could be played at house parties, with lascivious covers revealing disco’s visual code. In June 1978, German disco-Schlager sensation Boney M’s five-­concert tour of Yugoslavia was well prepared: Zagreb’s Jugoton label had already released many of the group’s singles, completing the project by the end of 1980 with the release of nearly all of the group’s back-catalogue, which received the warmest of receptions from radio listeners. Boney M had already visited Zagreb a year earlier to perform on the weekend TV programme Svjetla pozornice (Stage Lights), after which they partied in various Zagreb discotheques. While the mainstream media sensationally announced the concerts, music critics were generally unenthusiastic. Even those who were not repelled by the manufactured industrial sound criticised the group’s inability to transform sports halls into nightclubs, despite ‘anaemic attempts by a few couples to create the right dancing atmosphere’ (Konjović 1978). By and large, though, the fans did not care, welcoming the sweet and infectious Caribbean sound, which was mockingly called ‘the sound of “Sunday afternoon”’ after the eponymous variety TV show, Nedjeljom Popodne (Sunday Afternoon) that frequently featured the group’s music. Sales spoke in Boney M’s favour, and their exciting performance style and sound fit well into the local pop scene. The country’s links with the group were symbolically sealed in 1981 when frontman and dancer Bobby Farrell married a young Romani in Skopje with a huge media presence, in what tabloids dubbed the wedding of the century, and an adequate response to the recent British royal wedding of Lady Diana and Prince Charles (Aćimović 1981). It is no coincidence that the biggest Yugoslav disco hit, ‘Apsolutno tvoj’ by Mirzino jato, was the result of a conscious attempt to translate Boney M’s sound. If Boney M quickly became the favourite sound of local disco, its face was that of John Travolta. Disco arrived in Yugoslavia coupled with images which complemented the sound, helping to present its culture, visuals, and values, no matter how simplified. Mirroring Saturday Night Fever’s US marketing, Zagreb’s Jugoton released its soundtrack ahead of the screening, and it was met with great success. Arriving in local cinemas less than nine months after its US premiere, Saturday Night Fever stormed through local theatres, turning disco and its hero into a national phenomenon. All of a sudden, it seemed as though everyone had an opinion about the film, its music, dancing, and ambience.

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Reviews approached the film seriously, seeing in it the reigning American zeitgeist, praising its rhythm, and in particular its inventive camera moves which evoked disco dancing and enhanced the charisma of the main character (Pajkić 1978). Articles drew parallels with the local situation as the key question was left in the air: Does disco have a place at home? Headlines such as ‘Travoltization of the Balkans gives reason to think’ (Popović 1978) and ‘Would you let your daughter go out with Travolta?’ (Aćimović 1978) made him both a subject of analysis and a generational idol peering out at readers from magazine covers. Journals printed his biography in instalments, and the novelisation of Saturday Night Fever, written after the film, also quickly sold out. In that year’s New Year TV programmes, actors doubled up as Travolta. Vlado Gaćina played a billposter putting up posters for the film on the streets of Sarajevo—he falls into a daydream in which he is the king of the discotheque, only to be rudely awakened and brought back to his proletarian reality in Groznica ovogodišnje vec ̌eri (This Year’s Night Fever, 1978). On TV Belgrade, the role was given to a handsome lookalike who expressed hope that he would end up next to his idol on the big screen. In the coastal city of Split, a Travolta fan club was established, promising its members an abundant supply of merchandise. Eventually, the term ‘Travolta’ entered everyday language, becoming a common nickname for skilful and good-looking male dancers. Much has been written on how Saturday Night Fever distorted the image of disco by turning its cross-cultural and sexually transgressive traits upside down, instead promoting a vision of heterosexual celebrity-driven industry. But if Tony Manero distorted disco, the information failed to reach Yugoslav viewers, who by and large were fascinated with disco’s escapist hedonism while oblivious to the sexual fluidity of its roots. In a rare, subversive take, Slovenian film director Boštjan Hladnik (once a student of Claude Chabrol’s) re-appropriated these origins in one of the phantasmagorical scenes of his feature Ubij me nežno (Killing Me Softly, 1979) that sees a deluded elderly female pulp fiction writer joining a group of bike riders in leather suits. Together, in front of a life-size poster of Travolta in the hallway of a Mediterranean villa, they recreate Travolta’s hustle, albeit with a suggestive choreography with obvious gay innuendos and allusions—a move that remained isolated and largely unrecognised. The stunning success of Saturday Night Fever, however, encouraged local film distributors to include a remarkable number of disco films in their

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repertoire, some of which received media coverage. Within the next few years cinema enthusiasts could see Disco Godfather, Thanks God it’s Friday, Music Machine, Roller Boogie, American Fever, Can’t Stop the Music, and Disco Delirio (conveniently translated as Travoltijada), all perpetuating the image of disco as a form of fun, dancing escapism. It was clear that by this time, disco had become an essential part of popular culture; indeed, it seemed as though everyone had something to say about it. The hero of Momčilo Kapor’s novel Zoe (1978a) was a Donna Summer fan. Acclaimed cultural journalists, film critics, and a number of music critics reflected on the new fad, debating disco music, disco culture, the disco generation and disco ambience, and providing a framework with which to grasp the phenomenon. A myriad of diverse articles appeared across various journals, whose tone and approach matched their editorial policies and target audiences. TV reviews and tabloids pushed sensational themes, while pop-cultural and music magazines were open to more serious opinion pieces. A closer look at these texts reveals a nuanced and increasingly diverse discourse which did not shy away from deconstructing disco’s components, and which displayed an increasing willingness to include new insights, turn to social analysis, and touch on issues like its relation to other genres, major influences, and new features, even sporadically considering disco’s sexual politics, which had previously been ignored. From the almost universal initial rejection of disco as an allegedly manufactured, seemingly emotionless dance music, a few occasional favourable texts praised the quality of more respected envoys of the genre, such as Chic, Donna Summer, and Grace Jones. With few exceptions, there was a general sense that good dance music had to be ‘Black music’, with rare praise going to the genre’s industrial synthetic innovations. Soul and funk were almost artificially separated from disco, as though DJs didn’t mix Donna Summer with the Bee Gees. For better or worse, Saturday Night Fever remained an image of disco that fascinated Yugoslavs. Its hedonism and machismo were preserved in the mainstream perception, and refuted by no more than a few critics. In the country’s actual discotheques, people reacted equally positively to the Philly sound and disco boogie, but in the mainstream media, disco remained a mixture of Boney M, Saturday Night Fever, and Studio 54. In the remaining two sections, I will discuss how disco unfolded on the local music scene and in the discotheques, keeping in mind its multimedia manifestations and reflections.

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Adopting Disco In contrast to the rich discourse that proliferated in Yugoslavia about Western disco, when it came to its local echo, the media remained mostly silent. In a rare commentary from the time—an aside in an overview of the 1970s—veteran Džuboks music critic Branko Vukojević briefly described how disco played out: The Yugoslav disco sound happened last year. The result was a miscarriage. Filling popular hits with “a certain number of bass drum beats per minute”, by stroking the synthesizer and adding that inevitable “piu, piuuu”, our disco masters proved that they do not understand what disco is. I wonder if anyone has ever danced to the products of our “disco production”? (Vukojević 1980)

In the disco summer of 1978, the greatest music star in the country was Zdravko Č olić, who owed part of his fame to the disco beats that increasingly coloured his pop tunes. Č olić cemented his commitment to the genre by recording the Euro disco single ‘Light Me’ (1978) in English, intended for the German market, under the alter ego Dravco—easier to pronounce abroad, but ridiculous-sounding at home. His international breakthrough never materialised, but Č olić continued to sporadically insert disco-ish tunes into his repertoire. This move was paralleled by several other acclaimed estrada stars who tried to blend the new fad into their work—indeed, it was in estrada that the disco flavour was particularly strong, although this was rarely acknowledged. Some, like Duško Lokin, went to Germany to learn from the disco masters first hand; folk-pop singer Neda Ukraden seasoned her folkish vocals with an electro-synth background, and major diva Tereza Kesovija created a disco medley out of her Mediterranean chansons. Meanwhile, Eurovision contestants Pepel in Kri sang about ‘Superman’ in full ABBA Euro disco mould. Around the turn of the decade, it seemed as if everyone was recording disco tracks, from Ivo Robić, who had been Yugoslavia’s response to Frank Sinatra, to a range of newcomers and celebrities, such as TV host Suzana Mančić, who tried to launch a music career by turning disco. ‘Disco fulfilled Warhol’s promise of 15 minutes of fame’, wrote Džuboks writer Petar Luković, astutely detecting the genre’s aspirational essence (Luković 1980). Simultaneously, he satirised such disco excursions scattered on the B-sides of 7” singles or non-disco albums: ‘tired disco rhythm,

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stupid lyrics, position 2076 on the all-time worst singles list’ (Džuboks 1979), ‘rustic disco tune, psychopathic masturbation’ (Džuboks 1980a), ‘plebeian disco song, boring, monotonous’ (Džuboks 1980b). In his legendarily cruel reviews, Luković shattered the dreams of local Baccarra and Donna Summer copycats who disappeared from the scene as quickly as they appeared. With one exception: the Bosnian version of Boney M, Mirzino jato (Mirza’s Flock), became an instant success with their ‘Apsolutno tvoj’ (Absolutely Yours). The song was ‘completely meaningless in its emptiness, but at least one could dance to it’, as Vukojević remarked at the time (1980). The group’s leader, Mirza Alijagić, was a singer at the Sarajevo opera, and his powerful bass voice proved capable of reproducing Frank Farian’s vocals; backed by two female vocalists, he promoted the song on several TV shows, pushing its sales to record highs. The mixture was made bizarre, in a fashion typical of the Yugoslav take on disco, by the fact that heavy metal guitarist Sead Lipovača produced the song, creating the group’s recognisable sound. Lipovača was one of several musicians and composers, including Aleksandar Sanja Ilić and Nenad Vilović, who filled pop tunes with disco arrangements. For the most part, their haphazard efforts at modernising estrada failed to convince audiences and were typically blamed for Yu disco’s failure to compete with its US counterpart (Vukojević 1980). Still, this was also a moment when disco was spilling over into more sophisticated musical realms as professional musicians with academic or jazz backgrounds embraced the genre. Orchestral disco productions by acclaimed film composers, such Mihajlo Mića Marković, Alfi Kabiljo, and Zoran Simjanović, infiltrated production scores, soundtracks, and TV commercials, from Yugo car adverts to aerobics mixtapes, stimulating consumerist desires (Mimica 1983). Keyboardist Igor Savin with the backing of the Stanko Selak Orchestra recorded an exceptional brass-packed disco funk instrumental LP with occasional ethnic textures, Yu Disco Express (1979), and Skopje Albanian Arian Kerliu released a lavishly produced bilingual English/Croatian disco-boogie album (1981) with the help of experienced New York musicians. Zagreb’s funk-rock group Clan recorded a rare concept LP about discos and motorcycles, and Boban Petrović’s band Zdravo played funk grooves with the help of three backing vocalists from Zaire, all daughters of the country’s ambassador to Yugoslavia. Later, Petrović went on to make the most consistent disco record of the era, the aforementioned Žur (1981), along with the sole Yugoslav 12” disco single, ‘Meteorology’. That most of these efforts rarely made it onto the

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actual dance floor was partly due to the high expectations of local fans, who remained suspicious throughout. Disco, unlike rock, had to be foreign: ‘To Yugoslav fans of funk [or disco] they seemed unconvincing, and musicians didn’t give them much reason to reconsider, while rock fans despised everything related to funk/disco’ (Vukojević 1980). It is safe to say that disco spread more credibly through fashion and dancing than music: it was as if its outlandish dress-code was tailor-made for estrada performers, who readily appeared in flamboyant outfits on ever more glitzy festival podiums and in TV studios. Among them was Č olić, who in the summer of 1978 invited the dance troupe Lokice to join him on his nationwide tour to help him increase his disco credentials. Jovan Ristić’s documentary Pjevam danju pjevam noću (1979) documented the hysteria that Lokice, led by freestyle legend Lokica Stefanović, caused each time they stepped onto the stage. Their erotic moves and glamorous outfits soon turned them into stars in their own right, who regularly displayed their acrobatics on television, which proved to be the medium most susceptible to disco. Lokice also recorded a disco LP, Disco Lady (1979)—it prompted a typical response from Luković, but their legacy has remained intact, as they went on to become a true symbol of the Yu disco era. Thanks to them, exciting choreography became a requisite part of all festival and TV performances, and a string of visually attractive dance troupes, such as Elektre and DC-10, were modelled after them. But unlike Lokice, these were led by male managers who, much like Belmondo with Cice-­ Mace, tried to cash in on the ongoing disco craze. Dance troupes such as these posed for magazines like Start—‘schizophrenic’ publications themselves which published nude centrefolds alongside feminist analysis. Indicating that disco’s visual code became the most important part of disco, they offered them media presence as long as they would provide attractive images (Start 1981). Disco certainly led to the increase of female pop performers. For exam̵ ple, Sladana Milošević and Alma Ekmečić, both of whom were later associated with other music styles, echoed the ecstatic whispers of disco divas, using their sex appeal to enhance their stage presence. Like many divas of the time, the sexual revolution they enacted walked the thin line between empowerment and objectification, and their push for female emancipation boiled down to ‘sexy’ visuals. As a whole, Tony Manero’s brand of male chauvinism prevailed. It was reincarnated in Goran Marković’s film Nacionalna klasa (1979), for which Zoran Simjanović composed the funkiest soundtrack of the era. The title song, ‘Floyd’—named after the

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main character, an aspiring race-car driver—became a rare local disco-funk hit at the time, depicting him as an irresistible seducer, a sort of real-life Travolta: ‘Who’s that cool cat, flirting with the chicks? Floyd! Floyd! Floyd! (He) lives crazy! He loves crazy! Who could resist this maniac?’ Testosterone was running wild, yet around the edges there was some room for occasional transgressions that probed at gender stereotypes. An influential example of this was the innovative TV show Beograd noću (Belgrade at Night, 1980), featuring the artist Oliver Mandić in non-­ ironic drag singing his early disco-funk tunes, which caused a minor scandal.

Dancing to Disco A network of discotheques emerged in Yugoslavia a whole decade before Saturday Night Fever, driven by semi-private initiatives or supported by socialist youth unions. From the late 1960s onwards, clubs mushroomed in diverse settings, from tourist resort hotels to cafes and abandoned basements. Many were run by the first DJs, who merged different roles as entrepreneurs, musical gatekeepers, and DIY engineers. They soon gained professional status, turning into archetypical figures of the socialist music business—the nightlife industry was still a grey area, and DJs had the knowledge to take advantage of the system’s many loopholes (Zubak 2016). As the 1970s progressed, however, the Studio 54 paradigm— glamorous, exclusive, debauched—shifted the focus. Impressed by his 1978 visit to the New York club, Serbian writer Momčilo Kapor wrote a dramatic essay about the illusory space that kind of discotheque provided: Discotheques resemble Orpheus’s discovery of the underworld. Inside, there are only enchanted moves from the almighty wizard DJ behind the glass cage. Those who own nothing above ground have eternity down there. What they lack upstairs turns into an advantage downstairs; underground everything is upside down. (Kapor 1978b)

The idea of exclusive nightclubs was certainly not alien to some disco managers. For example, Mirko Sobota ran his venue on the outskirts of Zagreb, accessible by car, carefully planning disco events to build up his club’s reputation: he selected the music and guests, and redesigned the interior for every new season. Long gone were the days when DIY technicians made amplifiers and lights from scratch. Now expensive sound

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systems, professional lighting equipment, and other gear, including video walls, were imported from Munich, while DJs travelled abroad every month to get a fresh stash of new records. In Belgrade, Boban Petrović treated nightlife as an art form. Alongside his music career, he ran several clubs throughout the 1970s, earning a reputation for hosting the wildest parties in town and becoming the biggest envoy of a developing club culture. His discotheques applied the same model that Studio 54 would become famous for, recreating a similar elitist atmosphere long before the rise of the notorious New  York City discotheque. However, at least in theory, at Petrović’s nightspots it was not money that secured entrance, but attitude and the ability to appear ‘cool’—a small concession, perhaps, to the socialist context the venues existed in. The TV show that baffled Åke Wihlney, Ružic ̌asti žur, best exemplified disco’s liaison with affluent, self-indulgent youth. Broadcast in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1983, it portrayed a real-life disco party in a suburban villa, offering a surreal picture of Belgrade as downtown New York, with beautiful pleasure-seeking youth embracing disco sounds to form a tight community on the dance floor. Such images of decadence and affluence were often used against disco by its new wave and punk detractors. Translating music criticism into sociological analysis, they drew a link between disco’s repetitive music and allegedly shallow interests of its listeners, contrasted by creative and smart punks (Stojanović 1979, 6–7). In 1979, the Zagreb youth journal Polet, the voice of the local new wave scene, openly smeared the city’s gentrified discotheques such as Big Ben, which denied entrance to long-haired hašomani rockers (from haš, meaning hash), favouring the clean, well-­ dressed, supposedly monied youth šminkeri (from šminka, meaning make-­up) who came to be associated with disco (Perasović 2001). Fiksi Travolta’s critique painted a picture miles away from Ružic ̌asti žur: Clothes here are not some consciously designed message or invitation for interaction, but just [something from] a standard shop catalogue from Trieste. Local disco-man(iacs) don’t wear clothes, clothes wear them (…) The prevailing spirit of the petty-bourgeois youth suffocates even those occasional sparks of pleasure which come through (…) Zagreb disco clubs exist because of the parking lots outside, which are actually the parking lots of their parents’ socio-economic success. (Fiksi Travolta 1980)

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But reality, once again, was more complex. While journalists, informed by their subcultural theories, tended to see youth groups as exclusive tribes populating distinct clubs and caring only about their own music styles, late socialist realities obliged them to share. For one, the infrastructure was not big enough: Slovenian punk promoter Igor Vidmar remembers how he visited the main Ljubljana disco with the singer of a notorious punk band simply because it was the only available option. Subcultural diversification was definitely on the rise, but discotheques as a rule catered to mixed crowds and hosted eclectic DJ sets, even though the era witnessed the rise of DJs specialised in dance genres like Belgrade’s Dragan Kozlica or Zagreb’s Slavin Balen. And beyond these subcultural rifts, dance floors were dominated by unlikely candidates. Balen recalls how the Roma ruled the dance contests, known as ‘Travoltiadas’, which he and so many others organised across the country’s discotheques. One of them, the 18-year-old Hamed Đogani, has a story worthy of a Hollywood script: he travelled to Zagreb from his working-class Belgrade suburb to compete at the state disco-dancing championships where he surprisingly won. After perfecting his moves over the next few months, he went to London to represent Yugoslavia at the World Disco Dancing Championship in 1980 (Stojsavljević 1981). The poet Đorde̵ Matić wrote an entry on Đogani in the Lexicon of YU Mythology (2004). It contains a conspicuous lack of biographical details, which once again attests to the typical amnesia around disco, but in it, Matić brilliantly singles out the love affair between the genre and the lower classes. Remembering his classmates’ passion for dancing, he identifies a link between disco and the urban poor, which continued long after disco, as it was replaced by Italo disco and electrofunk. In his text, worth quoting at length, disco—in contrast to its media portrayal—appears as an unlikely social equaliser. His piece allows us to notice how disco facilitated social mobility and gave visibility—and even moments of superiority—to marginalised social groups: Our fellow citizens, from the edge, the proletariat, especially its “ethnic” edge of Roma and Albanians, could not identify with rock ‘n’ roll, with the issues it raised, with its style. It hardly even touched them; it was too “white” and middle class. They needed their own sound, and when they got it, they got it with a vengeance (…) With the spread of disco clubs, they gained their own values, their own heroes. And, for the first time, these heroes were exactly those who had always been at the edge and at the edge only. In the

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disco clubs of the 1980s, like never before, everyone mixed, dancing next to each other. But the real heroes, the best “dancers”, were, as a rule, guys from the margins: social—and especially ethnic. And thanks to the electronic dance sound, the centre and the periphery shared for the first time the same music, and the same fashion as well, the same culture. Kitschy, maybe, but they certainly felt it as “their own”. (Matić 2004, 117–118)

Conclusion In the shadow of punk and new wave, another fascinating yet ignored genre of music existed in socialist Yugoslavia which unlike its famed counterparts remained outside the popular canon, apparently considered unworthy of scholarly reflection. This chapter has argued its case, recognising the potential of this oft-derided music to elaborate upon society, even when its quality sometimes left something to be desired. ‘Punk is a symptom’, as Slavoj Žižek commented once long ago as the editor of the Slovenian theory journal Problemi, famously linking the rise of local punk subculture to the malfunctioning Yugoslav self-management, apparently in deep crisis, and not living up to its promises (Žižek 1981). This chapter has claimed the same status for punk’s alleged antithesis: disco too was a symptom of late socialism and its inherent contradictions, and indeed was, and is, a form of music that allows a privileged view into this decadent historical epoch. This chapter has revisited several inherent dilemmas at its heart. Silenced for too long, the label Yu disco was revived relatively recently by a community of local crate diggers, as they tried to characterise specific sounds they had come across in their search for forgotten dance-floor gems. By uncovering a vast body of previously unknown disco tracks, they expanded our knowledge of Yugoslav music, forcing us to adjust the existing musical narratives as well as the wider perceptions of the period. As I have shown, they stumbled upon something bigger than the music itself. A search through the archives reveals that these sounds did not come stripped of context. Yugoslav disco was simultaneously a pop music niche, an art form, a music scene, a cultural practice, and a lifestyle, and each of these aspects is illustrative of the late socialist pop culture as a whole. The diggers’ playlists and compilations confirm, on a musical level, some nuanced recent insights about the nature of late socialism. Incidentally, just as the crate diggers were embarking on their informal research, Alexei Yurchak published his seminal study Everything Was

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Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Yurchak 2006), which changed the way we think about late socialism. His account, rooted in post-Stalinist society, doesn’t provide an actual portrayal of everyday Yugoslav life, but Yurchak certainly develops a language to account for the complex realities of the era, by reclaiming agency for socialist subjects.2 For most people, even those living in the more rigid communist regimes, life evolved beyond contrasts between ‘us and them’, and away from the outdated binaries of conformity and dissent which have been automatically used for so long in explanations of the socialist era. People used official discourse to pursue their alternative goals, which were not necessarily restricted to those in line with the state ideology. In this way, all Yugoslav pop culture transgressed boundaries between official and unofficial realms, as key actors utilised existing institutional channels and infrastructure to promote their alternative, Westernised agenda that provided challenges on various levels. Due to its nuanced features, Yugoslav disco seems a particularly relevant part of this vision. Its rise was an example of the explosion of market socialism within the Yugoslav hybrid system, where capitalist motives mixed with the socialist mission. It prospered at a time when the consumer gap between the East and West had narrowed, with the earlier pursuit of enlightened socialist consumption slowly losing pace and giving way to a less ambitious wish to simply mimic the capitalist path. If the model was showing some cracks before, then disco deepened them, representing a sort of pinnacle where many of the processes that had begun earlier reached a point of no return. What had been exceptional before suddenly became mainstream; what had been previously implicit turned explicit with disco. Indeed, disco stripped down the residual ideological façade to its bare and true essence, and showed how far the country had gone in allowing decadence to resurface. Disco profited hugely from the cross-border cultural exchange which had started much earlier. With a leading Yugoslav rock guitarist sharing a stage in 1969 with none other than Jimi Hendrix, it is perhaps unsurprising that the early disco hit ‘Fly Robin Fly’ was penned by Yugoslav Hungarian Sylvester Levay, who had moved to Munich to find a larger stage. The Rolling Stones had played in the country back in 1974, which makes concerts by eclectic soul-funk bands like Osibisa and Earth, Wind & Fire seem natural. In a context where Hollywood dominated the film repertoire, it is also no wonder that local cinemas welcomed disco ‘roller boogie’ extravaganzas. Nudity being a fixture at newsstands, journalists

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were compelled to dwell on the androgyny of disco divas like Grace Jones and Amanda Lear (Vrdoljak 1980). Since proto-entrepreneurs had opened discotheques in abandoned submarines a decade earlier, it is not so strange that by the end of the 1970s, the country’s more advanced clubs were modelled on downtown New York discotheques. When considered individually, not much separated the disco era from the early 1960s, apart from the sheer speed and momentum with which Western stimuli came and were processed on the ground. Compared to the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll two decades earlier, this journey proved shorter and less tentative, with only a few years passing between the enthusiastic reception of Van McCoy’s hustle and Mirzino jato’s disco hammer. Welcomed by the media, Yugoslavia’s entertainment industry ensured that disco quickly left traces across the cultural scene. But, in contrast to punk, its translation proved problematic. Staging glamour was easier on television than in real life, and reproducing sophisticated sounds was more challenging than the raw energy of punk. While the latter appeared authentic, local disco was, by and large, seen as fake. For this reason, major disco players looked to the West, attempting at one point to kick-start their disco careers abroad. Discotheque managers leaned on Western experiences and cultural goods to recreate the lived experiences, just as DJs bought fresh records in Trieste and Munich—not only to gain a competitive edge over their peers, but to provide the most authentic background to their ‘imaginary elsewhere’ (Yurchak 2006). Nevertheless, the way disco played out perfectly matches Yurchak’s paradigms, almost as an ideal case in point. Musically, its grooves fed from a variety of sources and emerged at both ends of the spectrum, from underground basements to festival podiums. The same is true of disco’s other manifestations, from its associated visuals to dance-floor effects. Socialist discotheques emerged both within state youth clubs and as enclaves of private entrepreneurship. Next to the new bourgeoisie who displayed their improved lifestyles, clubs gave unprecedented visibility to the disenfranchised social groups who dominated local dance floors. Overall, disco’s eclectic background, contrasting aesthetic preferences, ambivalent cultural status, targeted audiences, and the fluid identities it forged, eludes simplified, black-and-white dichotomies of mainstream and counter-culture. Its funk sympathisers and estrada imitators, male chauvinism and gender fluidity, affluent club crowds and proletarian dance heroes, support of mainstream media and hostility of progressive critics, all defy such polarised notions. Instead, they all existed in the broad space in

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between, highlighting the inadequacy of those dated binaries, revealing instead/beneath complex experiences and practices. Moreover, a look across the border confirms that Yugoslav disco was not simply a product of the country’s unique geopolitics. Indeed, disco had easily penetrated and populated different musical landscapes across the Eastern Bloc, proving that by the late 1970s the Iron Curtain was rusting. Hungarian disco queen Judit Szűcs perfectly embodied Hungarian ‘goulash communism’, while the electronic Baltic space beats of Jānis Lūsēns and Zigmars Liepin ̧š had a strong avant-garde flavour. Seen from this perspective, Yugoslav disco seems to be both a testament to and an expression of the general transformation of the whole socialist world. Acknowledgements  I wish to express my appreciation to a number of musicians, dancers, disc jockeys, film directors, scholars, crate diggers, and journalists who shared with me their experiences and testimonies about disco and its reception, which are at the core of this text. These include (in alphabetical order): Mirza Alijagić, Jovan Bačkulja, Slavin Balen, Dragan Batančev, David Blažević, Vladimir Crvenković, Duško Cvetojević, Hamit Đogani, Dejan Gavrilović, Miroslav Gregurek, Željko Kerleta, Janoš Kern, Dragan Kozlica, Goran Marković, Kire Mitrev, Borja Močnik, Gordan Novak, Boban Petrović, Milena Savić, Mirko Sobota, Lokica Stefanović, Dragan Timotijević, Igor Večerić, Dušan Velkaverh, Igor Vidmar, Predrag Vukčević, and Mihajlo Vukobratović. In addition, the writing of this chapter was helped by the support of NEP4DISSENT (COST Action 16213) and the Croatian Institute of History and its project ʻAlternative Cultures and Grey Zones of Croatian/Yugoslav Late Socialism’.

Notes 1. Elsewhere, I have dealt in more detail with other aspects of Yugoslav disco, such as disc jockeys, disco’s cinematography, and overall codes (Zubak 2016, 2018a, 2020). All of this builds on my ongoing research on Yugoslav and Eastern European socialist disco culture, first exhibited as a gallery exhibition in Zagreb’s Galerija SC and Belgrade’s Galerija Doma omladine in 2015 and 2016. 2. Due to its exceptional theoretical framework that draws on theories of performativity, Yurchak’s study remains dominant in scholarship on late socialism, but it was not the only one. Since the late 2000s and especially the early 2010s a number of volumes have increasingly refuted a Cold War paradigm of fully oppressed communist life, affirming a place for alternative everyday realities, filled with consumption, emotions, and escapes (Crowley and Reid 2010; Fürst and McLellan 2016; Giustino et al. 2013).

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Bibliography Aćimović, Draško. 1978. Da li biste dozvolili svojoj kćerki da se zabavlja s Travoltom. Duga 129, February 3. ———. 1981. Makedonska svadba decenije. RTV revija, August. Beard, Danijela Š., and Ljerka V.  Rasumussen, eds. 2020. Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music. New York: Routledge. Crowley, David, and Susan E. Reid, eds. 2010. Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc. Northwestern University Press: Evanston. Džuboks. 1979. Singlovi. Džuboks 76, November 23: 35. ———. 1980a. Singlovi. Džuboks 79, January 4: 35. ———. 1980b. Singlovi. Džuboks 80, January 18: 35. Echols, Alice. 2011. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York: Norton and Company. Frith, Simon. 1986. Zvoc ̌ni uc ̌inki: Mladina, brezdelje in politika rock’n’rolla. Ljubljana: Univerzitetna konferenca ZSMS, Republiška konferenca ZSMS. Fürst, Juliane, and Josie McLellan, eds. 2016. Dropping out of Socialism. The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc. Lanham: Lexington Books. Giustino, Cathleen M., Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari, eds. 2013. Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books. Glavan, Darko. 1983. Na koncertu lekcije iz sociologije. In Drugom stranom: Almanah novog talasa u SFRJ, ed. David Albahari, 15–17. Beograd: IIC SSO Srbije. Hebdige, Dick. 1980. Potkultura: Znac ̌enje stila. Beograd: Rad. Jelača, Dijana, Maša Kolanović, and Danijela Lugarić, eds. 2017. The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia: (Post)Socialism and Its Other. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kapor, Momčilo. 1978a. Zoe. Zagreb: Znanje. ———. 1978b. Sodoma i Gomora u Studiju 54. Džuboks 49, August 4–7. Katalenec, Juraj. 2013. Yugoslav Self-Management: Capitalism Under the Red Banner. Insurgent Notes: Journal of Communist Theory and Practice. http:// insurgentnotes.com/2013/10/yugoslav-­s elf-­m anagement-­c apitalism-­ underthe-­red-­banner/. Accessed September 2, 2019. Konjović, Sloba. 1978. Nema posla kao što je zabavljački. Džuboks 48, Juli: 4–5. Lawrence, Tim. 2003. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2006. In Defense of Disco (Again). New Formations 58: 128–146. Luković, Petar. 1980. Sumrak opsenarskog ritma. Džuboks 88, May 9: 22–23. ̵ 2004. Đogani. In Leksikon YU mitologije, ed. Iris Adrić, Vladimir Matić, Đorde. ̵ 117–118. Zagreb & Beograd: Postsriptum, Rende. Arsenijević, and Matić Đorde,

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Mazierska, Ewa, ed. 2017. Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Searching for a New Paradigm. London: Palgrave. Mezei, Stevan. 1976. Samoupravni socijalizam: Prilog prouc ̌avanju teorije i prakse. Beograd: Savremena administracija. Pajkić, Nebojša. 1978. Groznica subotom uveče. Džuboks 51, October: 67. Perasović, Benjamin. 2001. Urbana plemena: Sociologija subkultura u Hrvatskoj. Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada. Popović, Petar. 1978. Ni crno ni belo. Zdravo 61, September 4: 23. Prica, Ines. 1991. Omladinska potkultura u Beogradu: simbolic ̌ka praksa. Beograd: Etnografski institut SANU. Ramet, Sabrina P., ed. 1994. Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ryback, Timothy W. 1990. Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. New York: Oxford University Press. Škarica, Siniša. 2005. Kad je rock bio mlad. Pric ̌a s istoc ̌ne strane (1956–1970). Zagreb: VBZ. Start. 1981. Zvjezdarije: Hopa cupa po estradi. Start 317, March 3. Stojanović, Saša. 1979. Disco otuđenje življenja. Džuboks 74, October 10: 6–7. Stojsavljević, Dubravko. 1981. Ludnica s okusom valcera. Studio 874, January 3–9. Tirnanić, Bogdan. 1978. Duša na ledu. Zdravo 61, September 4: 23. Tomc, Gregor. 1989. Druga Slovenija: zgodovina mladinskih gibanj na Slovenskem v 20. stoletju. Ljubljana: UKZSMS. Travolta, Fiksi. 1980. Disco. Paranoja subotnje noći. Polet, January 30: 19. Vályi, Gábor. 2013. Digging in the Crates. Practices of Identity and Belonging in a Translocal Record Collecting Scene. PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths. Vrdoljak, Dražen. 1980. Disko kraljica Lear.” Start 300, July 23. 40–42. Vučetić, Radina. 2010. “Džuboks (Jukebox)”: The First Rock’n’roll Magazine in Socialist Yugoslavia. In Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, ed. Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik, 145–164. Washington: New Academia Publishing. ———. 2018. Coca-cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties. Budapest; New York: CEU Press. Vukojević, Branko.1980. Decenija ukopčavanja. Džuboks 81, February 1: 44–45. Vuletic, Dean. 2007. The Socialist Star. Yugoslavia, Cold War Politics and the Eurovision Song Contest. In A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, eds. Ivan Raykoff and Robert Deam Tobin, 83–97. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate. ———. 2011. The making of a Yugoslav Popular Music Industry. Popular Music History 6, 269–85. Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1981. Untitled. In Problemi 205/206: 1.

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Zubak, Marko. 2016. The Birth of Socialist Disc Jockey: Between Music Guru, DIY Ethos and Market Socialism. In Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm, ed. Ewa Mazierska, 195–214. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018a. Socialist Night Fever: Yugoslav Disco on Film and Television. In Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe, ed. Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Gyori, 139–154. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018b. Yugoslav Youth Press: Student Movements, Youth Subcultures and Alternative Communist Media. Zagreb: Srednja Europa. ———. 2020. ‘Absolutely Yours’: Yugoslav Disco Under Late Socialism. In Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music, ed. Danijela Špirić-Beard and Ljerka Rasmussen, 89–98. Taylor & Francis.

Discography Arian. Arian. PGP RTB, 1981, LP. ̵ Jugoton, 1980, 7” inch. Cice-Mace. “Disko-baba” / “Što se to dogada.” Clan. Motor hoću mama. PGP RTB LP, 1978, LP. Č olić, Zdravko. Pusti, pusti modu. In Zbog tebe. Jugoton, 1980, 7” inch. Dravco. “Light Me” / “I’m Not a Robot Man.” Atlantic, 1978, LP. Isaac Hayes Movement. Disco Connetction. PGP RTB, 1976, LP. KIM Band. Ne, zaista žurim. PGP RTB, 1981, LP. ———. Za kim zvona zvone. PGP RTB, 1982, LP. Kovačićek, Zdenka. “Frka” in Frka. Jugoton, 1984. LP. Lokice. “Dodirni me” / “Disco Lady.” PGP, 1980, 7” Single. Mančić, Suzana. Mamin sin. PGP RTB, 1979. 7”. Mimica, Vesna. Yu Aerobic br.1. Jugoton, 1983, cassette. Mirzino jato. Šećer i med, PGP RTB, 1979, LP. nipplepeople. “Frka” in Singles. Not on label, 2015, Digital Release. Pepel in kri. Disko zvezda. In Ljubljana ’80: Dnevi slovenske zabavne glasbe, ZKP RTVL, 1980, LP. Petrović, Boban. Žur. ZKP RTVL, 1981a, LP. ———. Meteorology. ZKP RTVL, 1981b, 12” Single. Savin, Igor i orkestar Stanka Selaka. Yu Disco Express. Jugoton, 1979, LP. Space. Magic Fly. Jugoton, 1978, LP. Summer, Donna. Bad Girls. ZKP RTVL, 1980, 7” Single. Tereza. Disco ’79. Jugoton, 1978, 7” Single. Ukraden, Neda. “Pisma ljubavi” / “Ljubav me čudno dira.” 1978, 7” Single. Van McCoy, The Disco Kid. PGP RTB, 1976, LP. Various. Philly Sound: The Fantastic Sound Of Philadelphia. Suzy, 1975, LP. ———. Disko Hitovi 5, 1979a, LP. ———. Originalna muzika iz filma Nacionalna klasa. PGP RTB, 1979b, LP.

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———. Socialist Disco. Dancing Behind Yugoslavia’s Velvet Curtain 1977–1987. Fox & His Friends, 2018, 2LP. ———. Jugoton Funk Vol. 1—A Decade of Non-Aligned Beats, Soul, Disco and Jazz 1969–1979. Croatia Records, 2020, 2LP.

Filmography Badham, John (Dir.). Saturday Night Fever, Paramount Pictures, 1977. Crnobrnja, Stanko (Dir.). Beograd nocú / RTV Beograd, 1981. Godard, Jean-Luc (Dir.). Children of Marx and Coca-Cola. In Masculin Féminin, 1966. Groznica ovogodišnje večeri (This Year’s Night Fever). RTV Sarajevo, 1978. Hladnik, Boštjan (Dir.). Ubij me nežno, Vesna Film, 1979. Kane, Robert (Dir.). Thanks God it’s Friday, Casablanca Filmworks, 1978. Lester, Mark L. Roller Boogie, Compas International Pictures, 1979. Marković, Goran (Dir.). Nacionalna klasa, Centar Film, 1979. Righini, Oscar (Dir.). Disco Delirio, Consul International Films, 1979. Ristić, Jovan (Dir.). Pjevam danju, pjevam nocú , Zvezda Film, 1979. Sharp, Ian. Music Machine, Target International, 1979. Svjetla pozornice (Stage Lights). RTV Zagreb, 1977. Vagoner, Robert (Dir.). Disco Godfather, General International Pictures, 1979. Vukobratović, Mihajlo (Dir.). Ružic ̌asti žur, RTV Beograd, 1982. Walker, Nancy (Dir.). Can’t Stop the Music, Emi Films, 1980.

The Lebanese Music Experiment: Disco and Nightlife During the Civil War Natalie Shooter and Ernesto Chahoud

In the mid-1970s, the international wave of disco hit Lebanon full force and was quickly adopted into mainstream culture, and its reverberations were to be felt throughout Beirut’s music scene for decades afterwards. Disco music arrived in the country almost simultaneously with Lebanon’s civil war, sparked when 21 Palestinians were murdered by militia from the Christian Phalange party, who opened fire on a bus travelling to Tall Al Za’tar refugee camp in April 1975. Soon afterwards, Lebanon was split into two with a demarcation line separating the predominantly Christian East and Muslim West districts of Beirut. Lebanon’s civil war lasted for 15 years, and disco remained one of the dominant music forms throughout—their two histories are inextricably linked, each forming the backdrop to the other. Though in West Beirut—the centre of leftist movements which supported the Palestinian cause—politically engaged musicians were popular, disco spread across both sides of the demarcation line. Saturday Night Fever was a major hit in Lebanon’s cinemas in 1978: according to cinema archivist Abboudi Abou Jaoude (Interview, 2018)1 it ran for around three

N. Shooter (*) • E. Chahoud London, UK © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_10

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months and, like everywhere else in the world, the biggest commercial disco songs of the period reached huge popularity, with a handful even translated into Arabic-language versions. ‘One Way Ticket’, ‘Señorita Por Favor’ and ‘Voulez-Vous’ were regularly played at the city’s busiest discotheques Mecano and Beachcomber, located in two neighbouring hotel resorts, Summerland and Coral Beach. Previously a live music club, the Polynesian-themed Beachcomber reopened in 1977 as a discotheque, hiring Ghassan Khazoun as its DJ. The exclusive club had a strict door policy—couples and groups only—and a dress code. The DJ booth was equipped with Russco turntables and the dance floor was ‘waxed frequently for dancing purposes’ (Interview with Khazoun, 2018). In 1980, Gloria Gaynor came to Lebanon and performed by the pool of the Summerland to an audience of a few thousand. Her songs were regularly played at the hotel’s discotheque, Mecano, which came with all the modern features—strobe lighting, a smoke machine and a disco ball. Mohammed Tamo joined Mecano in 1979, DJing there seven nights a week for almost 20 years. Tamo was asked to play ‘I Will Survive’ so frequently during disco’s peak that he prepared a trick to play on clubbers: he would carry an old LP inside a Gloria Gaynor sleeve, and break it over his knee when he reached his request limit (Interview, 2018). Even during the war Lebanon’s club life continued, with Summerland and Coral Beach employees taking up permanent residence in the hotels and their discotheque customers often booking a room rather than making the risky journey home. As Khazoun recalls: In 1983, I was crossing to my home in Achrafieh late one night when I was nearly abducted by militia—the next day, [Coral Beach owner] Georges Massoud asked me to get my clothes, gave me a hotel room and I lived there for the next 14 years. (Interview, 2018)

Though both hotels took precautions—Summerland reportedly hired its own firefighting department and militia for protection, as well as keeping 18 freezers stocked full of enough veal, beef and smoked salmon to last an entire summer season (Friedman 1989, 32)—they didn’t survive the war without incidents. Located near the embassy district, an outpost of Palestinian fighters, the hotels were bombarded with everything from cluster bombs to phosphorus shells by Israeli forces when they invaded Lebanon in 1982 (Friedman 1983).

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Disco music was easily adopted in Lebanon as the country already had a fully developed music industry in place, which evolved simultaneously with the establishment of a modern school of Lebanese music, distinct from the dominant Egyptian industry. Broadcast across the Middle East, Al Sharq Al Adna (The Near East Broadcasting Station2) had a hand in Lebanon’s mid-twentieth-century music renaissance. Founded in Palestine, the radio moved its headquarters to Cyprus in 1948 during the Nakba (meaning ‘catastrophe’), the forced exodus of 750,000 Palestinians with the creation of Israel (Allan 2021). The radio’s director Sabri Al Sharif brought together musicians and composers from the region to participate in a project to ‘merge the local repertoire from the Bilad Al Sham region with European music’ (Burkhalter 2013, 154–157). Similarly, Radio Lebanon—founded in the late 1930s under the French mandate (Stone 2008, 77) and taken over by the Lebanese Government in 1946— had a significant role to play with its music department director Halim Al Rumi giving contracts to artists in the 1950s. Brothers Assi and Mansour Rahbani launched their prolific musical careers at Radio Lebanon, where they first worked with singer Fairouz (Asmar 2009, 10); they formed a lasting partnership with her, and Assi and Fairouz married in 1955. With no other recording studio in Lebanon, artists recorded at the radio, which became a central point for the music industry where producers such as Voix De L’Orient label founder Joseph Chahine went to talent scout (Interview with Abdallah Chahine, 2018). In 1957, Assi and Mansour produced their first of many musical plays starring Fairouz at Baalbeck Festival, an annual festival first held in 1956 at the Roman temples of Baalbeck, which hosted the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis. Assi and Mansour’s large-scale productions, often portraying a utopia of village life and folklore traditions, contributed to the formation of a refreshed national identity that traced its roots to before Lebanon’s colonial occupation by various foreign powers (Stone 2008, 49–50). The Rahbani Brothers started an institution that became known as the ‘Rahbani School’, involving the key figures of Lebanon’s music and literary scenes including poets, singers, composers and actors/actresses such as Said Akl, Nasri Chamseddine, Philemon Wehbe, Wadih Al Safi and Sabah. Functioning as a music factory, the Rahbani School dominated Lebanon’s music scene and was responsible for launching the careers of the majority of its singers and musicians for decades, laying the foundations of modern Lebanese music.

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In the 1950s and 1960s, Lebanon became a ‘regional leisure and fun destination par excellence’ (Buchakjian 2015, 256–281) with a diverse music and nightlife scene to entertain the swarms of tourists. In the mountains surrounding Beirut, hotel resorts like Piscine Aley and Grand Sofar became centres of entertainment in the summer, holding concerts with the region’s biggest stars. Until the civil war, Beirut’s nightlife was mostly clustered around the city’s central districts Sahat Al Burj and Phoenicia Street where a mixture of cabarets, hotel nightclubs and restaurants hosted a melting pot of Oriental ensembles, belly dancers, European dancers and live bands and singers. Caves du Roy was one of the city’s most renowned nightlife spots, where notable figures like Frank Sinatra and Jacques Brel rubbed shoulders with Lebanon’s high society (Buchakjian 2015, 264). Joe Diverio, an Italian singer who performed at the nightclub daily from the mid-1960s until 1975, remembers: ‘I met all the politicians in Caves du Roy—presidents, prime ministers, deputies. Everybody passed through Caves Du Roy—if they wanted to count for something, they had to come’ (Interview, 2018). In Le Paon Rouge, the Phoenicia Hotel nightclub, Greek-Italian Alexandrian-born belly dancer Nadia Gamal had an Oriental dance show, Fayza Ahmed and Hiyam Younes sang with orchestras at Sahat Al Burj’s 1940s cabaret La Parisiana, and bands such as the Kozaks and the Magic Fingers played at nightclubs Stereo, Revolution and Epi-­ Club. International musicians took up residence in Beirut too, finding well-paid work in the extravagant shows of the Middle East’s first casino, Casino du Liban. Many of them were also hired for studio recordings, forming orchestras alongside Lebanese musicians on the albums of Fairouz and Elias Rahbani. When disco emerged in Lebanon, the country’s recording industry was already well shaped. Many labels were established throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, reflecting the country’s position as a regional hub of music production. Most had international partnerships with labels such as EMI and Pathé and international labels like Philips had Lebanese offshoots. Established in the 1950s and partnering with EMI, Voix De L’Orient held an early monopoly, releasing the Rahbani Brothers’ extensive catalogue. Robert Khayat’s 1960s-founded Voice of Lebanon and Duniaphon released classical Arabic and Lebanese pop. SLD joined the industry in the mid-1960s, obtaining local distribution rights to make pressings of hundreds of hit records from Elvis to Jimmy McGriff. In 1969, EMI set up a Lebanese branch and record pressing plant in Beirut, but, proving a commercial failure, it closed only three years later.3 EMI

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then moved its Lebanese operations to Greece and absorbed the Arab World’s most prominent labels under its roof, with the company manufacturing and distributing 90% of the region’s productions. Besides Radio Lebanon, three main recording studios existed during disco’s rise— Baalbeck, Polysound and Al Ittihad. At the helm of the cinema industry as the Arab world’s biggest production studio, Baalbeck was no doubt the best equipped. Since the 1950s, hundreds of iconic albums were recorded there by studio manager Farid Abu Kheir. Many progressive works were given birth to at the 1974-founded Polysound, the studios of Nabil Mumtaz, an electrical engineer turned sound engineer. Pioneering fusion band Ferkat Al Ard’s album Oghneya (‘Song’, 1979) and guitarist Mohammed Hegazi’s belly dance albums were recorded at dubbing studio Al Ittihad.

‘Liza… Liza’ and ‘Abu Ali’: Lebanon’s Earliest Disco Records The first disco record to emerge from Lebanon was Elias Rahbani’s ‘Liza… Liza’, which was included on the 1978 album With Love… (1978b) and released as a 12-inch maxi single (1978a). Elias already had a more than 15-year prolific music career behind him, composing and arranging for a diverse spectrum of artists, as well as releasing under his own name. The younger brother of Assi and Mansour, Elias wasn’t part of the Rahbani Brothers’ musical partnership, but still contributed a number of famous compositions for Fairouz in their 1970s plays; he launched his own independent career and became one of the leading figures in modern Lebanese pop. Elias’ discography as a composer and arranger for Lebanese artists is vast and his work is wide-ranging in style, covering Oriental–Occidental fusion, Lebanese and French pop, psych-rock and easy listening soundtracks in the style of Paul Mauriat and James Last. His name is closely associated with iconic figures such as singer and actress Sabah, he launched the careers of artists like Sammy Clark and Hoda, and he was a leading figure in a regional wave of Franco-Arab chanson music. Working with large orchestras, he composed soundtracks for big-budget Lebanese and Egyptian films in the 1960s and 1970s such as Ahlan Bi-Lhob (‘Welcome Love’, 1967) and Habibati (‘My Love’, 1974). He was also one of the first in Lebanon to write jingles for TV and radio adverts in the 1970s. With only one TV channel, Télé Liban, broadcasting throughout the

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majority of the civil war, Elias’ jingles for Rayovak batteries, Tatra dairy and Picon cheese formed a kind of bizarre wartime soundtrack that became ‘part of the collective memory’ of the Lebanese (Burkhalter 2013, 115–123). Elias famously recycled his 1980s Barilla Macaroni jingle into the Euro disco song ‘Wa’a Douni Wnatarouni’ (‘They Promised Me and They Made Me Wait’) for Sabah, which appeared on her 1982 album Wadi Shamsine(1982). Elias also released a handful of interesting albums under his own name prior to ‘Liza’. Released on Voix De L’Orient, his 1972 Mosaic of the Orient and second volume in 1974 (1972, 1974)  are among his most original compositions, featuring Oriental psychedelic pop instrumentals with heavy drum breaks and funky basslines that have been sampled by artists like The Black Eyed Peas. It’s not surprising that Elias was one of the first in Lebanon to contribute to the international wave of disco in 1978 with ‘Liza’: overall, his previous discography is modern in its approach and connected to international music currents, and he was among the first in Lebanon to start recording with synthesisers. As Elias’ son Jad Rahbani explains, ‘it was the disco era, Elias saw that disco was popular and wanted to do something. He always wanted to try whatever was new’ (Interview, 2018). A fuzzy Cerrone-style cosmic disco instrumental, with a slight Oriental flavour, ‘Liza’ has all the hallmarks of a great mainstream disco record: a slow-build intro of electric bass and guitar loops, sweeping string lines, erotic-style female chorus, a heavy disco bassline and a punchy four-on-­ the-floor beat. On the B-side of the maxi single is the 1960s psych-garage song ‘From the Moon’, a slight adaptation of the song Elias previously wrote for the Armenian-Lebanese rock band The News, along with the romance ballad ‘Summer Love’. With a live orchestra of around 15 musicians, the album and single were recorded at Polysound, with Mumtaz no doubt putting his own stamp on the sound. Jad Rahbani explains how the two had a close artistic and personal relationship: They were very close friends. They spent a lot of time discovering sound together. Elias liked to know a lot about sound, technique and recording. He used to spend night after night with Mumtaz doing trials, recording frequencies, perfecting the sound of the drums. (Interview, 2018)

Though ‘Liza’ sounds like it was recorded with a bigger orchestra, Mumtaz was known to employ several cost-cutting techniques—including

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recording musicians playing the string lines twice to bulk out the string section and leaving empty tracks spare when he recorded on his 8-track tape recorder to add in more later. Sound engineer Ziad Sidawi, who worked alongside Mumtaz in the late 1980s, remembers his studio setup: He had a 24-channel mixer with no name, that he built himself. He would say it’s his top-secret weapon. He had a delay unit and a big reverb plate that he would run sound through, which gives that signature 1970s reverb. When you hear this, immediately you know it’s Polysound. He was famous for this lush string sound. (Interview, 2018)

Proposed by EMI Lebanon Managing Director George Makzoumeh, the 12-inch maxi sleeve artwork for ‘Liza’ went for maximum impact and market appeal. Matching the cover concept of international releases by artists like Fausto Papetti and Cerrone, it features a photograph of a topless woman, dripping with water, wearing a gold collar around her neck. Her arms are extended behind her head as she gazes suggestively into the camera. Clearly lacking though in Cerrone-style photoshoot budgets, the image is credited to Stock Photos Unlimited Inc. Indicative of Lebanon’s liberal and open society (as well as the tasteless objectification of women to sell records in the 1970s), ‘Liza’ is one of a handful of Lebanese productions from the period that feature nude women on their covers. It’s not known how many copies of ‘Liza’ were pressed: EMI Greece’s archives were looted when the factory closed down in 1990 and many of Voix De L’Orient’s archives were destroyed in a fire from an explosion near its vulnerably located headquarters in Bab Idriss. But Abdallah Chahine, who continued running the label that his late father founded in the 1950s, until he himself  passed  away  in August 2021, reported in a 2018 interview that Elias’ disco single was a commercial success. The record clearly had international appeal, as it was picked up by other EMI branches with pressings made by Pathé Marconi EMI in France and EMI Electrola in Germany in 1978. ‘Liza’ reached the US market too, distributed to record shops, discos and radio stations by Brooklyn-based Arabic music wholesaler Rashid Sales Company, a family business founded by Albert Rashid, a descendent of Lebanese immigrants. Albert’s son Stanley Rashid worked closely with Makzoumeh to promote EMI Greece’s Arabic music catalogue in the 1970s and 1980s in the US, mostly to the country’s large Arab diaspora, though ‘Liza’ was marketed alongside other international disco releases.

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According to a series of exchanges between Makzoumeh and Rashid which took place between September and November 1979, and which can be found in the Zida archives, the record seemed to find some success in the US market. In a cable dated September 24, 1979, Makzoumeh writes: ‘I have just seen your letter […] concerning your approach in new markets such as the Manhattan Stores for the “Liza” Disco and we are extremely pleased of the favourable response you obtained’. A few months later Rashid writes: ‘Several discos have contacted me and spoke well of “Liza” and will play it’. However, Rashid also suggests making an edit of the track, which is perhaps a sign that the record didn’t take off as well as hoped: ‘Please consider the possibilities of re-mixing Lisa Disco [sic]. I think it could have a stronger beat as well as a break. If we can get a break it would have more sales appeal’ (Zida archives). The other major Lebanese disco record of the late 1970s, ‘Abu Ali’ (‘Father of Ali’) (1979), was by Assi and Fairouz’s son Ziad Rahbani—a sign of the dominance the Rahbani family held over Lebanon’s music scene—and was released in early 1979 as a 12-inch maxi single.4 The composer, arranger and playwright’s 13-minute-long masterpiece is an Arabic jazz-funk clubbing instrumental that was targeted at the international disco market. Though he was only 23 when it was released, Ziad was already an established figure in Lebanon—a controversial artist who had become the voice of Lebanon’s left in wartime through his political plays and songs, even penning an anthem for the Lebanese Communist Party. Though Ziad contributed music to the Rahbani Brothers plays, such as Al Mahatta (‘The Station’, 1973) and Mais El Rim (1975), he carved out his own distinct identity as a playwright and director producing a series of social realist musical plays in the 1970s and 1980s that brought him national and regional fame (Asmar 2013, 145). Focusing on Lebanon’s struggling working class and real-life problems, Ziad’s plays spoke to a whole generation during the war. The songs he composed for them—set to lush jazz soundscapes that incorporated wide-ranging styles from bossa nova to Arabic music—became the soundtrack of the leftist movement, and jokes and phrases from the plays became ingrained in Lebanon’s popular culture and daily language (Elzeer 2010, 196–208). Ziad’s ‘Abu Ali’ was an ambitious music project from the start. Though it emerged out of war-torn Lebanon in 1979, the record carried aspirations to impact on the outside world. It was recorded in Greece with a 40-musician orchestra at great cost, and released on the small label Zida, the pilot project of Armenian-Lebanese record shop owner Khatchik

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‘Chico’ Mardirian. Zida—its name a play on ‘Ziad’—had a promising start: its first few releases included forward-thinking music projects from Lebanon’s small politically engaged West Beirut scene such as fusion band Ferkat Al Ard’s aforementioned Oghneya (‘Song’) and singer-songwriter Khaled El Haber’s Hin Yasmot Al Moghani (‘When the Singer is Silent’,  1979). For a short two-year period, Zida released all of Ziad’s creative output. Like many of Ziad’s songs, ‘Abu Ali’ was first composed for the stage— it was the main theme for the 1974 play Abu Ali Al Asmarani (‘Abu Ali the Tanned’, 1974). In an interview conducted in his Hamra recording studio Nota, Ziad recalled a conversation with EMI’s Makzoumeh that triggered his adaptation of the two-minute song into an extended clubbing record, with Makzoumeh making decisions on everything from arrangement to tempo: We worked on the theme to make it longer. I was planning to do an album with three pieces on each side. [Maksoumeh] said “No, no, no! This is not the wave now!”. He told me it needs to be a minimum of 12 minutes on each side for the clubs. It took one month-and-a-half of writing every day. (…) If you listen to the original “Abu Ali” it’s much faster. Maksoumeh suddenly said that we should do this disco bellydance thing. I told him the melody is much faster, but he said, “believe me, this will work”. So even the speed of the record is not what I decided—you see how much capital can interfere? (Interview, 2018)

Elaborately written, the instrumental features constant transitions across its 13 minutes, with the main melody line weaving in and out. Ziad’s integration of instruments such as nay, buzuk and tabla gives the record an Middle Eastern flavour and clear sense of origin. The B-side of the single is also an adaptation from a play, the theme Ziad wrote for the play Mais El Rim, and shows the same level of craftsmanship in its composition. A large-scale and costly production, with the bill footed by producer Mardirian, ‘Abu Ali’ and the song ‘Mais El Rim’ were recorded in Athens at the Columbia-EMI studios with the symphony orchestra of the Greek radio. Though some of them only had minor roles, Lebanese musicians from Ziad’s inner circle were flown in to be involved in the project too: the actor and singer Joseph Sakr, Ziad’s close friend and artistic collaborator, had a small vocal part on ‘Abu Ali’; Issam Hajali, the founder of Ferkat Al Ard, played a guitar solo on ‘Abu Ali’ and acoustic guitar on ‘Mais El

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Rim’ and remembers Ziad’s precise approach to composing: ‘He wrote everything. Nothing was accidental, everything was written, even the whisper’ (Interview, 2018). Ferkat Al Ard jazz saxophonist/producer Toufic Farroukh also featured on the record, as well as established flautist Joseph Karkoor, tabla player Setrak Sarkissian and riqq player Michel Baklook. On the same trip to Athens, the music for Ziad’s first album for Fairouz, the 1979 Zida release Wahdon (‘Only Them’, 1979), was also recorded. It includes ‘Al Bosta’ (‘The Bus’), an Oriental disco-funk adaptation of Ziad’s composition for his play Bennesbeh Labokra… Chou? (‘What About Tomorrow?’, 1978). Every intricate detail of the production of ‘Abu Ali’ was given careful attention, even instrument selection. The bass drums—six were rented to find the perfect one—proved a point of contention between sound engineer Stelios Yannakopoulos and Ziad, who to this day believes the record would have sounded better with a more accentuated bass drum sound: I didn’t like the sound of the bass drum and was insisting to push it. Finally, he said “believe me, that’s enough bass drum, there are levels here”. I wasn’t into [recording] technique at the time, but I told him that it doesn’t sound like it [should]—it wasn’t disco enough. He wasn’t into disco, he was into classical music and big bands. (…) It’s the bass drum that triggers everything. You could’ve had the whole thing at a higher level. (Interview, 2018)

With the careful shaping of ‘Abu Ali’ to fit the demands of the international market and the attention to detail in its production, there were clearly hopes the record would propel Ziad’s name beyond the Arabic-­ language market. It also carried on its back the dreams of producer Mardirian, who made a considerable leap of faith on the record in terms of his financial investment. Unfortunately though, it wasn’t to be—the record failed commercially because the international market refused it. In the late Mardirian’s archives, at the record shop Chico Records run by his son Diran Mardirian, is a complete collection of the documentation from Zida’s short existence between 1978 and 1980. Including sales receipts of the record’s distribution, invoices for its production tab and Maksoumeh’s correspondence promoting the record internationally, the documents give a rare insight into the making of the record and shed light on why it failed to crossover. Receipts from EMI Greece show that ‘Abu Ali’ was well circulated, with copies going out to the Levant, the Gulf, North Africa, Europe, North America and Australia.

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Three main factors appear to have limited the commercial potential and international reach of ‘Abu Ali’: piracy, its monumental production cost, and the difficulty of categorising and marketing the record. The record was also by an internationally obscure artist from a country in the midst of civil war, with an Arabic-language title and, just to pigeon-hole it further, exoticised sleeve artwork set in the desert, re-affirming a false but common belief about Lebanon. In the late 1970s, the record industry was still struggling to adjust to the rise in popularity of the cassette and its role in piracy. It was common practice for discotheques to purchase just one copy of each release and make multiple pirated cassettes. Diran Mardirian explains: ‘The local market was rampant with piracy—there were pushcart discotheques which would pass right in front of the store playing pirated copies of “Abu Ali”’ (Interview, 2018). The large-scale production behind ‘Abu Ali’ and ‘Mais El Rim’, including studio and instrument rental and musician fees, was extremely costly and the 12-inch single went significantly over budget. An invoice dated January 16, 1979 addressed to Khatchik Mardirian from Orchestra Supervisor Nicolaos Tsilimbaris shows that rental of the 35-musician Greek orchestra alone for two days of recording in January 1979 totalled 271,900 drs, the equivalent of 7552 USD at the time—a hefty bill for a small label in its infancy (Zida archives). Diran Mardirian recalls: ‘My dad had to call my mum to get her savings from Germany, which at the time was 25,000 USD—we’re talking 1979 dollars. That’s just what they needed to settle their account at EMI Greece, I don’t know what it cost before that’ (Interview, 2018). Despite Makzoumeh’s initial excitement about the record’s international potential, an underground Lebanese disco/jazz-funk record proved a hard sell within the dominant American disco market. At 13 minutes, the song was too long for radio play—the main promotional tool of the 1970s. The pioneering crossover of ‘Abu Ali’, straddling the genres of jazz-funk and Oriental disco, also made the record difficult to place in a commercial market that preferred easily categorisable genres. Discovering that the record didn’t neatly fit into either market, Makzoumeh proposed classifying it alongside Herb Alpert’s hit record Rise, (1979)  and suggested it might appeal to the ‘black market’. The Zida archives contain a number of enthusiastic letters from Makzoumeh—pitching the record to global distributors and to the likes of Lebanese-American singer-songwriter Paul Jabara—but the only person to bite was the US distributor of ‘Liza’,

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Stanley Rashid, and even he believed the record needed adapting to make an impact: His was the only answer that came back positively, but with some conditions. [Rashid] said that it had to be more disco and you had to remove the jazzy influences, or if you wanted to do it jazz, you had to remix it another way. That’s why it didn’t work commercially outside—in the production houses it’s either this or that. (Interview with Ziad, 2018)

Still, the record gathered some success in the US. After sending out the record to New York’s major discos and disco radio stations, a letter from Rashid dated October 1979 reads: ‘Last night I heard “Abu Ali” on the radio for the first time and it was a thrill for me to hear an Arabic record being aired in New York’ (Zida archives). In 1979, the idea to create a shorter re-mixed edit of ‘Abu Ali’, with a more pronounced beat to better position it in the US disco market, gathered momentum. An adaptation of ‘Abu Ali’ was eventually settled on, with Makzoumeh also proposing a title change. The mastertapes of ‘Abu Ali’ were sent across from Athens as planned and work on the third version of the song commenced at Polysound by September 1979, as demonstrated by invoices billing Mardirian for ‘Remixing Abu Ali’ (Zida archives), but it never saw the light of day. According to Ziad, the project was halted because ‘nobody wanted to produce it’ (Interview, 2018). Not long afterwards, Ziad and Mardirian’s music partnership ended. The cassette of Ziad’s 1980 play Film Ameriki Tawil (‘A Long American Movie’, 1980b) was the final Zida release, after little more than two bold years of existence. Bankrupt after the ‘Abu Ali’ episode, Mardirian exited music, preferring to invest in more dependable operations which would always have a market. As Diran Mardirian recalls: He didn’t want anything to do with music anymore. He had a nervous breakdown and the Israeli invasion happened shortly afterwards. My father decided to go into video. It was a war-torn country, so videos were like bread. (Interview, 2018)

Though the label was short-lived, the legacy of Zida remains—its nine releases between 1978 and 1980 remain among Lebanon’s most avant-­ garde works. Today ‘Abu Ali’ is one of the most sought-after records in the Lebanese discography, has received a second life among a new

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generation of music lovers, and is regularly played in clubs around the world and on radio stations such as NTS. It was bootlegged in 2014 and officially re-released in 2019 on the reissue label WEWANTSOUNDS (2019).

Disco Takes Root Though in the US disco’s popularity had begun to wane by 1980, its influence on the Lebanese musical landscape productions was at its peak and continued to dominate until the mid-1980s. Many composers and singers produced music within the realms of disco and albums from mainstream artists included at least one disco song, and even artists with a classical repertoire started riding the disco wave. With a local market already switched on to the sound of international disco, some Lebanese labels focused their catalogue and marketing towards the genre, keen to tap into its commercial appeal. The word ‘disco’ was incorporated into album and track titles and shouted on record covers in large fonts over disco-themed visuals. Mirroring the international market, a number of disco singles came out on the 12-inch 45rpm maxi single format, targeted at club play. Singer Jacqueline and composer and musician Rafic Hobeika teamed up to record Arabic-language disco covers in 1980 with a group of musicians dubbed the Sunshine Orchestra. Hobeika’s rearrangements of four big international disco hits—‘I Will Survive’, ‘Señorita Por Favor’, ‘One Way Ticket’ and ‘Pauvres Diables’, all with Arabic lyrics sung by Jacqueline—were recorded at Baalbeck Studios and released on Voix De L’Orient as a giant 45rpm single (1980a)  and on the album Jacqueline (1980b), with instrumentals on buzuk, violin and oud on the B-side. At the time of the record’s release, Hobeika was well-established among Lebanon’s music elite: the self-taught musician started out playing violin in a cabaret in Sahet Al Burj in the mid-1950s and later worked as a bandleader and arranger on popular TV talent show Studio El Fan (1972). He composed and arranged for Lebanese singers such as Hiyam Younes, Walid Toufic and famous eccentric Toni Hanna, writing his 1974 hit ‘Hidaya Hiday’ (‘Walk On By’, 1974), and his name was closely associated with stars Wadih El Safi and Samira Toufic. Singer, dancer and actress Jacqueline was also well-known: she was a regular on Lebanon’s entertainment circuit throughout the 1960s, performing a cabaret-style show at Piscine Aley and Grand Sofar, opening for stars like Abdel Halim Hafez and Sabah. In the 1960s and 1970s, she acted in a string of Egyptian and

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Lebanese films and she frequently filled the columns of Lebanese newspapers. Though her discography was modest, the handful of pop-­dabkeh songs she released include melodies from some of the biggest Lebanese composers of the time. Rafic Hobeika and Jacqueline’s 1980 releases represented a sizeable departure from each of their musical backgrounds, and were a sign that disco had become a truly mainstream music phenomenon. Their commercial disco records, which simply repackaged international hits for the Arabic market, were clearly targeted at mass market appeal. By the mid- to late 1970s, Jacqueline’s career had begun to wane, and the new wave of disco music brought the potential of fresh success. According to the late Hobeika’s daughter Joumana Hobeika, the disco project was an attempt to revive Jacqueline’s 1960s and early 1970s fame with something current that was related to the international market (Interview, 2018). Likely due to budget restrictions, Hobeika’s disco rearrangements are recorded with a relatively modest production, with no brass section, and take a lighter, bubblegum-pop approach. The Arabic lyrics of the songs were written by Hobeika, loosely translated to keep the rhyme of the melody. Visually speaking, the cover artwork of Jacqueline’s maxi single and album, along with her 1979 compilation, features a collection of photographs of the singer on the beach in pin-up style poses in various stages of undress: half-submerged in the water, wearing only an open-buttoned see-­ through shirt, lying on the beach, a straw hat covering her chest, and swimming topless. Though a series of 1970s and 1980s Lebanese album covers use female nudity as their selling point, these two releases are probably the only to feature a Lebanese artist. Nicknamed ‘Jacqueline Monroe’, the singer was one of the earliest pin-ups in the Arab World, a regular cover girl for popular magazines such as Al Shabaka and Al Layali. But in an interview at her Beirut apartment, Jacqueline told us that Hobeika persuaded her to pose topless for the record artwork—she agreed on the premise that the photos would only be used for the records’ American release: ‘That’s why I accepted to do them, but he tricked me—nobody told me they’d be distributed here’ (Interview, 2018). In the early 1980s, a mini wave of Lebanese artists started to release disco songs as the genre became the face of commerciality in pop music. Issam Raggi, a known pop singer who had hits throughout the 1970s, included the disco song ‘Lakini’ (‘Meet Me’) on his 1981 album Al Mahabba (‘Hello’, 1981). Composed by Elias Rahbani and typical of his Euro disco style, the synth-driven song is set to a fast-paced disco beat

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with a kitschy melody line hummed by a backing choir. New singers to emerge in the pop market also tried their hand at the disco trend, such as pop singer Maya Yazbek, whose 1980 debut album  (1980) ended on ‘Disco Cocktail’, a commercial, fast-paced 10-song medley. Several records that came out on Voice of Stars, a label that predominantly catered to Lebanon’s large Armenian diaspora, also reflected the popularisation of disco. Its 1980s greatest hits release  (n.d.) of Armenian-French singer Marten Yorgantz features the banging Armenian-language disco anthem ‘Discotchari’. As Lebanese artists began to fuse the new genre with their own style, disco music elaborated into many different shapes, creating a small, and distinctly Lebanese, disco catalogue. Singer and composer Mohammad Jamal made the forward-thinking Oriental disco album Doroup El Hawa (‘Waves of Love’), a world away from his previous pop discography of the 1950s and 1960s, when he found fame as part of the Arab World’s most popular duo, with his then wife, the Syrian-Jordanian Circassian singer Taroub, who also went on to have her own successful music and cinema career after they divorced (Shooter 2019). The eight-track album was recorded at Polysound and released in 1981, just before Jamal immigrated to Los Angeles. Composed by Joseph Hanna and arranged by Ihsan AlMunzer, the synth-driven album features the hallmarks of disco—heavy disco basslines and a whooping female backing chorus—but also incorporates electronic experimentations, dabkeh melodies and a reggae touch on ‘Rohty Rohty’ (‘You Left, You Left’). Another interesting Middle Eastern disco record, albeit with a more commercial approach, came from Mansour’s son Marwan Rahbani, whose debut release ‘Salade Du Chef’ (1980a) came out on a 12-inch maxi single on Voix De L’Orient in 1980. The entirely original 10-minute-long clubbing song, recorded with an orchestra of around 40–50 musicians, is a dizzying but well-formed mashup of rearranged Oriental and classical melodies put to a disco beat, including Abdel Wahab’s ‘Aziza’, Mozart’s ‘Turkish March’, Miguel Gustavo’s ‘Brigitte Bardot’, the Rahbani Brothers’ ‘Shatti Ya Denyi’ (‘Here Comes the Rain’) and two folklore songs, alongside his own melodies. It was the time of disco and so I did “Salade Du Chef”. At the time it was a kind of joke. I was coming from the classical side, all of my studies were on piano and we were always composing small concertos and symphonies, and all of a sudden, I moved to something very different. It was a big surprise

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that it turned out to be a hilarious success. People liked it—I guess because it was original and very modern. (Interview with Marwan Rahbani, 2018)

Musicians and artists were among the estimated 990,000 people (Tabar 2010, 5) who fled Lebanon during the civil war, and many more who’d left the country earlier for education or work stayed in their host countries with the ongoing conflict. As a result, part of the Lebanese discography of the 1970s and 1980s was produced outside the country. It is worth noting the output of Lebanese drummer Raja Zahr, who produced two experimental Middle Eastern disco albums in 1980 from the US, where he’d settled after leaving Lebanon at 17 (Interview with Zahr, 2019). Though they were recorded at California Recording Studios, they were funnelled through the Lebanese record industry—pressed at EMI Greece and released on Voix De L’Orient. Since Zahr was a drummer, the two albums take an experimental approach to rhythm, and are full of percussive breaks and a fusion of traditional Arabic rhythm patterns and Western drumming. The album Disco Balady (‘Homemade Disco’, 1980a) is a kind of drum-led Oriental disco fusion with Arabic-language lyrics. The disco songs on the record include the high-energy opener ‘Baby’, a mixture of disco-pop with dabkeh and belly dance, the slow-mover ‘Give Me Disco’ and ‘Maia’, a catchy Arabic disco pop song. Zahr’s other 1980 release, Lebanon (1980b), includes disco, belly dance and nostalgic folk-pop ballads featuring innovative drumming patterns and synthesisers used alongside a live band. The instrumental ‘Drum Sequence’ is perhaps the most experimental disco song by a Lebanese artist, driven by layers of drumming and a looping bassline.

‘Belly Dance Disco’: a New Genre, Born Out of Lebanon Belly dance—whose Anglophone nomenclature comes from the French danse du ventre but which is mostly known as raqs sharqi (dance of the East) in the region—has long been a staple of the Arab world’s cultural and nightlife scenes. Many of Beirut’s nightclubs and cabarets had belly dance shows and starred famous Egyptian belly dancers such as Nagwa Fouad and Nadia Gamal and a small circle of musicians built their name on the belly dance style (Nearing 1995, 14). The genre’s popularity peaked in Lebanon in the 1970s with labels releasing belly dance records

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by artists like Setrak Sarkissian, Nicolas Dick, electric guitarists Mohammed ‘Mike’ Hegazi and Omar Khorshid and buzuki-player Matar Mohammed. Voice of Stars was one of the labels to focus its catalogue on belly dance, with modern adaptations of the genre appearing in the 1970s and 1980s, as artists applied Western instruments and arrangement. Lebanese violinist, composer and arranger Nicolas El Dick was involved in multiple belly dance productions on Voice of Stars. He conducted the orchestra on Cairo By Night (1974), a 1974 album of Abdel Wahab compositions rearranged in belly dance style, worked on similar adaptations of Farid Al Atrache’s music and contributed to the album Aziza Belly Dance (1975). His album Disco Belly Dance (1978)  is an early fusion of belly dance with disco forms, featuring modern adaptations of folklore songs alongside El Dick’s own compositions. El Dick was also behind Robert Maalouf’s 1986 album Mahdoume (‘She’s Cute’,  1986),5 writing the music and lyrics for the Lebanese singer’s only release, which includes the interesting Oriental electronic pop-disco ballad ‘Ana Wil Leyl’ (‘The Night and I’). El Dick’s use of electronic rather than Oriental instruments, an interesting drumming pattern and funk influences gives the song a unique quality—a kind of psychedelic Oriental groove. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ihsan AlMunzer released a handful of innovative belly dance disco albums, across which he gave traditional melodies, with their origins in the Eastern Mediterranean region, a progressive update. The albums also feature his own compositions and modern adaptations of songs from the classical Egyptian, Lebanese and Armenian repertoire. AlMunzer’s integration of the new music technology available at the time, the Kawai organ, Solina string synthesiser and Prophet 5, give the albums their unique sound. It’s this synth-laden belly dance disco-funk style—a fusion of Occidental and Arabic music—that came to define Al-Munzer’s music. This pioneering fusion of belly dance melodies with disco music can be considered a truly localised form of disco music—a unique genre born in Lebanon. Classically trained on piano at the Lebanese National Conservatory, AlMunzer started playing beat and rock and roll with his band Moonlight in the 1960s and moved to Italy at the age of 21, where he studied music and worked in restaurants as a one-man show, singing in six languages. He returned to Lebanon and to Arabic music in the late 1970s: ‘when I came back, I was affected with what my father liked in Arabic music. I wanted to play Arabic music, but I was influenced by drums and foreign music. That’s why I made this new flavour’ (Interview, 2018).

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AlMunzer’s career peaked in the 1980s. He became a small-screen celebrity as the bandleader on the TV programme Studio El Fan, had a nightly gig at the piano bar of the Commodore Hotel—which at the time acted as headquarters for the foreign press—and played in the orchestra of Fairouz in her international concerts. Between 1980 and 1986, Al-Munzer formed a partnership—which he would later describe as a kind of creative ‘monopoly’ (Interview, 2018)—with Polysound Studio owner Nabil Mumtaz, arranging and writing the music notation for artists, conducting the orchestra and playing the organ.6 He bought a Solina String Synthesizer in the late 1970s when Studio El Fan creator Simon Asmar requested a more modern sound for the show, and Commodore Hotel owner Yousef Nazzal brought a Prophet 5 back from a trip to America for him. These synths revolutionalised the way he composed and arranged Arabic music and characterised the sound of his ‘disco belly dance’ releases: The Prophet 5 was very expensive—$4000. I used to cut from my salary each month to pay it off. It was very progressive; it has many sounds and you can compose your own through microtuning. It allowed for Arabic tuning. When I brought it to Nabil Mumtaz’s studio and we started to make these sounds, it was a bomb in all the Arabic market. The Prophet 5 changed my life… coming from the piano, I entered a whole digital world and started to make disco music and all these bellydance records. (Interview with AlMunzer, 2018)

In the late 1970s, Al-Munzer came to the attention of Voix De L’Orient owner Joseph Chahine, who proposed he rearrange the traditional song ‘Jamileh’. The Oriental cosmic disco-funk song starts with a 30-second synth intro, free of rhythm, styled on the mawwāl, before a drumming pattern kicks in. The instrumental is built on interweaving layers of synth and organ, a funk break and guitar riffs. The song formed the basis for the 10-track LP Belly Dance Disco (1979b), which also includes three of his own original compositions, as well as his psychedelic Oriental disco update of the folklore song ‘Girls of Iskandariah’ and modern rearrangements of known songs by Elias Rahbani, the Rahbani Brothers, Farid Al Atrache and Sayed Darwish. In 1980, Al-Munzer released the album and 12” single Shish Kebab: Disco Belly Dance (1980); although he had previously played organ on a handful of Voice of Stars records, this was his first solo release on the label. Title track ‘Shish Kebab’ is an adaptation of a traditional Turkish-Armenian

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folklore melody which circulated in the Arab world via composers such as Mohamed Abdel Wahab and Ali Ismail in the 1950s and 1960s, while at the same time becoming an exotica jazz-pop standard by artists like Dave Brubeck, Ralph Marterie and Bob Azzam, and also a garage rock version by The Black Albinos. Twenty years later in 1980s Beirut, AlMunzer reclaimed the melody, giving the instrumental an entirely new face, transforming it into a synth-led disco belly dance version for the club: It had a Turkish flavour, but I played it in the Arabic flavour. I played it with a new rhythm, a very new speed and I made it more disco, more danceable. I also added improvisation within the solos, which was new, and drumming. (Interview, 2018)

With the small wave of Lebanese records from the late 1970s and early 1980s that rearranged traditional and folkloric songs from the region in line with the modern disco sound, it seems probable that producers in Beirut were trying to replicate the commercial success of disco hits with a Middle Eastern touch such as Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ and La Bionda’s ‘Sandstorm’. Producers Der Sahakian and Chahine initiated AlMunzer’s updates of the traditional Armenian and Middle Eastern songs that appeared on his disco belly dance albums. They were likely aiming to produce commercial music projects that targeted the international appeal of the Middle Eastern disco sound, which is perhaps why every record comes branded with the ‘disco belly dance’ label. Certainly these international disco-pop hits with a Middle Eastern flavour were on the radar of Der Sahakian, as AlMunzer’s instrumental synth-laden version of ‘Rasputin’ appeared on the B-side of ‘Shish Kebab’ and on Disco Belly Dance Volume 2 (1979a). On the same album, Al-Munzer also rearranged the traditional song ‘Far Away’, popularised a few years earlier by Egyptian-born Greek singer Demis Roussos. The end result of AlMunzer’s ‘disco belly dance’ productions, though, was much more progressive than the commercial project the producers likely originally imagined: AlMunzer’s flawless musicianship and taste for experimentation, matched with the forward-­thinking approach to sound recording of Polysound owner Mumtaz, turned out to be a magical combination. This adoption of foreign influences in Lebanese music in the late 1970s and 1980s is certainly not one directional, but rather part of a continual cyclical music exchange between East and West. Years earlier, American musicians of Armenian, Greek and Middle Eastern descent popularised

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the ‘Eastern sound’ in the New York nightlife scene, playing rock and roll and jazz adaptations of traditional eastern Mediterranean region songs. In the 1950s, many of those musicians released records such as oudist Charles Ganimian’s ‘Come With Me to the Casbah’ and the Armenian Jazz Sextet’s ‘Harem Dance’ (1957). Following a similar pattern to the exotica genre, a number of American pop and jazz bands added an Oriental touch to their sound in the late 1950s. Martin Denny and Ralph Marterie, for instance, both had jazz-pop adaptations of Middle Eastern folklore songs within their repertoire and in 1959 the Markko Polo Adventurers released LP Orienta (1959), which aimed to combine the ‘charm of the Orient’ with the ‘wit of the Occident’ (Shepherd et al. 2003, 222). Within this wave of ‘Oriental exotica’, Eastern music was often only superficially explored within Western music composition: Orientalist signifiers and traditional instruments were used to give a ‘Middle Eastern flavour’ to an otherwise European style. Albums were usually accompanied with heavily exoticised artwork—the belly dancer and the hookah pipe—as well as cliché sleeve notes conjuring up stereotypical images of distant foreign lands. Finally, surf music was also heavily influenced by Middle Eastern scales and rhythm. Dick Dale, the late American electric guitarist, of Lebanese ancestry, who pioneered surf with his fast-paced alternate picking style and reverb along with his reworks of traditional Middle Eastern songs such as ‘Miserlou’ (1962),7 spoke of the Middle Eastern influence on his music in a 1998 interview with AramcoWorld: ‘My music comes from the rhythm of Arab songs. I applied the beat of the darbukkah to my guitar. This is where a lot of great surf motifs originated’ (Azar 1998, 20–23).

The Music Industry’s Synth’etic Solution to the Depravity of War In the 1980s, Lebanon’s civil war entered a new dark period. Israel invaded south Lebanon on 6 June 1982, keen to put into effect Ariel Sharon’s vision for a new regional order—with a ‘Christian Lebanon under Bashir Jumayil, an Israeli West Bank and a Palestinian Jordan’ (Traboulsi 2012, 221). Bashir Jumayil was soon elected president, but was assassinated only one week after his inauguration. A few days later, Christian Lebanese militia moved into the Sabra and Chatilla camps and massacred 1000 Palestinians and 100 Lebanese with the aid of Israeli troops. Lebanon spent the majority of the 1980s under Syrian and Israeli occupation; in

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1984, the country suffered economic collapse following the collective withdrawal of bank deposits as PLO fighters exited the country, the reconstruction costs following Israeli destruction during the war, and the devaluation of the Lebanese lira against the dollar. Lebanon’s music scene began to transition too, showing strains from the wartime conditions it was running under. By the early 1980s the days of large-scale productions and budgets were over. The pool of international musicians available for studio recordings had long dried up with the decline of Beirut’s nightlife industry. Central Beirut’s nightclubs and cabarets closed down in 1975 with the Battle of the Hotels, when Palestinian and Phalangist militias occupied the hotels of Phoenicia Street. The city’s two major recording studios—Polysound and Baalbeck Studios—continued to run intermittently through the 1980s, though Baalbeck was repeatedly looted (Borgmann and Slim 2013). The first home studios started to appear in Lebanon in the 1980s, offering competitive rates during the economic struggles of war. Ziad Rahbani’s home studio By-Pass became the nexus of Beirut’s independent scene in the early 1980s, with Abboud Saadi’s rock band the Force, Ferkat Al Ard and experimental Assyrian group Zodo’s Band all recording there. Ziad also recorded his mid-1980s productions at By-Pass, where he installed a generator on the building’s roof, covered with sand bags to protect from shelling, so work could continue during the frequent blackouts and when the conflict engulfed the studio’s immediate vicinity. Undercutting Polysound’s pricing significantly, the studio attracted commercial recordings throughout the 1980s, with AlMunzer regularly bringing the singers he was working with to record there. Meanwhile Elias Rahbani, who had spent the mid- to late 1970s recording almost exclusively at Polysound, was forced to set up a studio in his home in Antelias, 5km north of Beirut, where he recorded albums throughout the 1980s war period for singers Tony Valière, Pascal and Sabah. Elias’ son Gassan Rahbani, a musician and composer himself, remembers his father’s switch to home recording: Polysound was in West Beirut and sometimes we couldn’t cross the border to go there. Dad had a lot of work to do and we couldn’t wait for the war to stop so he decided to bring a mixer console, multi-track recording [machine] and all of the effects home. The studio was set up in our living room. (Interview, 2018)

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The use of the synth became widespread in Lebanese music in the 1980s, replacing the lush orchestras and polished production that had defined the sound of Lebanon’s early disco releases. Though artists were utilising new technology and reflecting international trends, the instrument also suited wartime conditions, allowing records to be made on minimal budgets. Disco music stayed in the consciousness of Lebanese artists for a number of years after its international decline, with its influence still heard on productions throughout the 1980s. The genre shaped the commercial music landscape, morphing into a kind of keyboard- and synth-driven disco-­ influenced pop. Elias was one of the first in Lebanon to use the synth in his recordings in the 1970s and worked almost exclusively on it in the 1980s. Able to write and record for artists solo and at low cost in his home studio, he became a one-man production house, dominating Lebanon’s commercial music industry. In the early 1980s, Elias and his friend Charbel Karam set up the record labels Cobra and Rahbania, releasing over 30 albums in their few years of existence. The labels became the vehicles for Elias’ multiple productions for emerging Lebanese singers and carried his distinctive sound stamp of the period—Arabic pop with disco influences and simplistic, catchy melodies on synthesisers. Part of this wartime wave of synth-driven Arab pop by Elias is the 1982 Rahbania-release ‘Kezzabi’ (‘She’s a Liar’) (1982), the album of Lebanese singer Al Amir Al Zaghir under the alias Le Petit Prince. Written and recorded by Elias, the album’s title track is a memorable melodic synth-driven Euro-disco-style composition with a kitschy chorus. Released the same year, Adonis Akl’s album Mech Ader (‘I Cannot’, 1982) also carries Elias’ characteristic style with catchy keyboard-­ driven disco-pop melodies and synthetic bass and strings. Disco influences can be heard in Cobra-release Jina L I’ndik! (‘We Came to Visit You!’, n.d.), the synth-based pop album of Lebanese singer Edgar Semaan, arranged by Abdo Mounzer. Clearly inspired by the disco imagery of the period, the album’s cover pictures the singer standing on an abstract illuminated dance floor in disco-style attire. One of the most interesting disco synth-pop albums on Rahbania is by Elias’ son Gassan Rahbani, the fourth Rahbani family member to contribute to Lebanon’s disco catalogue. Released when Gassan was only 17, the self-titled album (1981) is a mixture of slow-moving cosmic disco, synth-­ pop and reggae with English-language lyrics. Gassan played all instruments on the album, including drums, an electric piano and a collection of

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synths and keyboards, with electric guitar played by Abdel Did on one track. Gassan, who now predominantly focuses on metal, reflects: The record was like a test, a demo. There were some ballads, some love songs, a kind of disco, kind of underground music. I was lost. We sent it to Paris and they pressed it at Sono Disc. When we brought it back here, it was as if I’d won an Oscar. (Interview, 2018)

A handful of commercial disco mega mixes were released on Rahbania and Cobra too, including Lebanese-Armenian singer Joe Nell’s ‘Disco Sound’, arranged by Boudy Naoum and released as a 12-inch maxi, and two 1982 disco medley albums by Gassan and singer Pascale, with 30-second versions of songs such as ‘I Will Survive’ and ‘Ring My Bell’. Keyboard- and synthesiser-driven music dominated the handful of Lebanese labels that rose to prominence in the 1980s. Record label Voice of Beirut released a few of Lebanon’s most interesting synth experimentations. Its release, Teddy Lane’s Remote Control (1983), is Lebanon’s new wave synth-pop offering, complete with English-language vocals and use of vocoders and synth. Released in 1984, Lory by Karl. S is a synth-­ pop/rock album, which features an interesting use of synthesisers, particularly on title track ‘Lory’. The label also released Sammy Clark’s 1982 album Sammy Clark Sings Elias Rahbani  (1982), again featuring Elias’ distinct pop melodies. Throughout the 1980s, Lebanese pop continued within the realms of disco and synth-pop with catchy melodies on keyboard and small productions becoming the industry standard for singers. Mohammed Sherif’s 1984 pop song ‘Oumri Kaan…’ (‘My Life Was…’, 1984), which spent two weeks at number one, integrates experimental synth sound effects and a distinct disco influence. Released on Voix De L’Orient’s 1980s sub-label Byblos, Robert Chammaa’s 1983 Arabic pop EP Btetzakariny… (‘Do You Remember Me…’, 1983) is driven by darbukkah rhythm and live drums and features synth glitches and sound effects. The polar opposite to Lebanese tarab and pop of the previous decade—defined by its depth of emotion and poetic lyricism—these records, with their synthesiser-based melodies and introspective lyrics, carry an undertone of melancholy that seems to reflect the bleak landscape of war. In the end, disco music was to be a major trigger for the evolution of Arab pop music into a new era—marked by the ‘Rotana generation’ of pop stars such as Nancy Ajram, Elissa, Haifa Wehbe, Kadim Al Sahir and

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Fares Karam. The transformation of pop—from the more traditional music style of Umm Kalthoum in the 1940s and 1950s into the more modernised sounds of Fairouz and Abdel Halim Hafez—picked up speed in the 1970s and 1980s with the global adoption of disco. Arabic pop carried through the use of synthetic instruments and combination of Western pop and disco with traditional Arabic music, which had risen on the back of disco music, into the 1990s, later adding further synthetic effect with the popularity of autotune vocals. That style, for better or for worse, has remained the face of Arabic pop music until today.

Notes 1. This chapter is informed in large part by 19 extensive interviews conducted between September 2018 and October 2019 with a range of musicians, producers, DJs, record label executives, cinema archivists and other relevant players on the Lebanese disco scene, who shared their experiences and recollections and to whom the research presented here is heavily indebted: Ihsan AlMunzer, Abboudi Abou Jaoude, Abdallah Chahine, John Deacon, Joe Diverio, Issam  Hajali, Rafic Hobeika’s daughter Joumana Hobeika, Jacqueline, Ghassan Khazoun, Diran Mardirian, Rustom Nayel, Gassan Rahbani, Jad Rahbani, Marwan Rahbani, Ziad Rahbani, Abboud Saadi, Ziad Sidawi, Mohammad Tamo and Raja Zahr. To aid readability, these are referenced throughout the text as ‘Interview, date’; if it is unclear who is speaking, we have added the person’s name in brackets. 2. Henceforth all translations are the authors’ unless otherwise stated. 3. John Deacon, EMI Lebanon’s 1970s managing director, believed the Beirut record pressing plant failed because of the ‘choice to manufacture only the dying seven-inch’ when cassette piracy was rife. This is noteworthy given the effects of piracy explored later in this chapter. 4. Though the record’s label says it was released in 1978, it actually wasn’t recorded until January 1979—an invoice in Mardirian’s archives confirms this. 5. Maalouf’s vocals were recorded at a studio in Montreal, where the singer had emigrated to, while the music was recorded by El Dick at Baalbeck Studios. 6. During this period, AlMunzer put his distinctive sound stamp on numerous pioneering records such as Mohammad Jamal’s ‘Doroup El Hawa’ and Mohamad ‘Mike’ Hijazi’s ‘Ohdonni Ya Habibi’, as well as for pop artists like Azar Habib, Sammy Clark and Nouhad Tarabie. 7. A traditional instrumental, popular in the early to mid-twentieth century among immigrant communities in the US. It resurged in popularity when Dick Dale’s surf adaptation was featured in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction.

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Bibliography Allan, Diana, ed. 2021. Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine. UK: Pluto Press. Asmar, Sami. 2009. Mansour Rahbani, Legacy of a Family and a Generation. Al Jadid 61: 10. Asmar, Sami. 2013. Challenging the Status Quo in War-Torn Lebanon Ziad Rahbani, the Avant-Garde Heir to Musical Tradition. In The Arab Avant-­ Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity (Music Culture), ed. Thomas Burkhalter, Kay Dickinson, and Benjamin J.  Harbert, 144–163. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Kindle Edition. Azar, George Baramki. 1998. The Sultan of Surf. AramcoWorld 49 (2): 20–23. Borgmann, Monika, and Slim, Lokman. 2013. About Baalbeck Studios and Other Lebanese Sites of Memory. Umam Documentation and Research, September. Buchakjian, Gregory. 2015. Beirut By Night: A Century of Nightlife Photography. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 8: 256–281. Burkhalter, Thomas. 2013. Local Music Scenes and Globalization. New  York: Routledge. Elzeer, Nada. 2010. Language-based Humour and the Untranslatable: The Case of Ziad Rahbani’s Theatre. In Translation, Humour and Literature: Translation and Humour, ed. Delia Chiaro, 196–208. London: Continuum Books. Friedman, Thomas L. 1989. From Beirut to Jerusalem. New  York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Friedman, Thomas L. 1983. Lebanese Patch Up the Scars of War. New York Times, February 13. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/13/world/lebanese-­ patch-­up-­the-­scars-­of-­war.html Nearing, Edwina. 1995. Out of the Ashes  – Oriental Dance Renaissance in Lebanon. The Best of Habibi. 14/3. http://thebestofhabibi.com/vol-­14-­no-­3-­ summer-­1995/out-­of-­the-­ashes/ Shepherd, John, et al., eds. 2003. Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Part 1 Performance and Production, Volume II. London: Bloomsbury. Shooter, Natalie. 2019. Arab Idol: The Rebel Singer Who Blazed a Trail. Middle East Eye, July 26. https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/ taroub-­songs-­lebanon-­singer Stone, Christopher. 2008. Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon: The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation. London: Routledge. Tabar, Paul. 2010. Lebanon: A Country of Emigration and Immigration. The American University in Cairo. http://schools.aucegypt.edu/GAPP/cmrs/ reports/Documents/Tabar080711.pdf. Accessed 3 January 2019. Traboulsi, Fawwaz. 2012. A History of Modern Lebanon. London: Pluto Press. ZIDA Archives of Khatchik Mardirian.

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Discography Al-Munzer, Ihsan. Disco Belly Dance [Volume 2], Voice of Stars, 1979a, LP. Al-Munzer, Ihsan. Belly Dance Disco, Voix De L’Orient, 1979b, LP. Al-Munzer, Ihsan. Shish Kebab: Disco Belly Dance, Voice of Stars. 1980, LP. Al-Munzer, Ihsan. Belly Dance with Ihsan Al-Munzer, Voice of Stars, 1981, LP. Akl, Adonis. Adonis Akl Chante Elias Rahbani: Mech Ader. Rahbania. 1982, LP. Alpert, Herb. Rise. A&M Records, 1979, LP. Armenian Jazz Sextet, “Harem Dance”, Kapp Records, 1957, 7”. Chammaa, Robert. Btetzakariny, Byblos, 1983, EP. Clark, Sammy. Sammy Clark Sings Elias Rahbani, Voice of Beirut, 1982, LP. Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. “Miserlou”, Deltone Records, 1962, 7”. El Dick, Nicolas; Abdel Aal, Aboud and Abou Seoud, Hassan. Aziza Belly Dance, Voice of Stars, 1975, LP. El Dick, Nicolas. Disco Belly Dance. Voice of Stars. 1978, LP. El Haber, Khaled. Hin Yasmot Al Moghani. Zida, 1979. LP. Rahbani, Elias [And His Orchestra]. Liza… Liza. EMI Voix De L’Orient, 1978a, 12". Rahbani, Elias [And His Orchestra]. With Love… EMI Voix De L’Orient, 1978b, LP. Fairouz, Maarifti Feek, Relax-in. 1987, LP. Fairouz. Mais El Rim. Voice of Beirut, 1975, LP. Fairouz. Wahdon. Zida, 1979, LP. Ferkat Al Ard, Oghneya. Zida. 1979, LP. Ganimian & His Oriental Music. “Hedy Lou” in Come with Me to the Casbah, Atco Records, 1959, LP. Hanna, Toni. Hidaya Hiday. Voix De L’Orient, 1974, 7". Hobeica, Rafic; Jacqueline. Disco Hits in Arabic. EMI Voix De L’Orient, 1980a, 12. Hobeica, Rafic; Jacqueline (with Sunshine Orchestra). Disco Hits in Arabic. EMI Voix De L’Orient, 1980b, LP. Jamal, Mohammad. Doroup El Hawa, EMI Araby [EMI Greece?], 1981, LP. Karl. S, Lory. Voice of Beirut, 1984, LP. Lane, Teddy. Remote Control. EMI Greece / Voice of Beirut, 1983, EP. Le Petit Prince. Kezzabi. [Chante Elias Rahbani], Rahbania, 1982, LP. Maalouf, Robert. Mahdoume. EMI Voix De L’Orient, 1986, LP. Markko Polo Adventurers. Orienta, RCA Victor, 1959, LP. Nell, Joe. “Disco Sound”. Cobra [Year], 12” Maxi-Single. Raggi, Issam. “Al Mahabba” / “Lakini”, Al Mahabba. Voix De L’Orient, 1981. Sabah. Wadi Shamsine. Rahbania, 1982, LP. Rahbani, Elias. Mosaic of the Orient, Volume 1 & 2. EMI Voix De L’Orient, 1972, LP.

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Rahbani, Ziad. “Abu Ali,” Zida, 1979, 12. Rahbani, Ziad. “Abu Ali,” WEWANTSOUNDS, 2019, 12”. Rahbani, Ziad. Houdou Nisbi. By-Pass Productions, 1985. Cassette. Rahbani, Marwan. Salade Du Chef. EMI Voix De L’Orient, 1980a, 12”. Rahbani, Gassan. Gassan Rahbani. Rahbania, 1981, LP. Raja [Zahr]. Disco Balady. EMI Voix De L’Orient, 1980a, LP. Raja [Zahr]. Lebanon. EMI Voix De L’Orient, 1980b, LP. Semaan, Edgar. Jina L I’ndik! Cobra, [Year Unknown], LP. Sherif, Mohammed. Oumri Kaan. Voice of Beirut, 1984, LP. Wahab, Mohamed Abdel; Dick, Nicolas. Cairo By Night. Voice of Stars, 1974, LP. Yazbek, Maya. Maja. 1980, LP. Yorgantz, Marten. Greatest Hits. Voice of Stars, [n.d.], LP.

Filmography, TV Programs & Plays Rahbani, Ziad (music). Abu Ali Al Asmarani. 1974. (Play directed by Vazlian, Berj; starring Al Ashqar, Nidal and Kerbage, Antoine). Rahbani, Assi and Mansour. Mais El Rim, 1975 (Play directed by Antoine Remi, starring Fairouz, with music by Ziad Rahbani, Elias Rahbani and Philemon Wehbe). Rahbani, Assi and Mansour. Al Mahatta, 1973 (Play directed by Berj Vazlian, starring Fairouz, with music by Ziad Rahbani and Elias Rahbani). Rahbani, Ziad. Film Ameriki Tawil, 1980b. (Play). Rahbani, Ziad. Bennesbeh Labokra… Chou? 1978. (Play). Salman, Muhammad (Dir.). Ahlan Bi-Lhob, 1967. (Film). Barakat, Henry (Dir.). Habibati, 1974. (Film). Asmar, Simon (Creator). Studio El Fan, 1972 – Present.

Disco and Discontent in Nigeria: A Conversation Uchenna C. Ikonne, Flora Pitrolo, and Marko Zubak

Flora Pitrolo:

Uchenna, you have written extensively about Nigerian popular music and are currently preparing a four-volume publication on its history. In your published work, you tend to take great care to locate the music in its context, and that’s very important to this volume—understanding, for starters, that the 1970s and 1980s were very different decades in very different places. So let’s begin by setting the scene: socially, politically,

U. C. Ikonne (*) Quincy, MA, USA F. Pitrolo Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK M. Zubak Department of Contemporary History, Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_11

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and economically. speaking, the 1970s in Nigeria were an eventful time. Uchenna C. Ikonne: The 1970s in Nigeria was a time of reconstruction and upheaval. The country had gone through a particularly brutal civil war between 1967 and 1970, so the 1970s was a time when the country was trying to find its way back together to be a nation once again. This coincided with the oil crisis, which started in 1973, when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries enacted an oil embargo against the Western countries that supported Israel. While the embargo lasted only a few months, it resulted in a meteoric rise in the price of oil, especially in the US where there was a massive energy and economic crisis throughout the 1970s—and this environment of deprivation was the backdrop to the development of disco in New York City. But in Nigeria the oil crisis turned out to be an oil boom—Nigeria is an oil-­ producing nation and had just nationalised its oil industry after the war, so the sudden hike in the global price of oil was a great opportunity. Nigeria experienced a significant boost to its revenues, and this new wealth was largely spent in a very profligate manner that became just the perfect context for this music that celebrated glamour and excess to take root. FP: Was this a new wealth, since Nigeria had just come out of the civil war? Did the country go from very poor to very rich very suddenly? UI: Nigeria had been a prosperous country before, relatively speaking. It was already a prolific exporter of crude oil and various in-demand agricultural products. But yes, it definitely became much, much richer in the 1970s. There’s a particular quote attributed to General Yakubu Gowon, who was the military head of state at the time: ‘Nigeria’s problem is not the money, but

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how to spend it’. I don’t know whether it’s ­apocryphal or if he really said this, but it became a famous way to describe that time. So what did Lagos look like in this period? How was this oil boom reflected in the city—did its cosmopolitanism emerge at this point or was it already an international centre? Lagos was already a fairly cosmopolitan city and its population was pretty international as well. After all, Nigeria is known as ‘the Giant of Africa’—the continent’s most populous and dynamic country. But Nigeria also was, has always been and still is a land of savage inequities. So the average citizen may not have necessarily felt the difference between life before the oil boom and after it, but for the ruling class—for the upper class, for people in government and those close to them, and for the professional managerial class—there was a tangible difference. There was a vogue for very conspicuous consumption of Western luxury goods, for example, and civil servants received very generous grants and bonuses that helped upgrade and expand their middle-­ class lifestyles. In terms of the oil boom’s material manifestation in the city itself, I would say the most visible aspect were the very many ambitious construction projects that went through during that time. The government built quite a few opulent buildings, such as the flamboyant National Theatre, and a lot of new infrastructure. The private sector also spearheaded a lot of construction of new nightclubs, hotels, and the like. This was also the period, throughout the first half of the 1970s, when the government continuously tried to mount this very grand cultural festival FESTAC, which was designed to showcase Nigeria’s wealth and to show Nigeria as being essentially the spiritual homeland for Black people around the world.

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You say it ‘continuously tried’—did FESTAC eventually take place? It finally happened in January 1977. I would say that that was a turning point as well, in terms of disco. I can’t say exactly what it was, but for the first half of the decade there was a very strong Afrocentric feel in the popular culture—after FESTAC, it seemed as if the festival had been the climax of that cultural arc and then people moved on to other things. The cultural discourse became less about Afrocentrism and more about conspicuous consumption, and it’s around then that disco came in, full-scale anyway. I don’t know if it has to do with the fact that 1977 was the year that Saturday Night Fever came out, but something happened and the mood definitely shifted towards disco music. To what extent was disco a result of a fading Afrocentrism and to what extent was it a transition into this US mode of consumption, with more and more goods from the US being consumed in Nigeria? Given the country’s strong local tradition of Afrobeat and Afrofunk, I’m interested in the relation between Nigerian disco and this movement for African authenticity: how were Nigerian musicians navigating an interest in US music along with more local traditions, and what cut of US disco were they looking towards? When we think about disco, we usually think about music that is very slickly produced with a lot of synthesisers, strings, and horns—a music that is very clean in its production, and very broad. But disco was not always that: when you go back to the roots of disco in New York City, what the DJs were playing was not anything that sounded like the Bee Gees—what they were often playing was African music, or faux African music. Manu Dibango’s ‘Soul Makossa’ was an early example, but then there were also faux-Afro

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groups like Chakachas and people like that. I argue that what was already going on in Nigeria actually influenced the development of disco in the United States; and then, by the time disco got commercialised in America and became very slick, that sound was imported back to Nigeria. It’s hard to say why the Afrocentric thing fell away. Sometimes I make the case that it had just run its course: the Afrocentric thing was mostly introduced by Fela Kuti, and a lot of people followed his lead in purveying that style—FESTAC seemed to be the culmination of everything that Fela had been doing up until that point. But at the same time the climax of FESTAC saw the government attacking Fela’s home and burning it down—if we look at the actual chronology of events, that infamous incident happened two weeks after FESTAC, and after that Fela seemed to fall out of favour as a popular musician. So it’s possible that he took the Afrocentric thing down with him. We need to remember that Fela had a certain boldness and self-confidence that came from his upper middle-class origins—most musicians did not have the privileges that he had, and they weren’t willing to take the risks that he took. So a lot of people saw what happened to Fela and felt, ‘if this is what it’s going to lead to if you continue going down that road, let’s go in the opposite direction and just make music about dancing and having fun’. So that is my theory: I think the gradual rise of disco had something to do with musicians distancing themselves from the movement that Fela had essentially presided over for the first half of the decade. If the rise of disco coincided with the decline of Afrocentrism, is this sense of decline in any way audible in the music? To your contemporary ears, does it sound like music of the oil boom or does it carry some kind of pessimistic undertone?

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I’d say that it was aspirational, in the same way that US disco was aspirational. As much as American disco celebrated glamour and beauty and good times and the fine life, it was being produced at the time when New York City was bankrupt, crime-ridden, and filthy, and the US economy was in a crushing recession. People were just trying to project their fantasies through disco, and in some ways that was the same thing in Nigeria: even though the country’s economy was flourishing, life for the average citizen was not particularly glamourous.

The Disco Effect on the Nigerian Music Industry MZ: UI:

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Let’s move to the music: how did the disco phenomenon take hold, and how did it change the country’s musical landscape? When it comes to Nigeria, one of the most important things about the disco phenomenon is how it shifted the focus of the music industry from live performance to people dancing to records. Nigeria was already a pretty large market for recorded music, but at the time it became even more important. Previously, the music industry in Nigeria had been controlled primarily by three multinational record labels, EMI, Decca, and Philips; there were some others, but those were the main ones. During the 1970s you saw a lot more independent labels and independent majors, or independent labels that were striving to be majors, being founded. And a lot of these tried to construct much more technologically advanced recording studios to produce records that had that world-class fidelity and that big sound that was associated with disco. Was there a pressing plant at this point in Nigeria?

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Initially there was one that was shared by EMI, Decca, and Philips, and I think there was briefly a second one somewhere, but it got destroyed during the war. In the 1970s, you got a couple more spring up: William Onyeabor started his own pressing plant, and Phonodisk had one. In general one of the most important aspects of disco as a genre in Nigeria was how it facilitated the expansion of the Nigerian recording industry. Who were the people behind this new wave of labels? Local entrepreneurs. They came into it looking at it as a growth industry that was worth investing in. Of course, it didn’t always turn out great for them for various reasons. Can you pinpoint a record that symbolises this transition—the first record, or the first records, you would identify as Nigerian disco? That’s hard to say! I don’t have a definitive answer to that, but I have something close to it: the group Blo were definitely pioneers, and began very early in the game. Their LP Step 3, from 1975, had a distinct early disco vibe to it. And in what way does a record like Step 3 intervene in the history of Nigerian popular music? What is the public doing with these records; how do they feel? They felt it was great! At that time one of the ambitions of most Nigerian popular musicians was to make music that sounded ‘foreign’—just something that sounded like it had big, sophisticated production values. Nigeria’s studios were decent, but relatively primitive in terms of the kind of sound people wanted: you had advanced multitrack technology coming in, and you wanted to have all those string sections, you wanted to have what they would have called in Nigeria a very ‘expensive’ sound to the music. So whenever anybody could do that, it was ­welcomed

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with open arms. As a matter of fact that’s why during that period a lot of Nigerian artists started recording in London, to get that sound. Did these early disco artists mostly record in the studio and not perform live in the clubs, or was there a mixture of the two in the beginning? And also on this note, were there already some famous disco producers back then? At first there was a mixture. Blo, for example, were a band, so they performed live. But increasingly the music scene transitioned from bands to solo artists, and that was another big development of the disco era that seemed very new: up until that time everybody’s idea of a musical unit was a group of performers playing instruments, but as the disco sound developed, it became all about solo acts. Again, it was paralleled in something that was already going on in the United States, when you see Michael Jackson break from the Jacksons, Michael Cooper break from Con Funk Shun, or Ray Parker Jr leaving Raydio. The music industry was a lot more interested in marketing solo personalities, so whenever you had a band the lead singer would usually go solo, and maybe the most musically prodigious members of the group would go on to become super-­ producers. That happened in Nigeria as well. I don’t think there were any producers who were exclusively disco producers—at that time anyway—but one of the main producers of disco records was a man named Jake Sollo who had previously been in a few prominent Afro-rock groups: The Hykkers, The Funkees, and Osibisa. Again he was the member with the most musical ideas and he went on to become a producer. Another development is that a lot of the new solo artists, at least the ones that got the spotlight, were educated. This was considered a novelty because up until that time, music was viewed as

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something that you did when you dropped out of school—it was a career for the ne’er-do-wells. But all of a sudden you had university students and graduates going into the studio to make records, and that made the music profession more socially acceptable. The same could be said for women performers: previous to that, when the nightclub was the primary site of music production, it wasn’t really the place a decent lady would want to be found. In broad terms, if you were a woman in a nightclub, you were viewed either as a prostitute or as a potential prostitute. Even the female performers were perceived as part-time prostitutes, whether they actually were or not—it just wasn’t a place where a ‘responsible’ woman would want to be. So through the 1960s and early 1970s you didn’t really have too many women going into the music industry, but when music became more studio-based, it seemed that that was a safer environment for a respectable woman to involve herself in musical performance. While we’re on the subject of women, is this sort of proliferation of women in the music industry also reflected in discotheque audiences? Were women actually going out at night more as a result? Yeah, at least at first, the discos too were viewed as a more acceptable environment. Many of the previous nightclubs were typically hotels, which meant they were essentially nightclubs/brothels—we’re not talking about the Hilton or the Waldorf Astoria! Some were better than others, obviously, but a lot of them were basically whorehouses. Discos were not that: discos presented a more upscale, hygienic environment where it didn’t really seem that you were hanging around a seedy cathouse. That said, a lot of great music has always emerged from such environments—

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like jazz, which originally was the musical soundtrack of New Orleans’s bordellos.

Nigerian Nightlife in the 1970s FP:

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So how did this shift in both gender and level of education change the audiences of disco? Would you say that disco became a fundamentally middle-­class genre in Nigeria, and if so did it alienate working-class or poor Nigerians as a result? I would say it did become middle class, but I don’t think it alienated poor Nigerians, on a wide scale at least. Some people might have had problems with it but again, disco was aspirational: so a lot of working-class or poor people may have looked up to it, admiring that sophistication and the illusion of opulence as something that they wanted to access for themselves. There were some critics of it, of course, who may have mocked what Fela would have called the ‘colonial mentality’ of this: they felt that it was inauthentic and that these were people who were probably culturally lost, who had no sense of identity. Black men trying to be John Travolta. But that’s the sort of criticism that you would more probably find from the more academic set than from the working class. Can you elaborate a bit more on the clubbing scene? You mentioned that there was a paradigm shift between shady hotel clubs to ‘nicer’ discos. How big was this new scene: are we speaking about hundreds of nightclubs? African music was always very rhythmic, so I imagine that dancing would have always been a huge part of the nightclub experience—can you tell us more about

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these new kinds of clubs that go along with this new, polished, synthesised music? There had always been nightclubs in Nigeria since the 1940s, even before that. At first, you didn’t really have commercial clubs; what you had was private clubs. In the 1950s, the nightclub economy expanded dramatically and you saw several dozens of clubs in Lagos alone, clubs of various sizes and styles, catering to different kinds of clientele. The same expansion of the nightlife market was happening in other Nigerian cities too. At this time, the more ambitious nightclubs offered floor shows featuring all manner of entertainers: dancers, magicians, comedians, fire eaters, contortionists, snake charmers, and the like. Smaller nightclubs might not have the budget or even the space to host such entertainments, but the basic standard layout for any nightclub, regardless of size, was a dance floor, a bar, and a stage from which a band would supply the music throughout the night. The nightclub was the place to see and hear these bands, who became celebrities and amassed large followings that bought their records when they ventured into the recording studio, fuelling the growth of the local recording industry. But Lagos was already experimenting with discotheque-styled nightclubs as early as 1954. Can you tell us a bit more about the early days of Lagos nightlife, before disco? The top nightclubs in Lagos were usually run by expatriate businessmen, most typically Lebanese. They often modelled these spaces on famous nightspots in American and European capitals, borrowing names like Lido Bar, The Savoy, The Ambassador, Kakadu, The Ritz, and so on. There was a Greek entrepreneur called Peter Economidas, whose club Chez Peters was inspired by one of the trendiest joints in Paris at

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the time, the Whisky à Gogo. In 1953 the Whisky in Paris effectively became a discotheque in the contemporary sense: rather than featuring live entertainers performing on a stage, its entertainment was centred around records played on a jukebox that was operated by a disc jockey. The concept was new and quickly became the place to be seen for Paris’s most beautiful and celebrated personalities. Chez Peters was up and running in Lagos by 1954, so only a year later. Its downstairs section was formatted like a standard club, with a dance floor and a stage for bands, but if you went up the stairs you got to the ‘roof garden’, which was festooned with coloured lights and was presided over by a disc jockey rotating records on a radiogram—usually foreign jazz, pop, and dance band discs by the likes of Victor Silvester, Louis Armstrong, Edmundo Ros. Chez Peters also cultivated a reputation as the place for nightflies who might be just a little bit cooler than the average pub-crawler. Later on—in the 1960s, when chic discotheques started taking off in the West, with places such as the Los Angeles Whisky a Go Go and Arthur in New York opening up—Lagos embarked on this trend as well. Though you didn’t really have dedicated disco clubs, usually a few of the more upscale standard nightclubs would host weekly ‘disco nights’, when a DJ would spin soul and rock records for the more enthusiastic and fashion-forward crowds. The first all-disco, all-the-time club in Lagos was the Beachcomber, which opened around 1973. It was a huge success: a world-class club with a really international feel to it, run by a young man named Segun Shonibare, who was also the resident DJ.  After that, other venues followed in various cities across Nigeria. So it wasn’t a Lagos-centric, elite phenomenon.

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Not at all, not at all! Disco was going on everywhere! Disco was going on in every major city and town in the country. It was national. And when people went to discos, was there an escapist feel to it? An issue that often comes up in peripheral disco scenes is that people went to the disco to behave like, or even pretend that, they were in New York. Was there this same feeling in Nigeria? Oh yes, for sure. I think that’s the feeling that was associated with disco anywhere in the world: even the people dancing in a disco in Queens, New  York imagined themselves being in Manhattan! Everybody wanted to be in the shiny places with the beautiful people, and that’s what disco was really about, a sense of escapism. Then again, there is this sense of escapism in popular music in general, but I would say especially so in this case. To what extent did disco as a music infiltrate traditional spheres and parties, such as weddings and the like? That’s a great question. Yes, very much so. It infiltrated popular spaces, in the sense that if you went to a party or a wedding or something they would play all different kinds of music: they’d play some disco, they’d play some highlife, they’d play all sorts of different stuff. So it did that, but it also infiltrated the production of these genres, where they started adopting some of the instrumentation and production techniques. And you even get names of records like Tala Disco ‘85 or Fuji Disco—so it infiltrated in that respect too. Another question I wanted to ask you on the subject of parties is about drugs—although I know it’s hard to research and we can never really know. Yes, it’s hard to say: there’s not a lot of documentation and Nigerians tend to be very puritanical

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about drugs. There was not a lot of access to drugs—I don’t think cocaine was around at the time, but marijuana was always there and I know a lot of musicians took amphetamines of various kinds. People took Mandrax, which is what in other parts of the world were known as Quaaludes. It’s a question I would love to answer myself because it’s something I’m very much interested in, but it’s hard to get some of these old folks to talk about it because culturally, nobody wants to admit that they ever did drugs. But sometimes it does just slip out that people were taking uppers and Mandrax. We should also talk about the gay connection, the gay background of disco music. Was this lost in translation in Nigeria, as it was in so many places? Or were there people who were aware of disco’s LGBTQ+ roots? This is another difficult thing to talk about, and it’s something that I’ve been trying to find research on. You know, Nigeria is an extremely homophobic country; it still is today. In recent years—and when I say recent I mean the past two or three years—you’re starting to see more of an LGBT scene trying to rear its head, even though in the past five years the government has promulgated a lot of very harsh anti-LGBT laws. These laws are hardly, if ever, enforced—but still, they threaten people with 14  years in jail if they’re caught openly promoting homosexual lifestyles. The point is to put out the public message that there is no space for homosexual lifestyles in mainstream Nigerian culture. So it’s hard for me to imagine it being a thing in the 1970s, but it’s possible: there are certain musicians in the disco scene who I’m told were gay; one of them I had wanted to interview but unfortunately he recently suddenly passed away. So I don’t know: there are some people who were gay, but it’s not some-

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thing that was celebrated and it’s not something that was accepted. In terms of the sexual liberation associated with disco, as I said previously there was a lot going on in terms of the emancipation of women. When it comes to fluid sexuality in terms of representation, you saw a lot more men wearing makeup and having long hair and wearing clothing that could be deemed ‘feminine’. But whether they were actually living any kind of alternative lifestyle or having actual sexual interactions in real life, I don’t know.

The Role of DJs and Sound Systems MZ:

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Can you tell us something about the DJs? Are we talking about mobile DJs or only residents? Were there any famous DJs who crowds followed when they moved from one club to another? The first disco DJ to gain significant attention was Tony Benson, the son of bandleader and entrepreneur Bobby Benson, who is regarded as essentially the founding father of Nigerian show business. Tony Benson had been a child star, as he was a skilled multi-instrumentalist in his father’s group and as a teen he had been in one of the country’s earliest rock n’ roll bands. Later, leading his own combo, he helped introduce soul music to Nigerians in the 1960s. He usually performed with his band at his father’s club, Caban Bamboo, and around 1968 he started dedicating one night a week to playing the latest soul discs. Others followed his lead—Segun Shonibare of Beachcomber had actually learned his craft assisting Benson at Caban. But the most prominent DJ to emerge from this new wave was a guy named Femi Oni, ‘the Disco King’, who rose to fame in late 1969. Oni was initially based primar-

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ily at a nightclub called Batakoto, but unlike ­Benson who was permanently situated at Caban Bamboo, Oni started moving from club to club, introducing the concept of the mobile discotheque. He travelled to England and Germany in 1972, returning with a state-of-the-art sound system that allowed him to corner the market on the burgeoning disco scene. But Oni’s reign was not to go uncontested for long, because by the end of 1972 he had fierce competition from a sound system called Tower of Power Unlimited. While Oni was just one man with two turntables and a microphone, Tower of Power had stacks and stacks of gear and they were more dedicated to showmanship. The sound system was accompanied by a light show and vibrant sound effects that made their sessions a more immersive experience. And they had multiple sets that toured universities, allowing Tower of Power to play various locations simultaneously. The whole operation was founded and run by Sam Phil-Ebosie, who was Nigeria’s youngest commercial pilot. He had earned his commission at 19 and by the time he was 20 or 21 he started Tower of Power. So he was still a young and hip dude who had the unique opportunity to travel the world regularly, pick up the latest records on the day they were released in New York or London, and have them playing on Tower of Power in Lagos the very next day! This airplane connection also figures prominently in quite a few peripheral disco scenes. Some early Yugoslav DJs were friends with local stewardesses since they frequently travelled to places like London and could get fresh foreign records. Yeah, I’ve also seen that a lot too, in many places—having friends that work in airlines definitely helps!

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Did any DJs rise to ridiculous fame or was it always more about the venues? Oh yes. Femi Oni was like a rock star for a few years in the early 1970s, and Tower of Power’s top DJ Ricky Manuwa was idolised by university students. Many other DJs became huge celebrities, so much so that a ‘Deejay Jamboree’ was convened in 1975, like a Woodstock for disc jockeys! Some DJs even launched recording careers of their own: the first rap record in Nigeria—actually the first in Africa as a whole, I believe, ‘The Way I Feel Rap’—was cut in 1981 by a DJ called Ronnie Ekundayo, not too long after The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was released. The DJs of Funk Warehouse were also wildly popular: Funk Warehouse was a Tower of Power-styled sound system that gave Tower of Power some serious competition, especially within Lagos—even though Tower of Power maintained a higher profile nationally because they could do multiple sets at once. Funk Warehouse also put on a great show with a fog machine and bubble blower—these were quite decadent times! Another extremely famous DJ was Alex Conde. What were the biggest foreign records in Nigeria? What was it that people were spinning that caught everyone’s imagination, or that was influential on Nigeria’s own disco? Was there a specific kind of sound from abroad that was particularly resonant? The record that really, really popularised disco nights in Lagos clubs was Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)’. Probably not the kind of cut that comes to your mind when you think ‘disco’, but let’s remember that the disco sound as we now know it had not yet taken shape in 1970. That song reverberated so strongly that clubs started their own disco nights just to be able to play it over

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and over. ‘Soul Makossa’ obviously was huge in 1973. But from the later disco era, almost anything that was big in the US was big in Nigeria: the very popular mainstream things like The Bee Gees, Donna Summer, KC and the Sunshine Band but also stuff like Rice & Beans Orchestra, or virtually anything released on Salsoul records. Solar Records was very popular later in the decade; their records were so popular that Solar opened up an office in Nigeria because it was their biggest market—and Solar artists like Shalamar, Dynasty, and Lakeside came and played in Nigeria. Eurodisco was also very big, maybe even bigger than the American stuff. Boney M. was huge, and a lot of stuff from Germany and Italy. Italo disco was very big in the early 80s. Can you think of any big Italo records in Nigeria off the top of your head? Change and B.  B. & Q.  Band count as Italo disco, right? Because they were both huge. ‘On The Beat’, ‘Lover’s Holiday’, ‘The Glow of Love’, and records like that were played everywhere. ‘Dirty Talk’ by Klein & MBO was very popular, and ‘I’m Ready’ by Kano was big, and pretty influential on Nigerian dance music production in the 1980s. In the mid-80s, Baltimora’s ‘Tarzan Boy’ was played so much that it became annoying! So in relation to this, how did Nigerian disco artists compete with these Western ones, both on the dance floor and in terms of sales? Did local disco receive any significant airtime, or was radio play reserved mostly to disco coming from the States and from the UK? Some Nigerian disco records I’ve heard sound similar to American disco, as if they were recorded there—sometimes you wouldn’t even know that they were made in Nigeria.

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For the most part, people preferred foreign music. That’s almost always been the case, at least as far as Western-influenced genres are concerned. You know, with the current Nigerian music scene that’s going on right now, the so-­ called Afrobeats scene—I always say that is the first time in my lifetime that I can remember Nigerian youth actually preferring their local music to foreign stuff. So people did like the local artists, they were fine, but they’d rather listen to the foreign records. So sales were not huge— some things did very well and there are a couple of things that were big hits. But for the most part, it was foreign music. I remember I was talking to one particular musician and he was saying that if he could go back and live his life again he would just record juju music or some sort of local music. That stuff sold very, very well, because there was no competition for it. But when you’re doing something like disco, when people have a choice to listen to you or listen to Van McCoy, Van McCoy is going to win! To what extent was Nigerian disco copying foreign productions and to what extent was it masquerading as foreign? Was there any kind of counterfeiting going on? Oh they were copying all the way! But for the most part, they were definitely not trying to deceive anybody into thinking it was foreign. Nigerians wanted to sound foreign, but they also absolutely wanted you to know they were Nigerian. They wanted to show you that they were a Nigerian who was able to access that ‘expensive’ sound, and was capable of recording in the best studios in Los Angeles or London to get it. That kind of showing off, of flaunting one’s means—all of that was part of the aesthetic of excess that was in vogue during this era. And while a couple of people did do that kind of

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thing—the masquerading as foreign’ thing—it happened more in other places, like South Africa. Roy B.  Records, for example. There was this ­producer, Phil Hollis—I actually spoke to him a few months ago—who was trying to make these Italo records, and he had created this artist called Margino, which sounds sort of Italian. He took ‘Dirty Talk’ by Klein & MBO and put Margino’s female vocal over it, called the record ‘Make My Dreams Come True’ and sold it under the label Roy B. Records—which was the name of an existing record label in New  York! So I asked him about that, and he was like, ‘Well, you know, I met Roy B., he was a great guy and I wanted to make a label that was a tribute to him’. And I was like, ‘That makes no sense whatsoever! You used the same logo and everything!’ But the problem with it was that over the years he helped develop a new South African dance music sound that was completely different from anything that was going on in the US and Europe, and he was stuck with the name Roy B.  Records. So even if you look at Discogs, for example, people seem to think it’s the same label: under ‘Roy B.’ you’ll find both the South African and the American releases, but they were on two completely different labels. And originally, it appears that his intention was to deceive. I’m interested in your mention of South Africa and wanted to ask you if any Nigerian disco musicians were influential in other West African countries, or in Africa in general. Was there some transnational exchange of music, with Nigeria being influential in that respect? Not a lot. To the extent that there was, it was mostly relatively provincial, like Ghana—because Nigeria and Ghana are like cousins. And then Cameroon, probably, as a next door neighbour, and Cameroonian musicians were very influential

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in Nigerian disco. So there was some cross-­ pollination between Cameroon, Ghana, maybe the Republic of Benin, Sierra Leone… but I wouldn’t say Senegal, or Mali. Also, because Nigeria was so economically buoyant and Nigeria had all these great recording studios and this large, booming music market, musicians from other countries would come to Nigeria in search of better professional opportunities. As one Cameroonian musician said to me, ‘Coming to Nigeria was like going to Hollywood for us’. So you had a little bit of it, but it would not go as far as South Africa or Zambia; it would probably just be around the West African region and then maybe a little bit of Central African Republic and Congolese—a lot of Congolese musicians came to Nigeria during that time too. And as part of this cross-pollination, were people touring in and touring out within Africa? And indeed, were there tour circuits of international artists coming into Nigeria and Nigerian artists touring out of Africa? Touring out of Africa, no: there just was not the infrastructure for that. Things have become a lot easier in the Internet era because people are free to discover music from around the world, but back in those days there were a lot of Nigerian artists trying to get played in the US and in the UK, but how were they supposed to get on the radio? The market was really closed and it was hard for anybody to break through. There were a couple of groups that tried, but nobody was really successful with it. Coming into Nigeria, yes: there was a particular promoter, Ben Murray-­ Bruce, who in the early 80s brought acts like Lakeside, The Brothers Johnson, Shalamar, Dynasty, Kool & the Gang to Nigeria. And he wasn’t the only one—other promoters brought over Rafael Cameron, Positive Force, and others.

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But as far as Nigerian groups touring outside, no, that was not a huge thing, although they really wanted it to be.

Nigerian Disco Now and Then MZ:

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A question I think you can bring your own experience to as someone who runs a specialised label and has curated collections of recordings—such as Brand New Wayo: Funk, Fast Times & Nigerian Boogie Badness 1979–1983 (2011), and Wake Up You!: The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock 1972–1977 (2016)—concerns the diggers’ perspective, and ‘disco’ as a retroactive label. A lot of these scenes were not called disco at all at the time, or they were only called disco later, so to what extent is this a kind of imaginary genre an imagined culture which was overlaid onto the music by diggers? That is a fantastic question because to some degree I feel it’s very difficult for me to take the Nigerian scene as it was happening and try to fit it squarely into the archetype of disco as it was going on in the West and elsewhere in the world. It was part of so many other things that were happening, and you’re right: a lot of it is retroactive. The boogie thing definitely is retroactive, and ‘boogie’ in general is a retroactive label. By the time I was in high school in the mid-1980s, we were still calling it ‘disco’. Now ‘disco’ I would say was not retroactive, but to be sure, it was a label that was used very liberally: it was applied to almost any Western-influenced pop music at that time, and almost any kind of music that was not ‘traditional music’ that you would dance to at a party was just called disco. I remember when I learned about the so-called Disco

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Demolition: it was probably the mid-1980s before I realised that disco was supposed to be dead, because we were still calling the music disco up until the late 1980s, almost. Perhaps you could also comment on the wealth of Nigerian disco-ish compilations that have come out in the past decade and a half or so, in which you too have played a part of course. That was always a challenge for me, all of these compilations. And they always bothered me a little bit because I always felt that they were curated from the Western perspective. On the one hand, what else are you going to expect? It’s Western people doing it, and I see nothing wrong with them picking the music that is most relevant to them and that they like, because it’s being put together for a Western audience. But on the other, it bothers me because there’s not really a similar effort going on in Nigeria—the history is being written almost exclusively from the standpoint of the West. Even when you see all these record sales online and in the description they’ll say, ‘oh, here’s this record with this amazing disco track on it!’ and then the other side is just some garbage pop or highlife song that’s not really necessary. And I’ll be thinking: that pop/ highlife song is the song that Nigerians actually liked! That was the hit, and it was the disco side that was just a throwaway. And the problem is when they make a compilation and say ‘this is the sound of 1970s Nigeria’ they pick all the stuff that they like, and they think the stuff that Nigerians liked is irrelevant. When I started my label [Comb & Razor Sound] I wanted to do it from a Nigerian perspective; and then I quickly realised that it just wasn’t going to work because my main market is the West, and I have to give them what they want. So I tried to find a balance: there were a lot of tracks that I would put in

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there that weren’t necessarily what people in the West would consider the hottest track, but I would put it there because I felt that it just showed some degree of the Nigerian standpoint. But it was always a struggle for me, something I was always very uncomfortable with. As a side-point though, I’ve been researching and writing on diggers in Eastern Europe, where it also started as Westerners coming in and discovering the music but now it’s mostly locals running the show. So it’s a shame that hasn’t happened in Nigeria so far. Well it’s happening in Nigeria to an extent now, but even the local people are guided by what they see in the West. Because most of them are in their 20s and 30s and they weren’t around back then— they got turned onto this music when Soundway and all these other labels were doing stuff. And they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s exciting! We have that music here, I should actually get into it!’ But they’re taking all their other aesthetic directives from all these reissue labels in the West, and in some way they’re erasing the actual history and replacing it with this new version of history as it’s being written by people abroad. And I think this colonial gesture of reissue cultures is almost unavoidable here. So prior to this reissue wave of the past couple of decades—which has really enveloped every country and every scene—when did disco go out of vogue in Nigeria, how did that transition happen, and, crucially, what did disco become? I guess from my perspective, it really started going out of vogue in the mid-1980s. While we didn’t have any definitive event like Chicago’s Disco Demolition Day, no direct and powerful anti-disco statement, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction with it that had been growing for years. If you looked at the letter columns of vari-

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ous newspapers, some members of the public were criticising what they perceived as a spiritual emptiness in the music—the celebration of promiscuity, mindless consumption, all manner of moral laxity. It was viewed as a corruptive influence on the youth. This is anecdotal, but when I was very young, like eight or nine years old, the way I first learned about sex was through a friend at school telling me that when young girls start getting into disco, going to parties, they will inevitably end up pregnant. This terrified me because I listened to a lot of disco records with my sisters (who were seven and ten) and we went to parties—birthday parties!—and I didn’t want them to get pregnant! He had to explain to me that it was not the music itself that caused pregnancy; he went on to spell out in detail how women get pregnant, and he made it clear to me that the environment of the disco culture fostered the activities that lead to that particular outcome. I have to say it was clear to me even then that he was just parroting the complaints voiced by his parents and other older people. The aspect of female liberation was viewed as offensive in some quarters. I remember when I was a kid, one of my teachers talked about how disco was encouraging women to wear trousers, which turned them into harlots! Can we trace this kind of growing moralism back to any kind of political or economical shift? In general, there was a turning in the tenor of the culture. We’ve already associated 1977 with the beginning of the high disco era, but the funny thing is that by the end of 1977, the price of oil had dipped steeply and would continue to do so for the rest of the decade. By the time disco was really rising, the oil boom was already dwindling—the fruits of prosperity were still there, but they were existing on borrowed time. Most

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of this prosperity never trickled down that much to most of the masses to begin with, but as the economy declined and austerity measures were instituted by the government, life for the ­common people got even more difficult. There was a rising discontent with the profligacy and corruption of the civilian government, and even a sort of scepticism towards liberal democracy as a whole, if this was the kind of misconduct that it enabled. So most Nigerians actually welcomed with open arms the coup d’état that took place on 31 December 1983, installing a strict military junta. Perhaps not coincidentally, I recall this as being a turning point in the broad popularity of disco. This isn’t a retrospective assessment on my part: I clearly remember observing it as it happened. I was still a little kid but I felt it in 1984, going into 1985, that something was changing in the temperature and tone and texture of popular music. And I didn’t much like it. Could you elaborate on this shift in ‘temperature, tone, and texture’? What did you notice changing sonically? The new military dictatorship was very stern, humourless, and regimented. Its governing philosophy was based on the notion that Nigerians as a whole had become corrupt over the course of the prior decade, so they initiated a programme called War Against Indiscipline to whip Nigerians back into shape (and I mean ‘whip’ literally). The decadence, flamboyance, extravagance of the disco era was looked back upon as an embarrassment, something the national character had to be distanced from—there was this general sense of belt-tightening, and it was evident even in the music. Where you used to see Nigerian artists shooting their music videos in London on 16mm film, now the music videos were produced locally on videotape. The records themselves sounded

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thinner and cheaper, with a lot of the lush musicianship being replaced by the tinny tones of Casio keyboards. In retrospect I realise that was part of a global trend of electronics displacing live musicians, but at the time it sounded almost amateurish to me, and a marker of some kind of decline. Genre-wise, this overall change in the tone of musical culture was evidenced in the rise in popularity of roots reggae, which had a much more austere image. Make no mistake, the music had the air of rebelliousness and spoke out in favour of human rights and against corruption. But it mostly attacked the injustice going on in South Africa, advocated for the release of Nelson Mandela from jail, while carefully evading any direct criticism of the Nigerian dictatorship! And a lot of them seemed very… anti-sexual. As a teenager your hormones are raging and you’re enjoying this very sexy, libidinous disco music, and then it is replaced by this reggae that had a very ascetic, overwhelmingly masculine energy. We used to have Soul Train-like music shows on TV with really cool, well-dressed young men and women dancing with abandon in the studio— and now you’d turn on a music show on TV and you’d see a bunch of reggae guys dancing with each other, no girls. One of the most famous reggae artists of the era, Tera Kota, actually entrenched this as one of his major marketing points: he emphasised the fact that he didn’t associate with women. He didn’t sleep with them, didn’t date them, didn’t talk to them, didn’t tolerate the sinful presence of any Jezebel or daughter of Eve around him. A lot of artists had that kind of energy, and it felt to me like a deliberate attempt to correct for the libertine vibe of the disco era, to reject that loose, vivacious sexual energy with something more disci-

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plined and spartan. Great disco productions did continue to go on, right until the end of the decade and into the hip-hop era (depending on how broadly you want to use the term ‘disco’) but they were no longer at the centre of the culture as they had been prior to 1985 or so. As you speak about this domain of reggae from the mid-1980s onwards I wonder if you think we could theorise it as a kind of loop back to a kind of other Afrocentrism—in a different, austere key—that was somehow engineered to culturally take the place of the Afrocentrism that came before the rise of disco? That’s interesting. It was a weird Afrocentrism though, because it was Afrocentrism via Jamaica: you had all these Nigerian reggae artists speaking with Jamaican accents. What was interesting too was that part of the whole thing with reggae coming in was that they said that disco was inauthentic, with these Nigerians making fools of themselves pretending to be Americans—but they themselves were speaking Jamaican patois. And one of the biggest stars of the time, Ras Kimono, had built this whole mythology around himself that he wasn’t actually from Nigeria, he was from Ethiopia—there are a couple of major artists who claim to be from Ethiopia. And it’s interesting because reggae music, at least roots reggae music, has always had this obsession with repatriating to Africa, and a lot of Nigerian reggae artists wanted to repatriate to Jamaica. So it was a weird thing! But in a way it was a return to Afrocentrism. That’s interesting, and should maybe be a conversation in itself. So disco productions continue into the early 1990s. Presumably some people are still making disco today, as they are everywhere. But then how does disco lay the grounds for or

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transform into successive evolutions of electronic music, such as house or techno? Well, it was all disco to us, you know? So it was just the continuing story of disco. A lot of it, like I said, didn’t become big hits necessarily. I grew up middle class, so it was popular among people like me; but the working-class people would have been listening to reggae, if anything. So it just continued developing, but it became harder and harder for it to compete with the foreign stuff. I can remember a point at which I stopped listening to Nigerian music, when I was only listening to foreign music. But then from there it went through the house phase, through the techno phase, up until it got to like, new jack swing. It just kept on going, and if you follow the thread all the way it takes us to today’s Afrobeats, really. But just so I understand you clearly: you were calling it disco, but you weren’t still calling it disco when it was actually house, or techno, right? What were you calling it? Disco, disco! We were calling it disco.

Discography Alhaji (Chief) Sikiru Ayinde Barrister and His Fuji Londoners. 1980. Fuji Disco. Siky Oluyole Records, LP. Alhaji (Chief) Wasiu Ayinde Barrister & His Talazo Fuji Commanders. 1985. Tale Disco ’85. Omo Aje, LP. B.B. & Q. Band. 1981. On The Beat. Capitol/EMI, 12” single. Baltimora. 1984. Tarzan Boy. EMI, 12” single. Blo. 1975. Step Three. Afrodisia, LP. Change. 1980. Lover’s Holiday. Warner Bros. Records, 12” single. ———. 1980. The Glow of Love. Warner Bros. Records, 12” single. Dibango, Manu. 1973. Soul Makossa. Atlantic. 7” single. Ekundayo, Ron ‘Ronnie’. 1981. The Way I Feel. Phonodisk, LP. Kano. 1980. I’m Ready. Baby Records, 12” single. Klein & MBO. 1982. Body Talk. Zanza, 7” single.

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Margina & The Hot Dogs. [Year Unknown]. Make My Dreams Come True. Roy B. Records. 7”single. Sly & the Family Stone. 1969. Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). Epic. 7” single. Sugarhill Gang, The. 1979. Rapper’s Delight. Sugar Hill Records. 12” single. Various Artists. 2011. Brand New Wayo: Funk, Fast Times & Nigerian Boogie Badness 1979–1983 (2010). Comb & Razor Sound, 2xLP. ———. 2016. Wake Up You!: The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock 1972–1977. Now-Again Records, 2xLP.

Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia Ken McLeod

The musical power of the disenfranchised—whether youth, the underclass, ethnic minorities, women or gay people—more often resides in their ability to articulate different ways of construing the body, ways that bring along in their wake the potential for different experiential worlds. —McClary (1994, 34)

This chapter explores the influence of outer space and futuristic themes in disco. In particular, it looks at the nexus of space exploration, science fiction films, and the quest for an often illusory utopian world that informed and influenced the experience and practice of disco, primarily in North America and Europe, in the 1970s and early 1980s. I offer a brief history of the use of space themes and sounds in popular music in general, discuss the iconography, physical spaces, and sound systems developed in tandem with space disco, and look at how the phenomenon of space disco

K. McLeod (*) Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_12

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manifests itself in works by Boney M, Giorgio Moroder, and Meco, amongst others. The chapter also offers some theoretical perspectives, including Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (1954, 1955, 1959), Michel Foucault’s notions of ‘heterotopia’ (1967), and Vermeulen and van den Akker’s metamodern conception of an ‘atopic’ future (2010), to account for the popularity of outer space as a disco trope. In many ways, outer space represented the ultimate manifestation of hope: it was a fantastical imagined place that metaphorically stood for the potential to reimagine human relationships.

The Space Age, Disco, and the Politics of Hope To a large degree, the disco era is viewed today as a somewhat unrealistically naïve, nostalgic utopia that is firmly located in the past. While such a view obviously overlooks the important impact of contemporary dance floor cultures that evolved from disco (such as techno and other forms of EDM), it also overlooks and dismisses much of disco’s obsession with the future and outer space. Of course, outer space—‘the final frontier’, so to speak—is often viewed in popular culture as the ultimate refuge of humanity and is emblematic of the hoped-for freedom of marginalized communities. It is our very lack of knowledge about its apparently limitless vastness that makes it a blank slate for projecting an equally limitless number of utopian fantasies and futures onto it. The desire for a liberated racial and sexual identity, of course, lay at the heart of disco utopia, as evident in many accounts of the disco experience. The earliest such accounts are rife with descriptions of utopian egalitarianism and of spreading planetary love. DJ and producer Nicky Siano, for example, recalled being a gay Brooklyn youth drawn to the ‘social and affirming’ atmosphere of Greenwich Village (Siano in Haider 2018); he was 18 when he founded Manhattan’s The Gallery (where stars like Grace Jones debuted), and he later became a Studio 54 resident. He cites the 1969 Stonewall riots that sparked the fight for LGBT equality as the starting point of disco plurality and, in turn, for promoting an agenda of love on a planetary scale: There seemed to be so much turmoil, and the only answer to that is loving each other(…) In the beginning, all the songs were about spreading love, getting together, making the world a better place. (Siano in Haider 2018)

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Rolling Stone journalist Vince Aletti was another who was immediately struck by the social mixing at early disco clubs, describing them as ‘completely mixed, racially and sexually, where there wasn’t any sense of someone being more important than someone else’ (Aletti in Garcia 2014, 2). Some, such as Luis-Manuel Garcia, saw early disco as being an overt symbolic represention of a performance of a different world: Since the emergence of ‘disco’ music in early-1970s New York—and well beforehand in other contexts—the dance floor has been a potent symbol as well as a performative enactment of a world better than this one. (Garcia 2014, 1)

Indeed, aside from its concern with constructing a utopian planetary love, disco can be viewed from its inception as being inherently linked to outer space. To a large degree, disco was a logical extension of the Space Age, its accompanying sci-fi sensibility, and the evolution of futuristic-sounding music-making technology. The Space Age ostensibly began with the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, which effectively initiated the USSR-USA Space Race and intensified the popular imagination’s focus on futurism and worlds beyond our own. Theremin-driven scores for sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), as well as the first all-electronic score for Forbidden Planet (1956), had already established the soundscape of outer space in the public imagination. Electronically produced hovering tones, propulsive pitches, abstracted melodies, and repetitive radar blips marked the scores and soundtracks of these movies. They relied on technology that quickly evolved over the next two decades, highlighted by the development of the Moog synthesizer that epitomized Space Age sounds and which would be heard across multiple genres. The actual exploration of outer space conjured up the potential for new worlds and an associated romantic yearning for freedom and equality that, as many authors have discussed, was a hallmark of disco. During disco’s heyday in the 1970s, space exploration was at the forefront of people’s minds: following the first successful moon landing in 1969, throughout the 1970s the US and USSR continued to be actively involved in a series of high-profile space missions that captured the public’s imagination. Though Russia and the US were still engaged in the politics of the Cold War, many projects began to forward the notion of a more co-operative approach to space exploration. Of particular note was the first

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multi-national manned mission, the joint Apollo-Soyuz project (1975), the establishment of the European Space Agency that pooled the scientific resources of European countries (1975), and NASA’s Voyager Program (1977) that sent two robotic probes to study the outer solar system. Both probes contained ‘Golden Records’ of Earth information and music (including works by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chuck Berry, and Louis Armstrong, in addition to a wide variety of non-Western music and greetings in 55 languages) in order to communicate an interstellar message to any aliens or future civilizations that might recover them. To some extent, this increasing scientific drive for recognizing the internationalization and pluralism of space was mirrored in the attempted pluralism of disco. Echoing (at least to some degree) the quest for collaborative internationalism that was marking space exploration in the 1970s, disco was central to the drive for global musical collaboration. Although it is now a familiar aspect of contemporary popular music, whether it was in the Euro disco of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s ‘I Feel Love’ (1977) or in the work of British Indian producer Biddu, disco artists sought out and explored new sounds and musical styles from around the globe. Asha Puthli, for example, was a world music pioneer from Bombay, India. Her space-themed song ‘Space Talk’(1976) achieved underground immortality with its saunter-encouraging bass, spaceship synth, dip-and-soar vocals, and softly clipped lyrics like ‘Space talk, taking a space walk space’.1 As Alice Echols writes in Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking Of American Culture: ‘Promiscuous and omnivorous, disco absorbed sounds and styles from all over, and in the process accelerated the transnational flow of musical ideas and idioms’ (Echols 2010, xxiv). Possibly even more influential than the quest for international collaboration, the use of space and futuristic tropes in disco expressed a need to have hope for not only the improvement but also for the continued existence of humanity. For many in the 1970s who were faced not only with the realities and fears of the Cold War and its attendant possibility of nuclear annihilation, but also experiencing new and growing concerns about global environmental issues such as overpopulation and pollution, the future seemed to promise anything but hope. To some extent, the preoccupation with space and the future, both in actual scientific exploration and in more creatively speculative cultural manifestations, held out the hope that help could come from elsewhere. As manifest in the Voyager recording, even aliens could be of help because of their cultural imagined messianic identity, the latter ‘an expression of transcendence’ (Ruppersburg

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1987, 160) as particularly construed via the pervasive Western ideals of Christian mythos. Thus the archives and probes sent into the stars seem to indicate a type of wish, even a prayer—however, a techno-scientific one that if the world can rely on an ultimate saviour, it might be rooted in the possibility of an advanced, transcendent alien race. As will be discussed later in this chapter, disco’s fascination with space and futurism involves spectacular visions of a utopian or, as I ultimately argue, even an early manifestation of a metamodern ‘atopic’ future whereby humanity optimistically attempts to refine itself by chasing a never reachable horizon.2 At its heart, space-related disco thus manifests a politics of hope. Central to this discussion are ideas that have circulated since the 1950s as expressed in Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s epic three-volume work The Principle of Hope (1954, 1955, 1959). Published at the dawn of actual space exploration and the concomitant boom in science fiction literature and movies, the work describes various forms of cultural and historical utopias, and also offers a prescription for and ‘Outlines of a Better World’ in which humans can reach ‘something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland’ (Bloch 1986, 1376)—a place where social justice can be coupled with an openness to change and to an emancipated future. For Bloch, hope permeates everyday consciousness and its articulation in Western art and cultural forms: products of the imagination project their conditions of production and thus act in ‘an anticipating way’, extending ‘existing material into the future possibilities of being different and better’ (Bloch 1986, 144). His work provides a systematic examination of the ways that ‘daydreams’—fairy tales and myths, popular culture, comedy and dance, in addition to political and social utopias, philosophy, and even religion—project visions of a better life that put in question the organization and structure of life under capitalism (or state socialism). Bloch believes that music in particular transcends its ideological conditions of production to express dreams of a better life, and is even able to overcome death: ‘however firmly the night of death may be distinguished from any other, music rightly or wrongly feels itself to be a Grecian fire that will still burn in the River Styx’ (Bloch 1986, 1097). To be sure, the music Bloch speaks of is high-art classical music, and based on his negative views of jazz dancing—which he classified as ‘imbecility gone wild’ (Bloch 1986, 394)—Bloch would likely have frowned on the very existence of the apparently low-brow and decadently capitalist disco, space-themed or otherwise.3 However,  while seemingly wallowing in precisely the kinds of

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capitalist decadence Bloch despised,  futuristic and space-themed disco offered a subversive critique of the capitalist-dominated world in its very desire (even if expressed ironically) to leave that world behind: a desire fuelled by hope and ‘anticipation’ for an emancipated, transcendent, more inclusive world. I will return to Bloch’s notions of hope later in this chapter. Scientific space exploration to some extent was and is predicated on a similar principle of hope, despite the fact that many American and Russian exploits in space exploration were the products and achievements of a small group of privileged, largely white male scientists. The practice of space exploration, to this day, hardly conjures up the pluralistic utopian dream of disco inclusivity; however, as manifest in the possibility of messianic futuristic or alien saviours, space exploration was, in part, a projection that the ‘Other’ (particularly a technologically enhanced Other) could potentially save humanity. In many ways, the pluralism and marginalized identities that drove and embodied disco’s utopian dream metaphorically mirrored this ideal.

Spaceship Disco: Otherworldly Disco Spaces and Sound Systems Outer space and futurism were often evoked in the interior design experience of disco clubs, which were calculated to be de-familiarizing spaces that would take participants on an exotic, otherworldly trip that transported them outside of the often mundane confines of their everyday existence. The very latest in spectacular lighting effects, including multi-coloured shimmering strobe lights and illuminated flashing dance floors, were the order of the day. Almost all clubs featured the now iconic disco mirror ball hanging from the ceiling like some spectacular futuristic planet that beamed, to all appearances, infinite flecks of light across the otherwise completely dark universe of the dance floor space. In the context of the everyday world and its often repressive social and racial policies, it is tempting to read these points of light as figurative symbols of the liberatory, enlightened space of the disco itself. The lights, alongside the dynamically loud, bass-heavy, and throbbing music, contributed to a sensory overload—often heightened by the ingestion of alcohol or other drugs—that imparted an experience of otherworldly escapist fantasy.

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The iconography of space and science fiction was perhaps most famously brought together in 2001 Odyssey, the disco club featured in the film Saturday Night Fever. In a different form of space-themed fashion, the infamous Studio 54 was well known for having its DJs presiding from cockpits filled with an array of sound gear that appeared to hover over the dancers and were supplemented, in the words of critic Peter Conrad, by ‘a neon sign representing the man in the moon, with a suspended spoon that rocked to and fro, delivering twinkly snorts of cocaine to his nose’ (Conrad 2015). The futuristic and technological excesses of Studio 54, alongside its drug culture, underlined an obsession with both aspirational wealth and bodily transcendence. In addition to disco’s distinctive iconography, immersive and high-end cutting-edge sound was central to the experience of disco from its inception. David Mancuso, for example, had Alex Rosner build a groundbreaking setup for his Loft parties that featured Klipschorn speakers, a Bozak CMA-10-2DL, the first commercially available DJ mixer, and four tweeters above the crowd, each facing one of the cardinal points (Trandafir 2016). This was a feature that was often imitated by many disco clubs for its immersive quality. Later, in renowned clubs like Paradise Garage, Studio 54, and Zanzibar, Rosner’s protégé Richard Long would create the prototypical disco sound that featured a huge round bass with low frequencies that were felt more than heard. To achieve this, Long developed revolutionary equalizer (EQ) techniques (involving EQing the room rather that the sound system) and handmade his bass cabinets with a scoop at the bottom, ‘the “J-horn,” that reflect[ed] low tones so that they [were] felt with the flesh rather than heard with the eardrum’ (Beta 2016). The use of advanced sound technology and lighting systems, in combination with hypnotically repetitive beats, creates what I have explored elsewhere in relation to techno as a kind of ‘embodied technological spirituality—a literal transference of spirit from the machine to the body’ which ‘defeats what Adorno and others saw as the alienating effect of mechanization on the modern consciousness’ (McLeod 2003, 345). Much like the technologies surrounding the actual space programme, light and sound technologies acted as material forms of techno-scientific hope.

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A Brief History of Space Music Outer space, either as a sonic aesthetic or as a general theme, was not uncommon in popular music in the era before disco. Rock’n’roll music developed roughly contemporaneously with the era of space exploration and, as early as Bill Haley & His Comets’ song ‘Rocket 88’ (1954), and Alan Freed’s 1950s radio show Moon Dog Rock’n’Roll House Party, space was a popular theme. The association of such imagery with rock’n’roll rebellion and alienation permeated many subsequent popular music styles. David Bowie’s glam rock alter-ego Ziggy Stardust, an iconic figure of the early 1970s, was, in Bowie’s own words, a ‘Martian messiah who twanged a guitar’ (McLeod 2003, 341). Prog rock, so-called Krautrock, space rock, and the Berlin School all overlapped in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among the first genres to incorporate synthesizer and rock instruments, they also broke away from traditional song structures, extending song length and thereby expanding the sense of literal and figurative ‘space’ within a song, be it an inner space (e.g. a dreamscape) or overt references to outer space. Moreover, the impressive banks of keyboards and the myriad of knobs and dials associated with the analogue synthesizers of the 1970s, along with the increasingly advanced and electric guitar and studio effects, were roughly analogous to the cutting-edge technology being developed in real space programmes (McLeod 2003, 346). Cosmos-influenced pioneers in these genres include Tangerine Dream (Alpha Centauri, 1971), Hawkwind (In Search of Space, 1971), King Crimson (Earthbound, 1972), and Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, 1973). Jazz and funk channelled their own vibrant displays of outer space mythologies, which typically occurred within the realm of what cultural critic Mark Dery has termed ‘Afrofuturism’ (Dery 1993, 736). As I have noted elsewhere (McLeod 2003), Afrofuturistic art is typically concerned with the confrontation between modern alienated Black existence and historical prophetic imagination, such as ancient Egyptian myths of the afterlife. Channelling their roots in slavery, as Dery has observed, ‘African Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees’ (Dery 1993, 736). As such, African American diasporic consciousness often uses tropes of science fiction and outer space as loci for a potential return to a utopian homeland free from racial discrimination. The Afrofuturistic fusion of space, science fiction, techno-futurism, and a spiritual African heritage perhaps can most overtly be seen in jazz icon Sun Ra,

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who claimed a mystical link to Saturn, as well as in the group Parliament-­ Funkadelic and its leader George Clinton, whose alter ego, Starchild, first emerged in the 1975 hit ‘Mothership Connection’. It can also be heard in the techno-tribalism of Miles Davis’s ‘On the Corner’ (1972), Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Third Stone from the Sun’ (1967) and ‘Astro Man’ (1970, though not officially released until 1997), Billy Preston’s ‘Outa-Space’ (1971), Ornette Coleman’s ‘Science Fiction’ (1972), Herbie Hancock’s ‘Future Shock’ (1983), and Bernie Worrell’s ‘Blacktronic Science’ (1993). One of the more disco-inspired instances of Afrofuturism was provided by the Euro-Caribbean group Boney M’s single ‘Nightflight to Venus’ (1978). The eponymous album contained the hits ‘Rasputin’ and ‘Rivers of Babylon’ and became the band’s first number-one album in the UK as well an international bestseller. The unearthly studio creation of well-­ known German producer Frank Farian (the mastermind behind Milli Vanilli and Meatloaf), Boney M is one of the quirkier groups in history, and Nightflight to Venus stands as a rich and inventive—as well as outrageous and absurd—testament to Farian’s engagement with the cosmic. The album opens with ‘Nightflight to Venus’, which lasts over seven minutes and describes a futuristic trip to Venus in the manner of a present-­ day airline passenger flight. The song is driven by a propulsive, almost African-influenced disco drum beat that stereoscopically pans between speakers and an ethereal choir of Boney M’s three female singers breathily intoning the title lyric ‘Nightflight to Venus’. The flight lifts off with a spoken countdown underscored by a drumbeat increasing in tempo and a synth swell that continually ascends in pitch until lift-off. A heavily vocoded spoken-word vocal provides in-flight passenger announcements interspersed with the female chorus. The opening announcement, for example, robotically intones, ‘Welcome aboard the star-ship Boney M for our first passenger flight to Venus’. A later announcement informs us that ‘our flying time will be eight hours’ and that ‘you’ll be travelling at a speed of 2183 miles per second, that is 7 and one-half million miles per hour’. As the ‘flight’ progresses, the drum beat gradually evolves into a quasi-­ militaristic marching pattern while the synth and guitar groove constantly modulates higher and higher, adding an increasing intensity to and sense of tonal distance from the starting point of the work. While there is no official video for the song, the band did perform it live and on several television shows such as the German comedy show Plattenküche.4 Their performance featured the four band members in a variety of colourful Afro-Caribbean-influenced space attire, capes, space boots, and hats,

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robotically dancing on a strobe-lit open shell-like stage (mimicking the birth of Venus in Botticelli’s famous painting) that, periodically belching smoke, ostensibly functioned as the starship itself. In other television performances, the band is also juxtaposed against various images of real NASA rockets and outer space. In mixing actual space footage and their own space fantasy underscored by a militaristic beat and heavy use of vocoder and synthesizers, Boney M effectively co-opts the (white) military industrial complex linked with space exploration in service of their Afrofuturist vision. While the work is certainly a kitschy disco fantasy, it nonetheless contains a message that is at its heart predicated on the notion of hope. It is no accident that the planet we are futuristically travelling to is Venus: as represented in the shell-like stage spaceship, where Boney M really wants to take us is of course not literally to a fiery planet incapable of sustaining human life, but rather to a metaphoric place associated with the goddess of love, away from conflicts and divisions (reflected in the military drum beat). ‘Nightflight to Venus’, like many other space-themed disco songs, makes significant use of vocal effects, most often in the form of a vocoder.5 This somewhat alienating vocal merging with the machine would seem to most obviously suggest some form of science fiction cyborg fantasy. In such instances of machinic re-configuration, the voice has transcended the space of and connectedness to the body and, as such, loses its emotional dynamic typically in service of a sense of ironic detachment from humanity. The vocoded voice then reinforces the commonly kitschy nature of the music that often sees outer space as an ironic dreamscape, detached from the realities of earthly existence. Related to this, the prevalence of the high falsetto voice in disco is another manifestation of the desire for uplift and figurative spatial transcendence. In the work of artists as diverse as the Bee Gees, Earth, Wind & Fire, Sylvester, and others, the falsetto voice can be heard as a performance of extravagant otherness and of figurative feelings of alienation, be it of Black or LGBTQ+ identities, and ‘a metaphor for fictive spaces which uncover the untruth of the real’ (Françoise 1995, 447). In the falsetto-voiced lyrics to Earth, Wind & Fire’s futuristic disco-­ funk ‘Fantasy’ (1977), for example, listeners are invited to ‘Take a ride in the sky, on our ship fantasii [sic]/All your dreams will come true…’. The falsetto voice here literally and figuratively opens up a new sonic space and embodies a yearning for the higher, otherworldly form of liberation that is promised in the lyrics. Informed by some of the Afrofuturist concepts discussed above, it is of course an overtly escapist and utopian fantasy that

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is, once again and as the title of the song implies, predicated on the notion of hope versus reality.

Space Disco Running parallel to Afrofuturist disco, and often merging and interplaying with funk and other synthesizer-dominated styles of dance music, the primarily European genre known as space disco emerged in the mid- to late 1970s. Figuring less prominently in mainstream culture and making little impact on North American markets, space disco loosely spanned the years 1976 to 1986 and, as such, ran roughly parallel to the Star Wars franchise: Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983). Other blockbuster space films from this period include Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Star Trek: The Movie (1979), and Flash Gordon (1980). The same period also saw groundbreaking video games promoting space sounds in the public imagination, with games such as Space Invaders released in 1978, Galaxian and Asteroids in 1979, and Vanguard, Defender, and Galaga in 1981. Even as it began to achieve massive commercial success and mainstream popularity, disco was rooted in marginalized and alien identities. As Daryl Easlea has noted in Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco, ‘aliens were swamping popular culture’, be they actual extraterrestrials on the theatre screen or metaphorical ones in disco music where otherness prevailed: gay men (Village People, Patrick Cowley, Sylvester), black people ‘subliminally appropriating white symbols of power’ (Chic in their business suits), and powerful women (Donna Summer, Grace Jones, Amanda Lear) (Easlea 2004, 114). Outer space and the future represented quasi-inversions of the hard and often discriminatory realities of life on Earth for many of disco’s marginalized practitioners. Space travel and the concomitant establishment of new worlds of freedom and egalitarianism were clearly out of reach for all practical purposes. Nonetheless, space still served as a powerful though often ironic or tongue-in-cheek analogy for the socio-political hopes of many: it represented the dream of an alternative world where all alternative lifestyles and identities would be celebrated instead of marginalized, even while being fully cognizant of the fact that this was likely only ever going to be a fantasy. Even though actual space travel and exploration were increasingly becoming a reality during the heyday of disco, it is clear that popular science fiction, movies, and literature formed a greater influence on the incorporation of space themes and futuristic sounds in disco. As

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such, outer space presented a fictional future within disco culture, and the songs often reflected this dislocation from reality in their satirical content. Titles such as Sarah Brightman’s orgasmic ‘Love in a UFO’ (released in 1979 and featuring lyrics such as ‘it was a cosmic dream, his love went through me like a laser beam’) or Laurie Marshall’s ‘The Disco Spaceship’ (1977: ‘See the disco spaceship in the sky… disco dancing through the stars, no one questions who you are’) testify to the knowingly kitschy nature of many releases. Of course, the superficial lyrics and plastic synthesized production of such songs led many to simply write them off as some of the worst manifestations of disco’s empty excess, though they often masked a deeper idealistic hope. Perhaps the main commercial driver of the movement was synth-master Giorgio Moroder, whose major hit for Donna Summer, ‘I Feel Love’ (1977), highlighted the futuristic sounds of the pulsating Moog so compellingly that it inspired widespread incorporation of the synthesizer into dance music. As Lawrence aptly notes, ‘Gloria Gaynor might have been the first queen of disco, but Summer, blending with Moroder’s technology, had become its first cyborg princess’ (Lawrence 2003, 254). To some extent we can see in Summer and Moroder’s ‘I Feel Love’ a version of Afrofuturism that, perhaps unexpectedly, links it back to African American musical tradition while simultaneously evincing a colder, more mechanical form of techno-disco. ‘I Feel Love’ represented a unique paradigm shift in popular music, ushering the era of pulsating synth-dominated dance music. It was a shift that was intentionally rooted in futurism itself: Summer was making a historical pop concept album with Moroder and Pete Bellotte, 1977’s I Remember Yesterday, that transported listeners from 1940s jazz through 1960s girl groups and 1970s funk to the imagined future, represented on the record by ‘I Feel Love’. Thus, in something of a case of life imitating art, the song representing the future became the future. Of course, much as with Boney M’s ‘Nightflight to Venus’, the future entailed a utopian world dominated by literally and metaphorically feeling love: the song evokes a form of transcendent love that is humanly expressed and felt through the emphasis on synthesizers and studio technology. In much the same manner as humanity places hope for its future in science and space exploration, ‘I Feel Love’ manifests a utopian hope for humanity that is both sonically realized and imagined as being achieved through technology. Roughly contemporaneously to his work with Summer on ‘I Feel Love’, Moroder explored the concepts of space and utopia in his own

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album From Here to Eternity (1977). The album’s title track features musical elements that became nearly ubiquitous in electronic dance music: driving four-on-the-floor bass kick drums, vocoders, and squelchy pulsating synthesizer arpeggiation. The back and forth between Moroder’s breathy vocals and the ghostly, all-female backing choir has a sensual quality while also sounding completely innocuous. The relatively banal lyrics such as ‘From here to eternity/That’s where she takes me’ certainly contribute to the strangely distant, otherworldly atmosphere of the music. Other featured songs on the album include ‘Faster than the Speed of Love’ and the pulsating synth instrumental ‘Utopia—Me Giorgio’, which uses synthesized voices and Moroder’s signature repetitive arpeggiated basslines to again underscore the notion of a technology-inspired utopia (as represented by Moroder himself in the title). Indeed, notes on the back of the album proudly proclaim Moroder’s utopian technological accomplishment, stating that ‘only electronic keyboards were used on this recording’. Moroder’s investment in the ‘utopian’ was carried on into subsequent musics such as Italo disco, of which Moroder is often seen as the forerunner or even spiritual godfather, and tracks such as Charlie’s ‘Spacer Woman’ (1983) attest to how space was a theme in Italo as well.6 Another noteworthy example of the cross-pollination between film and record is American producer Meco’s disco spin on John Williams’s Star Wars theme, which appeared on his 1977 album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk and is one of the biggest selling instrumental singles of all time. Meco was fascinated by Star Wars and was ‘convinced that John Williams’s themes were recordable and danceable’ (Gabler 2018). His ‘Star Wars Theme’ incorporates the iconic pew-pew of the blasters, the light-sabre hum, droid R2-D2’s ‘voice’, and a Williams-inspired swirling orchestral arrangement, but underpinned by a relaxed disco drumbeat.  The B-side, ‘Cantina Band’, which references the film’s Cantina scene, provides an interesting case study to analyse the world of Star Wars as cinematic dimension vis à vis its adoption in disco dancing. The original scene provided some comic relief in the economy of the film, and a chance to show the diversity of life in the galaxy: the bar was populated by a diverse assemblage of weird and wonderful yet somewhat seedy alien life. Despite the weird array of his customers, the bartender refuses to serve droids (‘we don’t serve your kind here’) and C-3PO is forced to wait outside. The music in the scene is a spoof on the swing jazz George Lucas termed ‘jizz’, but uses a Caribbean steel drum and an ARP synthesizer for the bass while drastically minimizing bottom-end

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frequencies in order to give it a pronounced ‘alien’ sound. The Cantina scene is in many ways a parody of real-life disco, with its ideals of pluralism paired with exclusionary club entrance policies, and replete with odd characters drinking—and even one clip of aliens snorting a cocaine-like drug. It is ironic, then—and significant—to think that hundreds of thousands went on to dance to Meco’s disco version of this scene: beyond its mere association with the cultural phenomenon of Star Wars mania, we might read this ‘real life’ dance as a physical acting-out of the hope the film engenders and, at the same time, as a parody of a parody: the enactment of an imaginary future that disco dancers knew full well was ultimately fictional. It is also significant that Meco’s single and John Williams’s ‘Star Wars (Main Title)’ co-existed and competed in commercial terms: both reached the Billboard Top 10 concurrently, and Meco earned a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Performance (which he lost to John Williams). The Droïds, a French space disco outfit comprising Fabrice Cuitad and Yves Hayat, were yet another duo directly inspired by seeing Star Wars and sought to recreate the ‘space opera’ feeling on vinyl without bowing to John Williams’s score. The two-part title ‘(Do You Have) The Force’ (1977) alludes to the classic Star Wars line ‘may the Force be with you’, but otherwise the all-instrumental, stripped-down synth-based track is more reminiscent of Kraftwerk. Equally, before achieving international fame in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, soprano Sarah Brightman’s debut was a top-ten hit in England with the single ‘I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper’ (1978). The song is a head-spinning mélange of pop cultural space references and synthesized space battle sound effects, all in service of a colonization theme: ‘hand in hand we’ll conquer space’. As with much space disco, the song exploits the media and popular fascination with the original Star Wars and uses music from a number of other space-themed movies (Flash Gordon, Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind). In addition to sampling music from Star Wars, the song also quotes Richard Strauss’s late nineteenth-century tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra (which received mainstream visibility in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey) and the ‘spaceship communication’ melody from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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Theorizing Outer Space and Disco: The Politics of Spectacle and Utopia Given the marginalized and often socio-economically disadvantaged position of many of its adherents, disco’s infatuation with futurism and outer space—whether through advanced club lighting and sound systems or through the otherworldly sounds and lyrics of the music itself—configures itself as a manifestation of ‘spectacular’ consumption and the sound of future utopian wealth. We might link the ultimately spectacular and performative dimension of space disco to Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque as [s]omething that is created when the themes of carnival twist, mutate and invert standard themes of societal make-up(…) the extravagant juxtaposition of the grotesque mixing and confrontations of high and low, upper-­ class and lower-class, spiritual and material, young and old, male and female, daily identity and festive mask, serious conventions and their parodies, gloomy medieval times and joyous utopian visions. The key to carnival culture involves the temporary suspension of all hierarchical distinctions and barriers among men(…) and prohibitions of usual life. (Bakhtin 1984, 15)

Bakhtin’s concept of hierarchical inversion aligns well with the temporary pluralistic futurism of disco. Through the lens and imagery of outer space and the future, disco attempted to transcend racial, gender, and—notwithstanding Studio 54’s notorious exclusionary entrance policies—class distinctions in order to create ‘joyous utopian visions’ that were nonetheless informed by the ‘gloomy’ realities of the present. Disco was to a large degree about spectacular aspiration, whether economic, sexual, or simply pleasurable consumption (Echols 2010, 153). Jamie Kastner’s documentary film The Secret Disco Revolution (2012) posits that the genre ‘became the voice of the aspirational’, breaking down barriers for the liberation of women, African Americans, and gay men alike. The ultimate aspiration for many, however, was simply to transcend one’s own emotional, social, and bodily constraints through uninhibited movement, in order to experience another world of pleasure, solidarity, and acceptance in the collectivity of the dance floor—a world very much unlike the one lived and practised in the everyday. Alongside the Foucaultion notion of heterotopia that permeates this volume (Foucault 1986), we might return here to Bloch’s notion of hope introduced at the

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start of this chapter—rooted in a dynamic understanding of history and temporality—to further explore the idea of the ‘aspirational’ space of disco as the creation of a future-oriented, imagination-fuelled ‘homeland’. The temporality outlined in The Principle of Hope is three-dimensional: Bloch presents a dialectical analysis of the past which illuminates the present and can direct us to a better future. The past (what has been) contains the sufferings, tragedies, and failures of humanity (that which must be avoided) as well as its unrealized hopes and potentials (that which could have been and can yet be). As such, Bloch sees history as also a repository of possibilities and options for future action, and the present moment is marked by both latency and tendency: the unrealized potentialities that are latent in the present, and the signs and foreshadowing that indicate the tendency of the direction and movement of the present into the future. This three-dimensional temporality must be grasped and activated by an anticipatory consciousness that at once perceives the unrealized emancipatory potential of the past, the latencies and tendencies of the present, and the realizable hopes of the future. Disco, particularly in its fascination with the future and space themes, revels in such a Blochian hope for an emancipatory future: dancing to space disco physically activates the latency of the past into the present and propels that energy into hopes for subsequent change. Space-themed disco thus represents an ephemeral, though embodied, model for what might be. At the beginning of this chapter I noted that scientific space exploration was largely the realm of a privileged coterie of white men. Disco, on the other hand, held out the promise, the hope, of a pluralistic utopian conception of outer space and the future. For many this was an empowering, or at least an optimistic, message that offered a salve to the realities of their oft-marginalized positions as alien ‘others’ in society. However, it is important to point out that many of these works were perhaps less pluralistic than they might superficially appear, and that while female and Black artists like Boney M or Donna Summer were in charge of the performance and embodiment of futuristic space-themed works, the invention of such groups and artists was still in the hands of white men, in this case Frank Farian and Giorgio Moroder respectively. Particularly in their technologized sonic visions and production values, these men impacted and shaped futuristic dance music and space disco in much the same way that the scientific community have historically branded and/or colonized actual outer space as a white, male territory.

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Indeed, space-themed disco inspired by the synth-driven style of Moroder continues to live on almost solely in white, male contemporary artists such as Aphex Twins, The Orb, and Daft Punk, among others. In many ways the sonic, racial, and gender underpinning of space disco has become passé just as much as the concept of space travel, long-replaced in the popular imagination by the new frontiers of the internet with its own fantastic post-digital soundscape and seemingly infinite capacity for pluralistic representation and democratic participation. Space disco’s fall from grace as a cultural world might also be attributable to its not so subtle irony: while the songs taken into analysis across this chapter may have eminently danceable beats, the lyrics and sounds often appear comical in their simplistic invocations of futuristic space travel and aliens. Unlike the serious alternative futures envisioned by Afrofuturist artists such as Sun Ra or, more recently, Janelle Monáe, space disco perhaps evinces an early instance of metamodern irony. In their influential article on the concept of metamodernism, Vermeulen and van den Akker define metamodernism as a feeling ‘characterized by the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010), which [d]isplaces the parameters of the present with those of a future presence that is futureless; and it displaces the boundaries of our place with those of a surreal place that is placeless. (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010)

In many ways, space disco exhibits a form of naiveté that lies somewhere between (or beyond) the sincerity of modernism and the cynicism and irony of postmodernism. Thus space disco manifests a kind of informed naiveté that—rather than believing in a utopian vision of the future— describes a yearning for utopia despite knowing it is futile, characterized at the same time by both irony and sincerity. Outer space is perhaps the ultimate mediation between the utopian and dystopic sense of place, but instead of classifying it as a heterotopia, we could think of it as what Vermeulen and van den Akker term an atopia due to its extreme otherworldliness: ‘impossibly, at once a place and not a place, a territory without boundaries, a position without parameters’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010). Space disco manifests a ‘knowing’ or ‘informed’ kitsch. It plays off and with the warm familiarity of space sounds made popular in the science fiction soundtracks of the 1950s and 1960s and stands now as a nostalgic

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remnant of the imagined future of an earlier age and the places and spaces that, in all likelihood, will never exist. At the same time, imbued with what Bloch would term the ‘emancipatory’ and ‘anticipatory’, it seems to tell the listener that one can still and should always hope for something better. Space disco’s infatuation with the otherworldly, the messianic, the technological can thus be seen to ironically negotiate the frontiers of inner space through the lens of outer space. It enacts an ironic lucidity in which the answer to the problems, both personal and planetary, is found in experiencing the maximal bodily pleasure in the here and now. Ultimately, it suggests that true hope can only be found in the unknowable vastness of outer space itself.

Notes 1. Several hip-hop artists have subsequently sampled the song, including The Notorious B. I. G. on his Life After Death (1997). In 2009, the song was transmitted into deep space, at the speed of light, as part of a celebration honouring the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. 2. As suggested by Vermeulen and van den Akker, atopos implies a space existing between the temporal ordering of modernism and the spatial disordering of postmodernism—with humanity dreaming and pursuing a ‘horizon that is forever receding’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 12). 3. ‘Nothing coarser, nastier, more stupid has ever been seen than the jazz-­ dances since 1930. Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie, this is imbecility gone wild, with a corresponding howling which provides the so to speak music accompaniment. American movement of this kind is rocking the Western countries, not as dance, but as vomiting’ (Bloch 1986, 394). 4. The video of the performance is available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5mfbo_FmBRU. Accessed 10 January 2021. 5. The vocoder didn’t start life as a musical instrument, but as a communication device. In the 1920s, Homer Dudley at Bell Labs created a device whose function was to facilitate the transmission of telephone conversations over long distances by reducing bandwidth; the technology was later employed by the military, with an enhanced version of it used to scramble transatlantic conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War (Prior 2018, 497). In the early 1970s, the technology found a home as a musical effect when Moog developed a vocoder with Wendy Carlos for the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, while the late 1970s and early 1980s represented the vocoder’s heyday, with artists such as ELO (‘Mr. Blue Sky’, 1977) and Kraftwerk (‘The Robots’, 1978) popularizing its sound.

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6. In ‘Spacer Woman’ (1983) by Charlie, the sound is overtly mechanically synthetic and employs a signature Italo Linn Drum machine, a Roland Space Echo, a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, and densely vocoded vocals sung in heavily accented, slightly disjointed English (‘I come from Space/I want to know/If I can do/My love is true’). Critic Andy Beta describes Italo vocals as ‘operatic, halting, and cardboard-like, sexy to the point of being creepy, bizarre, robotic, histrionic, sleazy, and utterly baffling’ (Beta 2015). Though it was typically sung in English (accented or not), the genre was largely only popular in non-English-speaking parts of Europe but, according to producer Josh Cheon, ‘Chicago House music, Detroit Techno, and Miami Freestyle were all influenced by Italo’ (Beta 2015). In addition to those already mentioned in this chapter, other European-based significant contributions to the space disco genre include Cerrone’s ‘Supernature’ (1977), Koto’s ‘Visitors’ (1985), Dee D. Jackson’s ‘Automatic Lover’ (1978) and ‘Meteor Man’ (1977), and Sheila’s ‘Spacer’ (1979).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1986 [1984]. Of Other Spaces. Trans. Jay Miskowieck. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. H. Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Beta, Andy. 2015. Let Me Be Your Radio: The Bizarro Universe of Italo Disco. Pitchfork, February 27. https://pitchfork.com/features/electric-­fling/ 9603-­let-­me-­be-­your-­radio-­the-­bizarro-­universe-­of-­italo-­disco/. Accessed 13 November 2020. ———. 2016. Magic Touch: Richard Long’s Life-Changing Soundsystems. Redbull Music Academy, May 20. https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/ 2016/05/richard-­long-­feature. Accessed 13 November 2020. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, Three Volumes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Conrad, Peter. 2015. Studio 54: The Ultimate Den of Vice. The Guardian, March 15. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/14/studio-­54-­ ultimate-­den-­of-­vice-­photographs-­hasse-­persson. Accessed 13 November 2020. Dery, Mark. 1993. Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (4): 735–778. Easlea, Daryl. 2004. Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco. London: Helter Skelter Publishing. Echols, Alice. 2010. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Re-Making of American Culture. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Françoise, Anne-Lise. 1995. “Fakin’ it/Makin’ It” Falsetto’s Bid for Transcendence in 1970s Disco Highs. Perspectives of New Music 33: 442–457.

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Gabler, Jay. 2018. How Meco Made ‘Star Wars’ Music a Disco Sensation. The Current, May 4. https://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2018/05/04/star-­ wars-­disco. Accessed 13 November 2020. Garcia, Luis-Manuel. 2014. Richard Dyer, “In Defence of Disco”. History of Emotions – Insights into Research, 32 (November 2014). https://www.history-­ of-­e motions.mpg.de/en/texte/richard-­d yer-­i n-­d efence-­o f-­d isco-­1 979. Accessed 13 November 2020. Haider, Arwa. 2018. Why Disco Should Be Taken Seriously. BBC Culture, April 10. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180403-­why-­disco-­should-­be-­ taken-­seriously. Accessed 13 November 2020. Lawrence, Tim. 2003. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McClary, Susan. 1994. Same as It Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music. In Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose. New York: Routledge. McLeod, Ken. 2003. Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music. Popular Music 22 (3): 337–355. Prior, Nick. 2018. On Vocal Assemblages: From Edison to Miku. Contemporary Music Review 37 (5–6): 488–506. Ruppersburg, Hugh. 1987. The Alien Messiah in Recent Science Fiction Films. Journal of Popular Film and Television 14 (4): 158–166. Trandafir, Leticia. 2016. Moments in Music: 8 Sound Systems that Changed the World. LANDR, November 17. https://blog.landr.com/8-­best-­club-­sound-­ systems-­time/. Accessed 13 November 2020. Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. 2010. Notes on Metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2: 1.

Discography Boney M. 1978. Night Flight to Venus. Hansa. Bowie, David. 1972. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. RCA Victor. Brightman, Sarah, and Hot Gossip. 1978. I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper. Ariola Hansa. Brightman, Sarah. 1979. Love in a U.F.O. Hansa International. Cerrone. 1977. Supernature. Malligator. Charlie. 1983. Spacer Woman. Mr Disc Organisation. Coleman, Ornette. 1972. Science Fiction. Columbia. Davis, Miles. 1972. On the Corner. Columbia. Earth, Wind & Fire. 1977. Fantasy. CBS. Electric Light Orchestra. 1977. Mr. Blue Sky. Jet Records.

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Haley, Bill with Haley’s Comets. 1954. Rocket ’88/Green Tree Boogie. Essex Records. Hancock, Herbie. 1973. Future Shock. Columbia. Hawkwind. 1971. In Search of Space. United Artists Records. Jackson, Dee D. 1977. Automatic Lover. Jupiter Records. Jackson Dee D. 1978. Meteor Man. Jupiter Records. King Crimson. 1972. Earthbound. Island Records. Koto. 1985. Visitors. Memory Records. Kraftwerk. 1978. Die Roboter. Kling Klang, EMI Electrola. Marshall, Laurie. 1977. The Disco Spaceship. Casino Records. Meco. 1977a. Music Inspired by Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk. Millennium/ Casablanca. ———. 1977b. Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band. Millennium. Moroder, Giorgio [as Giorgio]. 1977. From Here to Eternity. Casablanca. Parliament. 1975. Mothership Connection. Casablanca. Pink Floyd. 1973. The Dark Side of the Moon. Harvest. Preston, Billy. 1972. Outa Space. A&M Records. Puthli, Asha. 1976. The Devil Is Loose/Space Talk. CBS. Sheila & B. Devotion. 1979. Spacer. Carrere. Summer, Donna. 1977a. I Remember Yesterday. Casablanca. ———. 1977b. I Feel Love. Casablanca. Tangerine Dream. 1971. Alpha Centauri. Ohr. The Droïds. 1977. (Do You Have) The Force. Barclay. The Jimi Hendrix Experience. 2000. The Jimi Hendrix Experience. MCA. The Notorious B.I.G. 1997. Life After Death. Bad Boy Entertainment. Williams, John and The London Symphony Orchestra. 1977. Star Wars. 20th Century Records. Worrell, Bernie. 1993. Blacktronic Science. Gramavision.

Filmography Hodges, Mike (Dir.). 1980. Flash Gordon. Kastner, Jaimie (Dir.). 2012. The Secret Disco Revolution. Kershner, Irvin (Dir.). 1980. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Kubrick, Stanley (Dir.). 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lucas, George (Dir.). 1977. Star Wars: A New Hope. Marquand, Richard (Dir.). 1983. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Spielberg, Stephen (Dir.). 1977. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Wilcox, Fred M. (Dir.). 1956. Forbidden Planet. Wise, Robert (Dir.). 1979. Star Trek: The Movie. ——— (Dir.). 1951. The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Epilogue: Decolonising Disco— Counterculture, Postindustrial Creativity, the 1970s Dance Floor and Disco Tim Lawrence

As the recent passing of the 40th anniversary of the July 1979 “disco sucks” rally at Comiskey Park draws attention to one of the earliest manifestations of the Middle American revolt against any group perceived to have made gains at its expense, it has become possible and even necessary to reach new conclusions about that population’s favourite point of attack. If the late 1970s backlash established disco as a phenomenon that needed to be defended, temporal distance from its formation, uptake, overproduction, collapse and recuperation allows for a more nuanced and far-­ reaching understanding of the culture that has three significant implications. First, the re-historicisation of disco enables and even requires a reconceptualisation of punk and hip hop/rap, the two other music-based movements that came to dominate 1970s and early 1980s New York City (NYC). All three genres have been figured by historians (Chang 2005, Cooper 2004, Echols 2010, Fricke and Ahearn 2002, Gendron 2002, George 1988, Goldman 1978, Haden-Guest 1997, Hager 1984,

T. Lawrence (*) University of East London, London, UK © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_13

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Holmstrom 1996, Lawrence 2003, McNeil and McCain 1997, Miezitis 1980, Savage 1991, Toop 1984) as unfolding as discrete and stable entities that emerged in opposition to one another, with each additional discursive reference to “disco,” “hip hop”/“rap” and “punk” attributing these sounds with a singular coherence. Yet a methodological approach that prioritises city-wide cultural developments above demarcated scenes leads to the conclusion that the cultures that gathered around these sounds were much more fluid, open and democratic than has been supposed. This, in turn, requires not only a new historicisation of the formative years of “disco,” “punk” and “hip hop”/“rap” in the 1970s and early 1980s, but also, given the way these sounds have influenced so much music that has circulated globally since that halcyon period, a broader re-reading of the history of music genre during the last 50 years. Second, the reconceptualisation of disco along with hip hop/rap and punk sheds new light on the progressive potential of the early postindustrial economy before it assumed its neoliberal character. The dominant reading of the history of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005) posits that the embrace of individualism, freedom and flexibility proposed by the loosely contemporaneous advances of the countercultural movement, the anti-­ state demonstrations of 1968 and the emergence of the Italian autonomist movement coincided with and supported the emergence of a corporate agenda that sought to introduce economic reforms that would undermine collective power and liberate capital via the slashing of welfare spending, the rolling back of corporate regulation and the lowering of taxes for the wealthy—reforms that the proponents of neoliberalism claimed would enhance individualism, freedom and flexibility. A counter-reading (Negri 1979; Negri 1991; Hardt and Negri 2001) maintains that the countercultural movement, the protests of 1968 and autonomia came about through the desire of citizens to free themselves from the social and economic restrictions of the postwar settlement by embracing new forms of autonomy, flexibility and creativity that channelled new collective desires. Far from instigating the shift towards individualism, freedom and flexibility, capital reacted to the demand for change. However, the popular resonance of this post-Fordism form of collectivist proto-politics has  been underestimated, with disco amounting not to a regressive form of narcissism, hedonism and materialism, as has been regularly argued on the Left (Dyer 1995), but instead a dramatic expression of the new sensibility. Third, disco histories should acknowledge not only the culture’s definitively diverse social and sonic roots (Echols 2010; Lawrence 2003; Shapiro

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2005) but also the way the international contribution to the early development of the sound came to be marginalised and eventually erased. Having integrated African and Latin recordings into their sets during the first half of the 1970s, New  York City’s pioneering DJs became almost entirely detached from these historic sources of dance music, in part because disco successfully co-opted African and Latin motifs into its matrix, in part because US disco became such a successful commodity that other production centres that lay beyond Western Europe became almost entirely obscured. What were the global roots of disco and how did these musical lineages evolve as New York, the United States and, to a certain extent, France and Germany claimed disco to be their own invention? What might an anti-colonial history of disco look like if it was written from within Africa or Latin America or another part of the world?

Rewriting the History of Disco, Punk and Hip Hop/ Rap in 1970s New York City Running up to the late 1990s, books dedicated to the history of disco characterised the culture as existing on an axis that, at one end, featured the elitist, hedonistic, narcissistic, individualistic, fashion-conscious, sexually polymorphous practices characteristic of midtown discotheques such as Studio 54, and at the other revolved around a working-class, stylistically less sophisticated culture that revived straight hustle dancing and enjoyed widespread uptake in the suburbs, as depicted in the movie Saturday Night Fever (Badham 1977; Goldman 1978; Haden-Guest 1997; Miezitis 1980). Inasmuch as it was acknowledged, punk was figured as disco’s aggressive, commercially less successful antagonist. Hip hop/rap didn’t feature, either because it had yet to enter public consciousness or because it was deemed to be irrelevant to the history of disco. For example, Haden-­ Guest’s The Last Party, the most extensive history of disco at the time of its publication, dedicates a single phrase (Haden-Guest 1997, 216) to the history of hip hop/rap during the 1970s. More recent histories of disco (Echols 2010; Lawrence 2003; Shapiro 2005) draw attention to the culture’s socially diverse and sonically progressive origins, which shaped a less visible yet ultimately more influential form of disco that took root in private parties, downtown discotheques and independent record companies, shaping contemporary DJ culture, remix culture, sound system culture and the practice of inclusive partying

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along the way. This revisionist analysis was necessary given that, ever since the “disco sucks” backlash peaked in the summer of 1979, disco’s reputation for crassness, commercialism, exclusivity and superficiality dominated public discourse. This extended to the wave of histories that established the basic parameters of punk and rap/hip hop (Chang 2005, Cooper 2004, Fricke and Ahearn 2002, Gendron 2002, George 1988, Hager 1984, 1986, McNeil and McCain 1997, Moore and Coley 2008, Savage 1991, Schloss 2009, Toop 1984). All figured punk and/or hip hop/rap as existing in direct opposition to a reductionist version of disco that revolved around midtown exclusivity, suburban bad taste and mindless music. To varying degrees, these histories figure disco, hip hop/rap and punk as cohesive and mutually exclusive music cultures that existed in opposition to one another, with the hip hop/rap and punk scenes alone in establishing dialogue in the early 1980s (Hager 1986). Yet more recent studies (Lawrence 2016; Reynolds 2005) highlight the degree of interaction that occurred between the disco, hip hop/rap and punk scenes during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Having punctured the sweeping assumption of mutual antagonism, these histories raise two questions. First, if these cultures were much more obviously collaborative than antagonistic during the late 1970s and in particular early 1980s, then when did the idea that they were grounded in opposition take root? Second, if the disco, hip hop/rap and punk scenes became less discrete and more interactive during the late 1970s and early 1980s, might their assumed opposition during the major part of the 1970s also be open to question? The answer to the first question lies in the divisive character of the 1980s, and in particular the second half of the decade, when the combination of AIDS (which reached epidemic proportions in 1983), crack consumption (which became a national crisis during the middle of the 1980s) and the embedment of Reagan’s neoliberal reforms led groups that had been collaboratively minded to become defensive and distrustful. This milieu formed the backdrop for the emergence of a discourse that depicted disco and hip hop/rap as being especially antagonistic, including the publication of George’s (1988) Death of Rhythm and Blues, which held disco responsible for the whitening of R&B and hailed the rise of rap as the anti-­ disco saviour of black music—this from a writer who in 1981 co-authored an article with disco columnist Brian Chin (George and Chin 1981) that welcomed the way that the “barriers” between post-disco dance music and black music had “crumbled.”

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To address the second question, perhaps because history is written backwards and with a knowledge of where the narrative will end, there has been a marked tendency within music histories to argue that, even if they aren’t born whole, genres and their pioneering participants display two elements from the moment they are conceived: they aggregate original aesthetic values, and they understand these values to exist in opposition to parallel practices. However, if the widespread practice of assuming and imposing a retrospective generic coherence on the histories of disco, punk and hip hop/rap is suspended, all three scenes can be seen to have engaged not in a three-way battle for subcultural supremacy, but instead in a subtler series of encounters that witnessed them emerge as nameless movements that sought out space in which to explore innovative, expressive cultural practices that ultimately shared more connections than has been assumed. Moreover, the imagined early divisions could have barely existed given that disco and punk didn’t acquire their names until 1974, rap didn’t receive its first release until 1979 and hip hop—as the term that figured DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti as a cohesive movement—didn’t come into formation or parlance until 1981 (Lawrence 2016). While moments of competition and hostility inevitably followed, even these were, on closer examination, rooted in caricatured depictions of disco and punk rather than any deep-rooted antagonism. To begin with disco, the DJ-led dance culture that started to unfold at David Mancuso’s Loft as well as Seymour and Shelley’s Sanctuary from early 1970 onwards wasn’t straightforwardly received as disco because the sound of disco didn’t fully coalesce or come into public consciousness until the middle of 1974. As late as the autumn of 1973, for example, Vince Aletti published an article in Rolling Stone that noted the way in which rising popularity of discotheques, juice bars, after-hours clubs and private lofts was exerting a “strong influence on the music people listen to and buy” (Aletti 1973), but that that music lacked a name. Disco started to circulate in public consciousness when the Hues Corporation and George McCrae enjoyed successive number one hits during the summer of 1974, yet those releases and the coalescing disco genre already amounted to a reduction of what was happening musically, never mind socially, in New York City’s party spaces. Quite simply, although the 1970s are frequently labelled the “disco decade” and although disco is routinely believed to have broken through at the beginning of the decade, the genre didn’t exist until the decade was almost halfway over. Whatever came

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before didn’t sound like straight-up disco and didn’t acquire or need a single name. Rather than label the diverse range of sounds selected by New  York City DJs during the opening years of the 1970s as “disco,” the music selected by DJs during the early 1970s can be more productively understood as a form of countercultural music that was more radical in aesthetic and social terms than the music that is more commonly associated with the countercultural movement, namely, rock, acid rock and progressive rock (Greene 2016; Macan 1997; Whitely 1992). In contrast to many, although by no means all, aspects of rock culture, early 1970s DJ sets were improvised, unrepeatable and impossible to commodify. Whereas rock concerts separated musicians from the crowd, DJ sets were explicitly democratic thanks to the manner in which DJs and dancers entered into an antiphonal, call-and-response conversation. Unlike just about any other musical performance of the era, save for the all-night loft jazz sessions that also unfolded in New  York’s downtown ex-industrial spaces, DJ sets would routinely last for several hours, and for 12 hours or more if the party was being staged in a private space rather than a public discotheque. In other departures, party DJs integrated music that cut across space as well as time, and also foregrounded female, African American and international musicians. Forming a much more notable presence in early 1970s dance culture than they did in late 1960s rock culture, queers went on to exert a formative influence on the musical aesthetics that followed, from the introduction of DJ mixing (Lawrence 2003) to the prominent role attained by African American female recording artists on the New  York City dance floor (Echols 2010; Hughes 1994; Lawrence 2003). Sonically open, demographically diverse, collectively minded, egalitarian and committed to social transformation, early 1970s party culture amounted to the most complete and compelling articulation of New York City’s often cited but never straightforwardly realised melting pot. To continue the comparison, if acid consumption was prominent in rock as well as in early 1970s dance culture, at the Loft, David Mancuso selected music according to the shifting intensities of an acid trip, as identified by Timothy Leary (Leary 2000), with the 12-hour journey enhanced through the introduction of specialist sound equipment, party decorations/lighting effects and expansive music selections, with the latter providing a sonic structure that supported social diversity and coalition building. The music selected by Mancuso and other DJs often included breaks and crescendos that encouraged crowds to express a form of

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liberationist energy as well as explore new forms of bodily movement, expression, sexuality and desire, and this combination set the early 1970s dance floor apart from the somewhat asexual, isolated swaying that characterised countercultural gatherings. DJs also made a point of picking out long cuts from albums because these foregrounded more explorative structures that encouraged dancers to lose themselves in the music and enter into an alternative dimension. The introduction of the 12-inch single supported the spread of this form of immersive, transformative “journey music.” Meanwhile, party DJs challenged the corrosive marketing hegemony of their radio counterparts, the rise of the relatively unprofitable 12-inch single challenged the music industry’s album-driven profit model, supposedly unskilled DJs became the primary innovators within remix culture thanks to their knowledge of dance floor preferences, and DJs even organised collectively in order to demand free promotional copies of new releases, establishing the Record Pool, soon known as the New  York City Record Pool, as their vehicle (Lawrence 2003). Disco’s malleable four-on-­the-floor bass beat enabled it to self-consciously integrate gospel, funk, R&B, orchestral, African, Latin and even rock elements into its mix, which added to the impression of it being a music that existed to forge a rainbow alliance between diverse communities. But if the rock end of the countercultural movement of the 1960s was at least partially blind to the concerns of women and people of colour, which groups found themselves, if not excluded by disco then, unable to embrace its ethos? The obvious answer lies in the coalitions that formed around punk and hip hop/rap. In contrast to disco’s embrace of racial diversity, early punk embraced a form of ethnic whiteness that mocked rock hipsters who embraced elements of black style; indeed, there were times when the embrace of white ethnicity tipped into racism (Bangs 1988). Punk prioritised aggressive, short bursts of noise over disco’s immersive, seductive groove. New York City’s two main punk hangouts, CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, didn’t even have dance floors. Holmstrom’s punk magazine declared that disco amounted to the “epitome of all that’s wrong with Western civilization” (Holmstrom 1996). Meanwhile hip hop/rap historians note how disco whitened, depoliticised and commercialised the terrain of black music, excluded Bronx partygoers from its exclusive dance floors and even embraced a form of polysexuality that was foreign to black male identity, all of which established the conditions for rap music and hip hop culture to emerge as the authentic new voice of young, working-class dancers and musicians of colour. Yet although

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differences existed between disco and punk and disco and hip hop/rap, these have been exaggerated by, on the one hand, subsequent historical developments that dramatically intensified the differences that existed between the ultimately complex demographic coalitions that were attached to these scenes, and, on the other, deep-rooted subcultural and musicological assumptions that understand scenes and sounds as being rooted in difference, distinction and opposition to one another, as well as, as Sarah Thornton (Thornton 1996) argues, a partly imagined mainstream. To begin with the partly imagined hostility that existed between disco and punk, the two scenes were barely conscious of one another’s existence or their own internal coherence as they began to take root. When punk musicians began to congregate at CBGB during 1974 and 1975, disco still only existed at the outer margins of the popular imagination, so in reality there was little to oppose. Holstrom started to pen anti-disco editorials during 1976, yet the vitriol was partly an affect, while his target turned out to be a specific strand of disco that was taking root in midtown and the suburbs, which was judged, not entirely without foundation, to be commercially driven and socially regressive. Very few, if any, CBGB regulars were aware of the more radical form of dance culture that was taking root in the city’s subterranean downtown scene (Lawrence 2016); had they been, they might well have identified with its DIY, organic underpinnings. When asked they declare the lack of a dance floor at the Bowery venue to have been a source not of anti-disco celebration but profound frustration (Lawrence 2016). Lurking beneath the culture clash headlines, the New York punk scene understood itself to be in opposition to much more than the most obvious signs of commercial disco, with pivotal figures such as curator/scenester Diego Cortez drawn to the Bowery venue as an alternative to the more obviously privileged scene that had settled in SoHo, where, he notes (Davis 2010), white people drank white wine in gallery rooms that displayed art mounted on white walls. Although the black presence at CBGB was minimal, the scene understood itself to be international, polysexual, driven by art and creativity more than anger, and definitionally renegade. The nascent disco and punk scenes also shared an interest in minimalist and post-minimalist music, and, in particular, sought to explore how the physical and emotional impact of music could increase as its content was stripped away, with punk’s limited chord structures matching disco’s obsession with the break. If a degree of headline hostility between punk and disco gathered momentum during 1977 and 1978, just as the slick/midtown/Studio 54 and the conformist/suburban/Saturday

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Night Fever articulations of disco reached saturation point, those years also saw entrepreneurs plan for and open the first of several influential punk discotheques, with Hurrah and the Mudd Club leading the way. Musicians delivered mutant music that combined disco, punk and other sounds to feed the converging scenes (Lawrence 2016). An overlapping series of observations can be applied to the supposed enmity that existed between disco and hip hop/rap. Widely, if not universally, credited as hip hop’s pioneering DJ and party host, Herc can’t have consciously opposed disco when he started to put on parties in the autumn of 1973 because disco didn’t yet exist and, besides, Herc had no experience of partying outside of the Bronx. Herc is also said to have embraced funk only after his crowd didn’t respond to his early dub-reggae selections, as if that indicated that something novel unfolded in that space, rather than the opposite, which is that funk-oriented dance music was spreading through the city like wildfire, with many records being played in Bronx and downtown party spots alike (Lawrence 2016). Hip hop/rap historians cite Herc’s Jamaican upbringing as influencing his innovations in sound system construction, yet more advanced experiments in bass reinforcement were being explored by Richard Long, whose innovations were introduced in the Loft, the SoHo Place and eventually the Paradise Garage, where members of the Zulu Nation would eventually head to take notes (Lawrence 2016). Herc is also credited with pioneering the technique of mixing between the breaks during the summer of 1974, yet discotheque DJs were deploying the same technique in Boston, as was the NYC-based DJ Walter Gibbons, whose skill and precision outstripped that of Herc (Lawrence 2008). The overstated disagreement between hip hop/rap and disco extends to the claim that funk-driven Bronx DJs didn’t play disco, as if disco couldn’t be funky. In fact, Bronx DJs only became disillusioned with disco when the sound reached its commercial peak during 1978, by which point downtown DJs had also started to question the direction the sound was taking (Lawrence 2003; Lawrence 2016). Much has also been made of the way discotheques excluded Bronx partygoers, but while it’s true that Studio 54 admitted very few dancers of colour, that highlighted the limits of Studio’s door policy rather than a rupture between borough dancers of colour and disco. Scores of discotheques were located in the Bronx; queers of colour who didn’t feel comfortable in those environments had since started to head to queer-friendly venues in Manhattan before midtown became a home for flashbulb discotheques; and several Manhattan venues

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catered to African American dancers. In any case, many of the Bronx dancers who partied with Herc and other pioneering Bronx DJs such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash were underage, and wouldn’t have been admitted to any public discotheque, never mind Studio 54. Above all, just as disco didn’t exist in anyone’s mind until 1974, so rap didn’t consolidate as a genre until 1979, with hip hop only breaking through conceptually during the latter part of 1980 and 1981. Indeed, it was only during the 1980s that Bronx DJs and MCs started to come into contact with the pioneers of downtown party culture and disco (Lawrence 2016). If territorialism came to the fore it was experienced not between the two scenes but within the two scenes. The noise created by clashes between disco, hip hop/rap and punk, some of which occurred during the 1970s, much of which has been amplified subsequently, shouldn’t obscure the extent to which New York City’s grassroots music scenes embarked on a path to interaction and even convergence during the 1970s. If aesthetic preferences overlapped and crowds became more fluid, then disco should be refigured not as a singular movement that briefly overhauled rock as the bestselling genre in the United States during 1978 before it collapsed during 1979, but instead as an open-ended plurality that intersected with other semi-permeable scenes. If the radical underpinnings of punk and hip hop/rap are taken for granted, it has taken much longer for disco’s radicalism to be recognised, so powerful has been its association with commercialism, mindlessness and hedonism. Even the ambitious overview provided in The Downtown Book (Taylor 2006) remains almost entirely blind to the contribution of DJ-led discotheque/disco/dance floor culture. Yet participants in New York’s DJ-led party/disco scene agreed with protagonists in the city’s parallel grassroots music and art scenes about the need to place music at the centre of their activity; to explore new forms of bodily experience and communal transformation; to refocus political expectations following the denouement of the 1960s countercultural movement; to move towards practices and lifestyles that prioritised flexibility, creativity, openness, participation and a basic DIY orientation that broke with the social norms and hierarchies of the postwar era; to prioritise democratic and antiphonal forms of music-­ making, from DJ culture to forms of playing and performance that de-­ emphasised virtuosity; and to explore the sonic and social potential of minimalist and post-minimalist forms of artistic expression.

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DJ Culture, Disco, Creativity and the Early Postindustrial Economy The 1970s are widely judged to have marked the turning point in the transition from industrial to postindustrial capitalism. For many on the Right, the decade evidenced the breakdown of the postwar settlement, the need to roll back the bloated and inefficient state in order to liberate the individual and market competition, and the corrosive moral impact of the countercultural movement. For many on the Left, the decade was marked by state’s failure to manage the faults that were emerging within industrial capitalism as well as the onset of a new form of individualistic narcissism that either passively or actively enabled corporate capital to engineer the introduction of a series of budgetary and legal reforms that paved the way for the shift to a neoliberal economy. New York City provided both sides with evidence to support their critique, its declining public services and rising crime rates offering proof that market forces either needed to be unleashed or reigned in. The Right and Left seemed to agree on one thing: disco encapsulated the economy’s collapse into a form of inefficient, hedonistic, morally degenerate wastefulness. Whether in the plot lines of Saturday Night Fever or the representations of Studio 54’s dance floor and basement shenanigans, the culture encouraged abstinence from work, declining productivity and new levels of amoralism. David Harvey’s influential analysis (2005) of the decade is of particular interest here. Harvey points to President Ford’s refusal to provide bailout money to a bankrupt New York as being key to capital’s strategy to “move decisively” (Harvey 2005, 15) to test-run a new form of neoliberal governance as a response to the declining profitability of industrial capitalism. Meeting with city officials, the corporate banking sector demanded the introduction of a wage freeze, cuts to government services, new institutions to manage the city’s budget, new user fees (including tuition fees), a requirement that municipal unions invest pension funds in city bonds, and punitive interest rates in return for bailout money. Their strategy, which aimed “to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (Harvey 2005, 19), crystallised around the project of persuading sympathetic national and international governing bodies to liberate finance by valuing the individual above the collective, markets above regulation and tax cuts for the wealthy above spending on welfare. Ronald Reagan won the presidential election of November 1980 by promising to introduce such a project while restoring

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Christian values and defending the interests of white working-class families. Harvey maintains that these developments might have been forestalled had creative workers not descended into individualistic modes of expression and work that led them to become complicit with the shift to a new neoliberal conjuncture: The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture […] Artistic freedom and artistic licence, promoted by the city’s powerful cultural institutions, led, in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture [… and …] erased the collective memory of democratic New York. (Harvey 2005, 47)

He adds that “the city’s elites acceded, though not without a struggle, to the demand for lifestyle diversification (including those attached to sexual preference and gender) and increasing consumer niche choices (in areas such as cultural production),” and concludes that as a result “New York became the epicentre of postmodern cultural and intellectual experimentation” (Harvey 2005, 47). The argument that cultural workers started out as passive onlookers before embracing the opportunities that came their way through shifting economic circumstances received an earlier articulation when one of Harvey’s protégés, Sharon Zukin (1988), detailed the way SoHo artists became complicit with the real estate investment sector when they mined the rising value of the area’s ex-industrial infrastructure. It has subsequently been popularised by figures such as the renowned documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, who alleges (Curtis 2016) that a new form of self-absorption prevented artists and punks— whom he correlates with the Left—from focusing on the advances of capital. In an improbable capillary motion, just as elements of the traditional working class blamed queers, women and people of colour for their declining living standards, switching their votes from Democrat to Republican in the November 1980 election, so a significant part of the Left has blamed the countercultural movements of the 1970s for facilitating the revival of capital in return for self-discovery and limited sectional gains. There are, however, grounds to refigure the DJ-led party culture of the 1970s, its disco and hip hop/rap manifestations, the punk scene, the wider art scene and the convergent, mutant forms they assumed in combination with one another as an original, epoch-defining form of postindustrial expression that sought to hold on to the collective and egalitarian values

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of the postwar settlement while seeking to explore new forms of expression, creativity and participation that broke with the constraints of industrial capitalism. New  York became the pioneering epicentre of the movement in the first place because it was the most diverse city in the world, its population defined by millions of stories of flexibility, mobility and openness. Downtown industrial buildings, many of them empty or emptying, were converted into postindustrial spaces for social congregation and creative work, with dance venues rivalling art galleries in terms of sheer numbers. The form of dancing that took root replaced the convention of couples dancing with something that was both more individualistic and more collective, as dancers embraced a style of freeform dancing that enabled them to move individually while also becoming part of a physical and psychic “crowd.” DJs might have lacked the conventional instrumental skills of other musicians yet demonstrated themselves to be experts in a new form of information gathering, processing and communicating. Rooted in the goals of the liberation movements and counterculture, participants exchanged the structures, hierarchies and rituals of the nine-to-­ five working day and conventional domestic routines with new forms of work and sociality, switching the daily grind for nocturnal release. Far from failing, New  York’s population navigated the decline of industrial capitalism by giving birth to a new form of creative, collective, postindustrial activity. The goal, in short, was to explore a new form of being that navigated a pathway between the limits of industrial capitalism and the not yet visible competitive individualism that would define neoliberal capitalism. If economic exploitation remained an ongoing concern, the social movements of the 1960s and the protests of 1968 asserted that the fight against class exploitation should no longer automatically override the equally important need to end inequalities around gender, race and sexuality, with the state understood to be as likely to constrain as to support. A new form of politics was required, one that could connect the disparate yet connected interests of the rainbow coalition and the working class in a way that appeared to be alien to the established practices of the Democratic party and the trade union movement. A new form of praxis was also required, one that could demonstrate how these new social relations could offer an escape route out of the existing repressive practices. Sylvère Lotringer, a younger contemporary of French poststructural theorists Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Paul Virilio, went further than any contemporary in his analysis of the

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way these emerging forces were finding a new form of articulation in 1970s New  York City. Based in Paris before he started to teach in the French department at Columbia in September 1972, Lotringer believed that the failure of the Communist Party to support the student uprising of 1968 “had been a clear signal in France that the old revolutionary machines had outlived their purpose” (Lotringer 2013a, 11) and made it his mission to introduce European/Italian political theory into the United States, co-­ founding the journal Semiotext(e) in 1974 and organising a schizo-culture conference at Columbia University in 1975. Opening the conference, Lotringer envisioned the forging of a “libidinal fluidity” that would extend beyond the person, replacing the existing “neurotic model” that emphasised “difference between the sexes” with a “transpersonal and transsexual process where desire could be directly coupled to the socius” (Lotringer 2013a, 43–45). The aim, he added, was to produce a “nomadic entity, an irreducible multiplicity” (Lotringer 2013a, 45). The conference agreed that the traditional Left was too authoritarian, too centralised and too beholden to the idea that progressive change could only be achieved through working-class organisation. However, the conference was also marked by fierce arguments, shifting formats panel and breakdowns, with Guattari booed off the podium during the final panel when he criticised the audience for wanting to participate in a conventionally structured conference. The event ended in an atmosphere of discord. Lotringer found solace in the downtown scene. He had already absorbed Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopia” (Foucault 1984) and the argument that heterotopic spaces either “create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory,” or “create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (Foucault He had also come to view New York as an expression of unconscious desire that escaped wider repression in the United States and that exposed the contradictions of the wider system, so concluded that what he was “looking for in art would involve in some way the experience of living in New York” (Lotringer 2013b, xi). William Burroughs, who spoke at the schizo-culture conference, introduced Lotringer to SoHo’s thriving art scene, where figures such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham were introducing “chance operation’s into their work and resisted “the seduction of narrative, which always imposes an order of progression and climax” (Lotringer 2013b, xi). In particular, Cunningham’s presentation of heterogeneous elements side

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by side offered “a different idea about how people can coexist together” (Lotringer 2013b, xi). The critic concluded that the downtown scene’s aesthetic paralleled French theory without knowing it. By the time Lotringer organised the Nova Convention in late November/early December 1978, he had also become acquainted with the art-punk end of the downtown scene that gathered at CBGB and the recently opened Mudd Club, and for the most part lived in the crumbling tenements of the East Village rather than the grand lofts of SoHo. Staged at the Entermedia Theater, Irving Plaza and NYU, the event featured no wave film screenings, performances, concerts and talks by Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Patti Smith, Robert Wilson and Frank Zappa as well as by William Burroughs. After the convention Lotringer moved into a raw loft with Cortez in the Fashion District, having met the downtown scenester, one of the co-founders of the Mudd Club, after the Columbia conference. “It was so loud that no one could ever talk with each other,” Lotringer recalls of the venue: “just dancing among this crowd was meaningful enough. We all knew each other and there was a sense of togetherness” (Premmereur 2014). A late twentieth-century heterotopia, the Mudd Club staged regular immersive parties that were inspired by the Fluxus happenings of the 1960s. Owner Steve Mass recalls how “the parties took American institutions and parodied and destroyed them in one way or another,” adding that “all kinds of unexpected things would happen” (Lawrence 2016, 19). The network of venues that routinely included combinations of DJing, live music, performance art, art shows, film and video screenings in their offering expanded exponentially in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The sheer level of activity was remarkable. “Downtown was like this kaleidoscopic, smorgasbord of activity” recalls Club 57 organiser and performance artist Ann Magnuson: “all of these ideas were out there. It was like Halloween every night” (Lawrence 2016, 19). If anything, the scale and the scope of activity was underestimated by Lotringer, Magnuson and friends, who inevitably experienced the expansion in real time, and who, through the definitional limits of their own immersion, were only able to grasp shards of an explosion that not only deserves to be credited as one of the most influential cultural renaissances of the twentieth century but also for its then unique rootedness in multimedia spaces and cross-scene interactions. Participants in the art-punk and Bronx party scenes discovered a mutual appreciation of cut-up, the manipulation of found objectives, DIY, collaboration and ephemeral

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performance, with these exchanges core to the opening of downtown venues that showcased Bronx talent as well as the conceptualisation and deployment of hip hop as a cultural phenomenon that encompassed the differential discrete practices of DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti. A little more gradually, art-punk and Bronx party protagonists came to appreciate the organic, funky, communitarian ethos of the city’s DJ-led downtown and downtown-inspired dance spaces. Easing into the moment, the DJ-led downtown dance scene was able to more or less seamlessly embrace the mutant/hybrid/interactive era because in many respects it echoed and intensified the eclectic mix of early 1970s DJ-led party culture. The Loft and the Paradise Garage arguably reached their creative peak during the early 1980s. Musicians adapted to provide all three interacting scenes with sounds that ambitiously brought the sonic preferences of the scenes together, which in turn encouraged participants to move beyond their usual hangouts and bring into being an increasingly integrated social milieu. The composer, instrumentalist and songwriter Arthur Russell came to embody the period as he moved between scenes and sought to bring previously separate elements together (Lawrence 2009). Hybridity, mutation and convergence came to define everyday cultural practice, with participants generating new forms of collective, flexible, project-driven work. These groups were political although steered clear of mainstream politics, the democratic party and the trade union movement. Theirs was a new form of engagement that didn’t consist of mere navel-gazing but explored new modes of expression, both individual and collective. They also carried out their activity during the tenure of Carter’s relatively benign if disappointing administration, and when Reagan came to power they maintained their core beliefs while hoping that New York’s long-standing island status would enable them to maintain their direction of travel while the nation went into reverse. While a minority of artists benefited from the rising value of loft spaces and opportunities that came as Wall Street brokers sought to spend some of their income on art, most struggled to maintain their foothold in the city and struggled to come to terms with the mixture of increased surveillance and commercialism. To suggest otherwise is one-dimensional. Yet a further question raised by Harvey remains: did capital lure New York’s apolitical creative class into its neoliberal turn so seamlessly because its advocacy of individualism, flexibility, creativity and materialism appealed to the city’s artist community, or did that community and other like-minded groupings independently initiate the

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emergence of new forms of flexibility and creativity, with capital co-opting its philosophy only later? Although Harvey’s analysis of capital’s exploitation of New York City’s fiscal crisis of 1975 is compelling, an alternative reading of the underlying shift to postindustrial capitalism has been proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2001, 2006), who note that the countercultural movement of the late 1960s, the anti-authoritarian protests of 1968, and the Italian autonomists of the 1960s and 1970s fed into an international grassroots movement that rebelled against the hierarchical structures, social exclusions and systematic inequalities of industrial capitalism as well as the wider postwar settlement, with its critique including the state, the family, the church, the trade union movement, the corporate sector and other elements of the ideological establishment. Whereas 1968 ultimately produced often ineffective declarations of intent, argues Negri (1979), by 1977 the movement had affirmed itself as a social force, turning the words of 1968 into a reality, at least in Italy. Negri and Hardt add that during the 1970s autonomia “succeeded temporarily in redesigning the landscape of the major cities, liberating entire zones where new cultures and new forms of life were created” (Hardt and Negri 2006, 82). The movement called for the social sphere and the workplace to become more flexible, more participatory and more creative while depending the values of democracy, equality and inclusiveness. As Jeremy Guilbert has argued, [T]he dream of 1968 had always been that the hedonism that the new consumer society made possible, and the right to self-expression, which was one of the demands of the new social movements, need not lead only to such a selfish individualism. […] However, the mainstream communist and socialist Left […] tended to adopt a rather censorious stance towards the new pleasures which consumer culture made available. (Gilbert 2008, 42)

It follows that capital hijacked rather than initiated the discourse of flexibility, expression and creativity, and did so as part of its drive to rollout neoliberal ideology, policy and associated management practices (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Gilbert 2017). The case study of New York City doesn’t merely affirm an argument advanced by Negri and others. Brimming with examples of citizens seeking out new forms of participation, creativity and freedom far in advance of capital’s call for the breakup of the state regulation, the city’s creative scenes of the 1970s and early 1980s also suggests that the kind of

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breakthrough Negri attributes to the Italian autonomist movement enjoyed a far greater uptake in the United States than is assumed. Participants in their thousands, many of them self-identifying suburban refugees, resolved to abandon the regulated work and social patterns followed by their parents in order to pursue a new form of freedom that placed very little value on wealth creation and the reproduction of the nuclear family (Lawrence 2016). They also understood themselves to be engaged in birthing a new form of cooperative society that sought to breakdown the separation between work and pleasure. Glenn O’Brien, Interview Magazine editor and co-founder of the cable TV show TV Party, argued: The party is the highest expression of social activity—the co-operative production of fun. The party is the first step in organizing society for mutual interests. TV Party believes that social affinity groups will provide the foundation for any effective political action. (Fantina 1980)

Although Lotringer would have been familiar with TV Party—a punk-­ style cable TV show that was heavily intertwined with the Mudd Club scene—the critic’s conference interventions, his Semiotext(e) journal and his more recent reflections on the downtown scene understate the power of the movement in part because the breadth and depth of the gathering inter-scene coherence was only fleetingly grasped at the time and has remained under-analysed until recently, as already argued. The belated insertion of the DJ-led party/disco scene into the wider analysis of New  York’s organic creative movements of the 1970s adds exponential weight to the importance of that movement, because the city’s DJ-led party/disco scene predated and ended up enjoying far greater popular support than the movements that would manifest themselves as hip hop and punk, at least during the 1970s, before the three scenes became increasingly intertwined. On a qualitative level, disco also contributed to class, gender, queer and sexual diversity of the grassroots creative movement, compensating for omissions and blindspots that could be found in the more contained demographic scenes that coalesced around punk and hip hop. The point isn’t to create a hierarchy of inclusiveness but to point to the way new conceptions of coalition-building can be understood if dance/disco is understood to have contributed to the broader urban-wide movement towards creativity, collaboration and community.

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The extended period of convergence began to fracture during 1983 before collapsing during 1984 and 1985. The AIDS and crack crises contributed significantly. Although AIDS was first reported in 1981 and reached epidemic proportions in 1983, Reagan didn’t mention the virus in a public address until the autumn of 1985, preferring instead to uphold the kind of normative “family values” that resonated with the Christian fundamentalist Moral Majority faction within his electoral coalition (Kaiser 1997). In the meantime Ronald Reagan, having launched his “War on Drugs” in 1982, harnessed the crack epidemic to increase the policing and imprisonment of users of colour as well as justify cuts to programmes that could have helped alleviate the crisis (Reinarman and Levine 1997). Facing an existential threat, black and queer communities that had become increasingly open to forming collaborative and social alliances assumed a new body language that revolved around defensiveness and survival. Hank Shocklee explains how he and rapper Chuck D took it upon themselves to put the celebratory party aesthetic of the 1970s and early-to-mid-1980s to one side when they began to record as Public Enemy and instead record incendiary music that addressed the crisis in the black community (Shocklee 2008/2009). It was a short step for Nelson George to publish a book on the death of rhythm and blues that blamed disco for whitening the sound, with the late 1970s breakthrough of rap positioned as the solution to disco’s supposed abandonment of black music—a move that conclusively eclipsed his co-authoring of the 1981 article that welcomed the crossover that was occurring between the black and dance charts. Meanwhile the AIDS crisis engendered a “new spasm of fear” (Clendinen and Nagourney 1999, 517) in the queer community as participants dropped like flies, the media fed a moral panic around the disease, and the city government dramatically intensified its surveillance of queer-identified venues and bathhouses. Masculinist voices in the black community were perceived to be implicitly if not explicitly homophobic. The queer dance floor became a place of refuge. Changes in the New York economy, many of them traceable to Reagan’s first budget of 1981, also contributed to the era of division, with real estate and Wall Street values jumping significantly during 1983 before rising by approximately 20% per year for the next four years. New  York became more competitive, more unequal and more estranged, with the art and music scenes caught up in the neoliberal conjuncture. It was during 1984 that Basquiat started to receive $20,000 for his canvases, which enabled him to paint in spattered Armani suits. Meanwhile artists and

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musicians who had contented themselves with living cheaply and doing minimal paid work in order to cover the rent now needed to chase the dollar in order to remain in the city. Their modus operandi shifted from one devoted to forming collaborative relationships that produced participatory, ephemeral, gestural art to one that was necessarily competitive and individualistic. Paying less tax, corporations started to commission art and sponsor exhibitions in order to improve their brand image. The minority of artists who won these commissions didn’t demonstrate a consistent willingness to critique the system that was feeding them. Basquiat wasn’t the only winner—short-term winner because by 1988 he was dead—as an increasingly visible strata of elite artists-cum-celebrities headed by Jeff Koons started to charge spiralling fees for their works. If these artists weren’t already among the relatively small number who had profited from purchasing a SoHo loft space, they soon had the money to join that group. As with the wider economy of the 1980s running through to the present, the gains were enjoyed by the few, not the many, leaving the vast majority of artists to struggle to pay the rent. As Magnuson comments: When I got to New York [in 1978] my feeling was the most uncool thing you could be was rich. Then what started happening was the most uncool thing you could be was poor because being a struggling artist became unsustainable, and it sort of switched like that very dramatically. It shifted for me when Reagan got into office for the second four years [in November 1984]. (Magnuson in Lawrence 2016, 470)

An increasingly disaggregated creative scene both mirrored and contributed to the wider shift towards competitiveness and inequality, with a small number of participants enjoying exponential financial success while the vast majority made do or struggled. “The context quickly changed and New York soon became a financial capital and a showcase for the entire world,” recalls Lotringer (Premmereur 2014), who stopped publishing Semiotext(e) in 1985 after concluding that the collectivist impulse of the downtown scene had given way to a more individualist formation: Artists who had been occupying huge downtown lofts with cheap rents had to relinquish them. Our 5,000 square feet loft in the Fashion District, for which we paid $300 a month suddenly went up to $2,500 and we had to give it up. Uptown and downtown, until then separate, started mixing at night in the clubs. The Soho group of artists lost its centrality with expressionist art proliferating in the East Village and fashionable shops replacing

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rough lofts. The No Wave, neo-punk scene with a lively production of no-­ budget films didn’t last for much longer. Art galleries multiplied and being an artist became an enviable, parent-subsidized profession. (Lotringer in Premmereur 2014)

By 1984 the collective, collaborationist impulse of the New York music and art scene had given way to something more individualistic and more competitive, because by then the economy had started to assume its neoliberal shape while the nation’s president’s response to the AIDS and drug consumption crises amplified rather than resolved divisions. Yet the embedment of competitive individualism and the material successes enjoyed by a minority of artists and musicians during the new epoch shouldn’t obscure the distinctive nature of the period that preceded it, as it has been allowed to do in arguably the most popular account of the rise of neoliberalism. Nor should the mythology that during the 1970s New York amounted to a failed city in need of repair pass without critique, for while cuts to public services and associated social problems shouldn’t be romanticised, the challenge of shifting from industrial to a postindustrial economy indicates that New York was in need not of repair but support. Even though the response of the White House and Wall Street was harsh, the city nevertheless hosted an explosion of culture that was rooted in community and pioneered new forms of expression and living. Far from seeking to escape a city that is routinely depicted as amounting to an unliveable hellhole, participants in its art and music scenes were reluctant to leave for even for a weekend in case that would lead them to miss out on some essential gathering. The challenge, then, is to understand the 1970s and the early 1980s not as a time characterised by urban decline that paved the way for the inevitable introduction of neoliberal reforms, but as one that broke with the postwar settlement in order to generate new forms of flexibility, creativity and collaboration. As Maurizio Lazzarato argues in his discussion of the French “intermittents,” intermittent workers in the entertainment industry who went on strike in 2003 to contest cuts to benefits introduced by the French government, [T]he assertion that subjectivity is first of all a collective assemblage, even when it is expressed through an individual, is essential to the dismantling of the neoliberal ideology of the “creative class” or the theory of the “cognitive worker”, which maintains belief in the creativity of individuals or social

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groups defined by certain socioanthropological characteristics. (Lazzarato 2017, 195)

Libertarian, antiessentialist and rigorously anti-individualist, the intermittents recognised the creative nature of collectivity and the collaborative dynamic inherent in all real creativity, as Gilbert has also observed, adding that “it is these facts that neoliberalism is predicated on attempting to refute at all costs. It is their irrefutability that remains neoliberalism’s— and perhaps capitalism’s—greatest point of vulnerability” (Gilbert 2017, xliv). If arguments made for the intermittents can be applied to the earlier activity of New York City’s intersecting creative movements of the 1970s— movements that almost certainly inspired a visiting Brian Eno to formulate the idea of the “scenius” as “the communal form of the concept of the genius ethos of the genius” (Lawrence 2016, 462)—then claims already made for the Italian autonomist movement can be forcefully extended.

Decolonising Disco While large swatches of the United States believed New York to be unsalvageable precisely because of its multiracial, polysexual, cross-class population, the channelling of that coalition onto its dance floors enabled the city to achieve its pioneering role in the development of DJ-led dance culture. Drilling down on this development, Francis Grasso and David Mancuso moved ahead of Kool Herc because the crowds that gathered at the Loft and the Sanctuary were more diverse and included a far higher proportion of queers than was the case at Herc’s Sedgwick Avenue parties. Diverse crowds also encouraged diverse DJs to draw on records from a diverse range of sources, as identified by Vince Aletti in his pioneering article on the rise of private party and public discotheque culture. Aletti described the music that could be heard in these venues as often “Afro-Latin in sound or instrumentation, heavy on the drums, with minimal lyrics, sometimes in a foreign language, and a repetitious chorus” with the most popular cuts “usually the longest and the most instrumental, performed by black groups who are, frequently, not American” (Aletti 1973). A Loft regular who was heavily influenced by Mancuso’s selections, Aletti added that Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” amounted to “a perfect example of the genre.” The coalescing sound included African and Latin elements at its core, yet during the second half of the 1970s the supply lines for imported

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records narrowed markedly, so while West European disco flowed into the United States freely, shaping much of the output of the era’s bestselling label, Casablanca Records, little African and Latin music made the same journey. The development received little attention, perhaps because the spiralling success of Eurodisco soon threatened to overwhelm not merely African and Latin imports but African American disco itself, leaving the proponents of African American disco to argue for the ongoing importance of what could be loosely described as the original disco sound. In the process, disco became a US invention that inspired a European subgenre, with the non-US and non-European elements that contributed to the shaping of the original disco sound subsumed within a colonial narrative that buried its colonial status. In this respect, too, the history of disco requires further thought. To elaborate, the early years of DJ-led dance culture integrated European, Latin and in particular African imports into the open-ended yet interlinked soundscape that could be heard in private parties and public discotheques across New  York and in particular in the city’s downtown neighbourhoods. A sign of the changing times, Grasso only started to play Olatunji’s “Drums of Passion” when new owners took over the Sanctuary in early 1970 and opened its to queer dancers, a first within public discotheque culture. Mancuso went further as he integrated records by the Congolese Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, the Bahamian-led Exuma, the Bahamian Funky Nassau, the multicultural UK band Cymande, and the UK-based Ghanian-Caribbean line-up Osibisa. Records that displayed a strong Latin element, even when recorded outside of Latin America, also received heavy play, including cuts by the Spanish group Barrabás and the US/multicultural rock band WAR.  Meanwhile African records such as Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” and Fela Kuti and the Africa ‘70s “Shakara” became iconic Loft selections. Many of these records went on to gain local and national notoriety because, first, Mancuso’s audiophile sound system and electric party atmosphere enabled his selections to emit in the best-possible situation and, second, because his private party status enabled him to stay open long after New York’s public discotheques were required to close, which in turn encouraged the city’s discotheque DJs to head to the Loft once they were finished working for the night. Indeed “Soul Makossa” became the first record to enter the Hot 100 without radio play precisely because of the rising power of New York’s dance floor network (Lawrence 2003).

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As a close reading of the DJ lists that accompanied Vince Aletti’s weekly “Disco Files” column published in Record World confirm, African and Latin elements became central to disco as the sound consolidated between 1974 and 1977 before peaking in 1978 (Aletti 1998). Recruiting many of Philadelphia International’s key musicians, Salsoul became the first label to explicitly integrate Latin elements into its recordings. Lamont Dozier’s “Going Back to My Roots” culminated with an extended break that featured African-Latin percussion and ecstatic chanting. Linda Clifford’s “Runaway Love,” Patti Jo’s “Make Me Believe In You,” Melba Moore’s “Standing Right Here,” Ozo’s “Anambra,” Vicki Sue Robinson’s “Turn the Beat Around,” Salsoul Orchestra’s “Salsoul 3001,” T-Connection’s “Do What You Wanna Do,” Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” and Karen Young’s “Hot Shot” variously foregrounded congas, talking drums, timbales and woodblocks to heighten the African-Latin component of disco, with DJ-remixers Walter Gibbons and Richie Rivera arguably the most progressive contributors to the development. At times the engagement assumed a more obviously colonial rhetoric, as was the case with the Ritchie Family’s internationally themed albums, Brazil, Arabian Nights and African Queens (the latter featured the African drummers J.M. Diatta and Babatunde Olatunji). In short, disco continued to draw on many of the African and Latin sounds that had contributed to its formation, yet now did so as an organising force, with sounds that had previously enjoyed a form of chaotic equality now subsumed within its integrative coordinates. Yet it is hard to pinpoint any African or Latin tracks that became dance floor staples at party spaces such as the Loft along with other cutting-edge private parties including Flamingo, the Paradise Garage, Reade Street, the Soho Place and 12 West, never mind midtown’s more explicitly commercial discotheques. Although Mancuso’s ear remained tuned to international sounds, he appears to have played maybe not even a handful of tracks that were recorded outside of the United States and Europe during the latter years of the 1970s, with Third World’s “Now That We Found Love,” laid down in Nassau, Bahamas, the location of Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios, the standout exception. Although Compass Point would remain influential for several years, the supply chain had shifted, in part because US record companies had belatedly woken up to the potential to sell music through party as well as radio DJs, turning the production of disco into an industry. The spiralling success of Saturday Night Fever took the disco market into overdrive, encouraging independent as well as major labels to release a disproportionate amount of substandard,

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generic disco music. Whereas during the opening years of the 1970s New York DJs found themselves scouring record bins in search of music to feed to ravenous crowds, oblivious to the culture that was taking root, by 1978 they had become embroiled in a supply chain of increasingly variable quality, the sheer size of which diminished the range of sounds that were within easy reach. There was no lack of danceable music being recorded in Africa, Latin American and beyond during the second half of the 1970s, and much of it was transparently influenced by disco as well as funk and jazz. To focus the discussion on Africa and to begin with one extended example, drawing on primary discographical information available at database and trading website Discogs (2019), a New York-based company based at 1755 Broadway, Editions Makossa, which later traded as Makossa and Makossa International, captured the unfolding exchange. Early into its run the label released music by the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band, a Long Island funk line-up that had relocated to the less competitive environment of Paris, where they worked as the in-house band at Pierre Jaubert’s Parisound studio and performed regularly in Barbès, a centre for African immigrants living in Paris, which tuned them into African music. The group released the heavily percussive “Voodounon” on Editions Makossa in 1973; the record was distributed by the African Record Centre, located at 1194 Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. Released in the United States in 1974, their debut album featured a cover of Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” as well as “Hihache,” the latter registering more in the Bronx than Manhattan. The band’s 1974 follow-up, Malik, included “Djungi,” which featured four-on-the-floor bass beat and uptempo, grooving instrumentation—a combination that would soon define the early sound of disco. Indeed, the O’Jays classic disco record “I Love Music,” a 1975 release, reproduced the bass line and keyboard melody in “Djungi.” Editions Makossa went on to license and release music from Fela Kuti as well as Georges Anderson, Ernesto DjéDjé, Gregoire Lawani and Buari. The latter, led by Ghanian singer, dancer, percussionist, composer and co-­ arranger Sidiku Buari (1975), debuted with an eponymous album on RCA in the United States in 1975 that displayed many of the key components of the breakthrough disco-funk sound; the opening track, “Karam Bani,” features sizzling four-four hi-hats, funky drumming, a four-on-the-floor bass beat, foreign-language chorus- and chant-led vocals, and jamming instrumentation. Buari went on to release Disco Soccer, an upfront disco-­ funk album released by Polydor in Ghana in 1977 and by Makossa in the

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United States in 1979. In the text that accompanied Disco Soccer Buari explained: I feel through my music—as waxed in this collection is a development [sic] which comes from the ingredients of the traditional music and culture of Ghana. There is a strong American disco beat to these heavy African rhythms. For it is my intention that my music gives pleasure to dancers as well as educate. (Buari 1977/79)

Featuring a tight disco-funk rhythm, swooping strings, lyrics that were limited to a soulful chorus and a trippy synthesiser, “I’m Ready,” the second track on Disco Soccer, came out as a 12-inch single on Makossa International Records in 1978. African interaction with disco during the second half of the 1970s didn’t begin and end with Makossa. Foregrounding five African musicians, produced by white Belgian producers Ralph Benatar and Jean Kluger, recorded in Brussels and released on local label Biram, “A. I. E. (A Mwana)” by Black Blood (1975) received international distribution before Chrysalis (UK) issued a 12-inch version (1977) in a bright-blue-and-­ yellow cover featuring “DISCO DISCO DISCO DISCO DISCO” printed in circle formation. Pioneering Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen and the Africa 70 musicians provided evidence that disco had reached Nigeria no later than 1976 when they recorded “Afro-Disco Beat” at Decca’s 16 track Abule-Oja Vaba Studio in Lagos. Released by Phonogram in 1977, the track is straight-up Afrobeat, raising the possibility that Allen was minded to claim disco as being his and Kuti’s invention. Wherever invention lay, Teaspoon & the Waves were sufficiently familiar with Lamont Dozier’s “Going Back to My Roots” (1977) to release “Oh Yeh Soweto” (1977), a toughened, roughened cover of the song, in South Africa. Regarded as Cape Town’s answer to Earth, Wind & Fire, Pacific Express recorded “The Way It Used to Be” in Johannesburg before the record was released in France in 1978. Composed and produced by South African musician Hamilton Nzimande, the Nzimande All Stars released the 16-minute dance jam “Sporo Disco” on the South African label Masterpiece in 1978. Having settled in Paris, the 20-year-old Gabonese vocalist Ondeno recorded the pulsating Afro-disco track “Mayolye” (1978) after finding joy in the city’s Afro-disco scene, releasing the seven-inch in a colour cover that featured him sitting in front of the Eiffel Tower plus a “Super Disco” logo stamped in bright red on light blue. Meanwhile

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Ghanian musician Dan Boadi moved to Chicago and as Dan Boadi and the African Internationals released 500 copies of the Curtis Mayfield-­ sounding “Money Is the Root of Evil” (1978) on NAAP. Eko recorded Funky Disco Music (1979)—including the title track plus “Ndolo Embe Mulema”—at Studios Barclay in Paris and released the result on Dragon Phénix. The production of African disco continued through the tipping point year of 1979, when the overproduction of generic disco along with the slowdown in the US economy provoked a national backlash against the sound and a general reduction in its production. If progressive New York City DJs were becoming concerned about the lack of fresh-sounding disco, one wonders if they got to hear Ghanaian multi-instrumentalist and one-time Osibisa player Kiki Gyan’s shimmering “Disco Dancer,” the opening track on Feeling So Good, which was recorded and mixed in London before receiving a release on Nigeria’s Boom Records. Clément Djimogne’s “Money Make Man Mad” (released on Nigerian label Nigerphone) and Benis Cletin’s “Jungle Magic” (released on Nigerian label Afrodisia) foregrounded a more organic aesthetic and more obviously African accented vocals than any disco recorded in a US studio and were no less compelling for that. An example of the rich cultural exchange that flowed between Nigeria and the UK following Nigeria’s declaration of independence in 1960, and surviving the corrosive effects of successive dictatorships, Nigerian line-up Blo recorded the disco-funk number “Get That Groove In” in London before releasing the track on Afrodisia. Nigerian musician Orlando Julius, the leader of numerous bands and a collaborator with Lamont Dozier, merged disco and Ghanian highlife for the recording of “Disco Hi Life,” released on the Nigerian label Jofabro (1979). Explaining the depth and energy of Nigeria’s contribution, John Doran notes that the indigenous club scene’s preference for live music over DJs meant local disco line-ups were in demand, with every city able to support “at least one world-class band” (Doran 2016). These and other African disco records released during the second half of the 1970s didn’t appear in the DJs lists published in Vince Aletti’s “Disco Files” column save for Fela Kuti and the Africa ‘70s “Shakara Oloje,” first released in Nigeria (1972) before Editions Makossa licensed it in the United States in 1974. During the first months of the year Aletti made some references to African and Latin music, describing Buari’s debut album as “one of the most exciting African imports since ‘Soul Makossa’” (Aletti 1998, 58), and noting that

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while [Latin music] may not be everyone’s idea of discotheque music, […] an increasing number of clubs in New York and other cities with large Latin, primarily Puerto Rican, communities are scattering records by Eddie Palmieri, Larry Harlow, Tito Puente and others in between B.T. Express, Carl Douglas and LaBelle. (Aletti 1998, 62)

Even if they were contained, these comments chimed with Aletti’s groundbreaking account of the open-ended character of discotheque music, published in 1973, yet the rest of the year saw virtually no further references to African and Latin music save for a thumbs-up review of a Fania All Stars concert at Madison Square Garden. By the summer of 1975 the quick-­ succession release of the Ritchie Family’s “Brazil,” Banzaii’s “Chinese Kung Fu” and Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” suggested that US and European disco outfits were becoming adept at integrating the signifiers of international music into their recordings. In August 1975 Aletti claimed that “the popularity of disco music hasn’t prevented performers and producers in other styles from breaking through” (Aletti 1998, 110). Yet although he concluded in his end-of-year column in December 1975 that disco “remains unpredictable,” his end-of-year lists of the year’s best disco singles, albums and special pressings didn’t include a single African or Latin track in its 160 entries (Aletti 1998, 152). A certain narrowing had taken place on the NYC dance floor, two years before disco would go into marketing overdrive. The mutant, convergent period that followed the backlash against disco and the withdrawal of the major labels from the genre witnessed the reentry of African and Latin imports into the New  York party scene, with Jamaican dub also establishing a new foothold. Having shifted towards an increasingly disco-driven sound, as exemplified by his straight-up disco selections for a chart submitted to Record World (Aletti 1998, 411) in July 1978, David Mancuso started to select recordings by artists such as King Sunny Adé and His African Beats (“365 Is My Number/The Message”) and Hugh Masekela (“Don’t Go Lose It Baby”) as well as Black Uhuru, Jimmy Cliff and Eddy Grant. Mudd Club DJ Anita Sarko started to integrate music from Mexican composer Esquivel and His Orchestra, Peruvian vocalist Yma Sumac and Fela Kuti into her sets. French label Celluloid contributed to the reopening when it established an office in the city, making it easier for DJs to draw music from Errol Dunkley, Kassav,” Nyboma Mwan’dido, Salif Keita, Touré Kunda, Kante Manfila and Osibisa into their sets, with Danceteria’s Mark Kamins one of the first to cultivate a

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“world music” sound. Produced, arranged and mixed by the trend-setting team of Arthur Baker and John Robie, “Funky Soul Makossa” by Nairobi and the Awesome Foursome, a 1982 release, linked the early 1980s back to the notably open period of the early 1970s. Michael Jackson went on to replay the chant from Dibango’s breakthrough release in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin,’” the opening track on Thriller, without permission; in 1986 the US performer settled out of court with the Cameroonian musician (Gbadamassi 2009). However, a significant number of African disco records continued to struggle to gain any traction, among them Ghanian Okyerema Asante’s “Sabi (Get Down),” Nigerian N’Draman Blintch’s album Cosmic Sounds, the London-based Ghanaian outfit Kabbala’s “Voltan Dance,” Cameroonian Pasteur Lappe’s 12-inch release of “Na Real Sekele Fo Ya,” Martinique vocalist Mac Gregor’s “Nan Ye Li Kan” (recorded in the Ivory Coast), Boncana Maïga’s “Koyma Hondo” (recorded in New  York), Ghanian Rim and Kasa’s “Love Me for Real” (recorded in San Francisco), Ghanian Pat Thomas’s “Yesu San Bra: Disco Hi-Life” and Ivory Coast artist NST Cophie’s album Mon’Da Center. Given that these recordings have gone on to circulate in Europe, the United States and beyond via a wave of reissues led by labels including Analog Africa, Awesome Tapes from Africa, Mr Bongo, Sofrito, Soul Jazz, Soundway and Strut, picking up significant DJ play along the way, it could be concluded that their initial failure to break through had little if anything to do with concerns about “quality.” Interestingly, these and scores of other African and Latin disco tracks have for the most part come to the fore following disco’s initial 1990s revival. As DJs and dancers exhausted the US and European disco archive, they turned to more obviously international archives, many of which hadn’t enjoyed widespread distribution prior to the backlash against disco or even after. It is time for these and other disco-oriented recordings to be included an expanded definition of the disco archive. Their musical value suggests that if trading routes and cultural assumptions had been more equal then disco might have maintained the more obviously open and international aesthetic of early “discotheque music,” and might have found it easier to avoid becoming the two-dimensional product that made it vulnerable to the backlash. The expanded history of disco also enables the history of US disco to be better understood, for in addition to the sound emerging as an expression of marginalised, countercultural forces, it also came to assume a colonial logic that included US and European disco at the expense of

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minority expressions of the sound. The very fact that disco assumed an international dimension also confirms disco to have been one of the first sounds to demonstrate that humans with connecting desires were ready to move to a common beat, irrespective of where in the world they were dancing. Drawing attention to this can’t be reduced to a desire to live in a recycled, nostalgia-tinted past (Reynolds 2011) or a wish that history had taken a different turn. Global sounds have come to the fore powerfully during the last 10 years, after all, with African, Asian and Latin sounds offering fresh directions for electronic genres including nu disco, house and techno that might otherwise have run out of ideas. Awarded label of the year at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM awards in 2018, the London-­ based label On the Corner exists as a cutting-edge newcomer to an evolving movement that combines a wild yet strangely cohesive array of international styles. Melding jazz, electronic music and field recordings from the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Brussels— which was built to showcase King Leopold II’s Congo Free State in the 1897 World Exhibition—DJ and electronic producer Khalab’s Black Noise 2084 provides a postcolonial platform upon which subjugated voices connect with black electronic dance music and jazz. Whereas disco c. 1974 smoothed out some of the rough edges and radically improbable connections that came to the fore in the discotheque mix of 1970–1973, recordings such as Black Noise maintain the rough edges and improbable connections of colonial and postcolonial transatlantic music to the fore. Flow and interruption are held together in a form of anti-imperial expression. For a culture that has often been derided as being simplistic, disco nestles at the apex of contemporary complexity. Born out of counterculture and postindustrialism, the culture in its pre-named form became an influential example of community-driven creativity and connectedness. Paralleling other scenes, it provided participants not only with hope during challenging times but also with a new way of living that suggested a postindustrial economy could take root in ways that would enable citizens to lead lives that were more participatory as well as more flexible. And although US and West European disco eventually marginalised the culture’s organic party origins and its international roots, those histories remain recuperable to the point where an oft-ridiculed cultural formation seems to offer strange hope for us to better understand a past in order to reconceptualise and reexperience the present and the future.

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Bibliography Aletti, Vince. 1973. Discotheque Rock ‘72 [sic]: Paaaaarty! Rolling Stone, 13 September. ———. 1998. The Disco Files, 1973–78. London: DJhistory.com. Bangs, Lester. 1988. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Ed. and Intro. Greil Marcus. New York: Knopf. Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso. Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation. London: Picador. Clendinen, Dudley, and Adam Nagourney. 1999. Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster. Cooper, Martha. 2004. Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979–1984. Cologne: From Here to Fame. Curtis, Adam. 2016. Hypernormalisation. London: BBC. Discogs. 2019. https://www.discogs.com. Searches conducted 1 September 2018 to 1 April 2019. Doran, John. 2016. Nigerian Disco–10 of the Best. Guardian, 10 August, https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/aug/10/nigerian-disco-10of-the-best. Dyer, Richard. 1995. In Defence of Disco. Gay Left, summer 1979. Reprinted in Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage (eds.), The Faber Book of Pop, 518–527. London: Faber and Faber. Echols, Alice. 2010. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York: W.W. Norton. Fantina, Richard. 1980. TV Party Interview with Glenn O’Brien. East Village Eye, March, 9. Foucault, Michel. 1984. Des Espace Autres. Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5, 46–49. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics. 16, 1, 22–27. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf. Fricke, Jim, and Charlie Ahearn. 2002. Yes Yes Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-hop’s First Decade. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo. Gbadamassi, Falila. 2009. Michael Jackson and His African Affairs. Afrik-News, 30 June. http://www.afrik-­news.com/article15846.html. Gendron, Bernard. 2002. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. George, Nelson. 1988. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Penguin. George, Nelson, and Brian Chin. 1981. Dance Clubs, Black Radio Interacting More Closely. Record World, 4 July. Gilbert, Jeremy. 2008. Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics. Oxford and New York: Berg.

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———. 2017. Introduction. In Maurizio Lazzarato, Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Goldman, Albert. 1978. Disco. New York: Hawthorn Books. Greene, Doyle. 2016. Rock, Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, 1966–1970: How the Beatles, Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground Defined an Era. Durham: McFarland & Co. Haden-Guest, Anthony. 1997. The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night. New York: William Morrow. Hager, Steven. 1984. Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. New York: St. Martin’s. ———. 1986. Art after Midnight: The East Village Scene. New York: St. Martin’s. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2006. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmstrom, John, ed. 1996. Punk: The Original. New York: Trans- High. Hughes, Walter. 1994. In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco. In Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, 147–157. New York: Routledge. Kaiser, Charles. 1997. The Gay Metropolis, 1940–1996. London: Phoenix. Lawrence, Tim. 2003. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–79. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2008. Disco Madness: Walter Gibbons and the Legacy of Turntablism and Remixology. Journal of Popular Music Studies 20 (3): 276–329. ———. 2009. Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–92. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2016. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–83. Durham: Duke University Press. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2017. Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press. Leary, Timothy. 2000. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. New York: Citadel. Lotringer, Sylvère. 2013a. Introduction to Schizo-Culture. In Schizo-Culture: The Event, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and David Morris, 9–49. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2013b. Notes on the Schizo-Culture Issue. In Schizo-Culture: The Book, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, v–xxiv. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Macan, Edward. 1997. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. 1997. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. London: Abacus. Miezitis, Vita. 1980. Night Dancin’. New York: Ballantine. Moore, Thurston, and Byron Coley. 2008. No Wave: Post-Punk, Underground, New York, 1976–1980. New York: Abrams Image. Negri, Antonio. 1979. Reformism and Reconstruction: Terrorism of the State-as-­ Factory Command. In Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis: Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory and Practice of a Class Movement, 1964–79, ed. Mario Tronti, Tony Negri, and Sergio Bologna, 33–37. Trans. P.  Saunders. London: Red Notes. ———. (1991) Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. Ed. Jim Fleming and Trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano. London and New York, Autonomedia/Pluto. Premmereur, Juliette. 2014. From New York No Wave to Italian Autonomia: An Interview With Sylvère Lotringer. Interventions, 3, 2, 13 March. https://interventionsjournal.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/from-­new-­york-­no-­wave-­to-­ italian-­autonomia-­an-­interview-­with-­sylvere-­lotringer/. Accessed 10 February 2019. Reinarman, Craig, and Harry G.  Levine, eds. 1997. Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Reynolds, Simon. 2005. Rip It Up and Start Again: Post- Punk 1978–84. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber. Savage, Jon. 1991. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber and Faber. Schloss, Joseph. 2009. Foundation: B-boys, B-girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York. New York: Oxford University Press. Shapiro, Peter. 2005. Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. London: Faber & Faber. Shocklee, Hank. 2008/2009. Interviews with Tim Lawrence, 7 November and 29 July. Taylor, Marvin J., ed. 2006. The Downtown Book: The New  York Art Scene, 1974–1984. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press. Toop, David. 1984. Rap Attack: African Rap to Global Hip Hop. London: Pluto Press. Whitely, Sheila. 1992. The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

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Zukin, Sharon. 1988. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. London: Radius.

Discography Banzaii. 1975. Chinese Kung Fu. Twelve-inch single. Scepter Records. Black Blood. 1975. A. I. E. (A Mwana). Seven-inch single. Biram. ———. 1977. A. I. E. (A Mwana). Twelve-inch single. Chrysalis. Blintch, N’Draman. 1980 Cosmic Sounds. Cosmic Sounds. Blo. 1979. Get That Groove In. From the album Bulky Backside—Blo Is Back. Afrodisia. Buari. 1975. Buari. RCA Victor. ———. 1978. Disco Soccer. Twelve-inch single. Makossa International Records. ———. 1979a. Disco Soccer. Polydor 1977, Makossa. ———. 1979b. Karam Bani. From the album Buari. RCA Victor. Cletin, Benis. 1979. Jungle Magic. From the album Jungle Magic. Afrodisia. Clifford, Linda. 1978. Runaway Love. Twelve-inch single. Custom Records. Dan Boadi and the African Internationals. 1978. Money Is the Root of Evil. From Money Is the Root of All Evil. NAAP Records. Dibango, Manu. 1972. Soul Makossa. Fiesta. Djimogne, Clément. 1979. Money Make Man Mad. From the album Money Makes Man Mad. Nigerphone. Dozier, Lamont. 1977. Going Back to My Roots. Twelve-inch single. Warner Bros. Eko. 1979a. Funky Disco Music. On Funky Disco Music. Dragon Phénix. Reissued by Africa Seven, 2018. ———. 1979b. Ndolo Embe Mulema. On Funky Disco Music. Dragon Phénix. ———. 2016. Funky Disco Music. Twelve-inch single. Fly By Night Music. Fela Kuti and the Africa ‘70s. 1974. Shakara Oloje. Editions Makossa. Gyan, Kiki. 1979. Disco Dancer. From the album Feeling So Good. Boom Records. Jackson, Michael. 1982a. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. From the album Thriller. Epic. ———. 1982b. Thriller. Epic. Jo, Patti. 1973. Make Me Believe In You. Seven-inch single. Wand. Remixed by Tom Moulton for Disco Gold (Scepter, 1975). Julius, Orlando. 1979. Disco Hi Life. Jofabro. Kabbala. 1982. Voltan Dance. Twelve-inch single. Red Flame. Kendricks, Eddie. 1972. Girl You Need a Change of Mind. From the album People… Hold On. Tamla. Khalab. 2018. Black Noise 2084. On the Corner Records. King Sunny Adé and His African Beats. 1982. 365 Is My Number/The Message. Island Records. Lafayette Afro-Rock Band. 1973. Voodounon. Editions Makossa.

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———. 1974a. Djungi. From the album Malik. ———. 1974b Hihache. From the album Soul Makossa. ———. 1974c. Soul Makossa. From the album Soul Makossa. ———. 1974d. Malik. America Records / Makossa International. Lappe, Pasteur. 1980. Na Real Sekele Fo Ya. Twelve-inch single. Disques Espérance. MacGregor. Unknown. Nan Ye Li Kan. Production Ecurie. Maïga, Boncana. 1982. Koyma Hondo. From the album Koyma Hondo. West African Music. Masekela, Hugh. 1984 Don’t Go Lose It Baby. Twelve-inch single. Vuka Africa. McCoy, Van. 1975. The Hustle. Seven-inch single. Avco. Moore, Melba. 1977. Standing Right Here. Twelve-inch single. Buddah Records. Nairobi and the Awesome Foursome. 1982. Funky Soul Makossa. Streetwise. NST Cophie. 1982. Mon’Da Center. Cophie’s. Nzimande, Hamilton. The Nzimande All Stars. 1978. Sporo Disco. Twelve-inch single. Masterpiece. O’Jays. 1975. I Love Music. Philadelphia International. Okyerema Asante. 1979. Sabi (Get Down). From the album Sabi. Atumpan Records. Olatunji. 1959. Drums of Passion. From the album Drums of Passion. Columbia. Ondeno. 1978. Mayolye. Seven-inch single. African Music Time. Ozo. 1976. Anambra. Twelve-inch single. DJM Records. Pacific Express. 1978. The Way It Used to Be. From the album On Time. Gull. Rim and Kasa. 1982. Love Me for Real. From the album Too Tough. Sum Sum Records. Ritchie Family. 1975. Brazil. From the album Brazil. 20th Century Records. Robinson, Vicki Sue. 1976. Turn the Beat Around. RCA Victor: Seven-inch single. Salsoul Orchestra. 1976. Salsoul 3001. Seven-inch single. Salsoul Records. T-Connection. 1977. Do What You Wanna Do. Twelve-inch single. TK Disco. Teaspoon & the Waves. 1977. Oh Yeh Soweto. From the album Teaspoon & the Waves. Soul Jazz Pop. Third World. 1984. Now That We’ve Found Love. Twelve-inch single. Island Records. Thomas, Pat. 1980. Yesu San Bra: Disco Hi-Life. From the album 1980. OIR/Pan African Records. Tony Allen and the Africa 70. 1977. Afro-Disco Beat. Phonogram. War. 1972. City, Country, City. From the album The World Is a Ghetto. United Artists. Ward, Anita. 1979. Ring My Bell. Twelve-inch single. TK Disco. Young, Karen. 1978. Hot Shot. West End Records.

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Filmography Badham, John (Dir.). Saturday Night Fever. Paramount Pictures, 1977. Davis, Tamra (Dir.). Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. Arthouse Films, 2010.

Index1

A ABBA, 116 Adorno, Theodor, 77, 87, 287 Adriatic sea coast, 199 riviera, 20, 76–80 Afrobeat, 254, 269, 279, 328 Afrocentrism, 23, 254, 255 Afrofunk, 254 Afrofuturism, 288, 289, 292 Agha, Salma, 135, 136 Al Mounzer, Ihsan, 237, 239–241, 243, 246n1, 246n6 Albert One, 84 Aletti, Vince, 283, 307, 324, 326, 329, 330 Alfa (label), 118, 119 Appaiah, Biddu, 132–134, 137–139, 284 Archambault, Gilles, 38

Archives, 5, 15–17, 22, 24, 42, 178, 179, 195, 200, 214, 229, 230, 232–234, 246n4, 285, 331, 332 archival practices, 17, 24 Atopia, 24, 297 atopic future, 282, 285 Autonomia, 90, 304, 319 Avex, 115, 118, 120, 121 B Baalbeck Festival, 225 Baalbeck Studio, 235, 243, 246n5 Baby Records, 83, 84 Baia degli Angeli, 83 Bailes Black, 67 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 295 Baldelli, Daniele, 83 Bambaataa, Afrika, 312

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Pitrolo, M. Zubak (eds.), Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5

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INDEX

Bamboo Shoot Tribe (Takenokozoku), 116, 117, 119 Barry, Claudja, 43 Barthes, Roland, 80 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 321, 322 Batakoto, 266 Beachcomber, 224, 262, 265 Bee Gees, 207, 254, 268, 290 Being (label), 115, 121, 200 Benedict, Vijay, 130 Benjamin, Walter, 89 Benson, Tony, 265, 266 Berlusconi, Silvio, 78, 95n3 Big in Japan, 20, 103 Blo, 257, 258, 329 Bloch, Ernst, 282, 285, 286, 295, 296, 298, 298n3 Bon dance, 101, 111 Boney M, 24, 101, 116, 138, 139, 181, 204, 205, 207, 209, 241, 268, 282, 289, 290, 292, 296 Brazil, 19, 20, 51–70, 330 Brightman, Sarah, 162, 292, 294 Brown, Miguel, 43 Bubble gum’ music, 176 Burman, R. D., 135 C Č olić, Zdravko, 208, 210 Caban Bamboo, 265 Canada, 31, 32, 35, 40–42 Candy pop, 115–121 Casablanca, 205 CBGB, 309, 310, 317 Chaimovicz, Marc Camille, 10 Chakachas, 255 Chakraborty, Mithun, 21, 127–130, 135–137, 140–147 China, 21, 151–166, 166n2 Cice-Mace, 200, 201, 210 City pop, 114, 115, 122

Coca-Cola, 184, 189, 199 colonial gestures, 274 Communism, 198, 217 Conde, Alex, 267 Cortez, Diego, 310, 317 Cosmopolitanism aesthetic cosmopolitanism, 4, 15 cosmopolitan, 52, 54, 57, 61, 68, 153, 164, 173, 253 Counterculture, 24, 69, 105, 216, 303–332 Cover, 23, 34, 67, 84, 101, 108–112, 115, 118, 120, 138, 161, 163, 179–181, 205, 206, 229, 235, 236, 244, 322, 327, 328 cover versions, 21, 84, 111, 179, 181, 183, 191n7 Crate digging, 5, 12, 14, 16 crate diggers, 12, 13, 15, 22, 182, 203, 214 Cucuzella, George, 39 Czechoslovakia, 2, 22, 173–191, 191n3 D Đogani, Hamit, 213, 217 Dancin’ Days discotheques, 19, 51, 56–59, 61, 71 soap opera, 19, 52, 62–63 soundtrack, 63–65 David, Michal, 184, 185 Decolonisation, 3 Deleuze, Gilles, 315 Derrida, Jacques, 17 Deserio, Pat, 40 Dibango, Manu, 15, 39, 254, 324, 325, 327, 331 Dick, Nicolas El, 239, 246n5 Disco 1234, 42 Disco ball, see Mirrorball Discobolos, 178, 179, 181, 182

 INDEX 

Discogs, 16, 17, 85, 95n4, 204, 327 Discomagic, 85, 86 Disco polo, 89, 96n5 Diting, 152 Douglas, Carl, 111, 133, 330 Dr. Dragon & The Oriental Express, 107 Dzi Croquettes, 59 Džuboks, 208, 209 E Eastern Gang, 114 EBM, 84 Eco, Umberto, 80, 94 Economidas, Peter, 261 EDM, 282 Emori, Ai, 105, 106, 108–112, 114 Empire Records, 40 Estrada, 199, 202, 208–210, 216 Eurodisco/Euro disco/Eurodance/ Europop/Eurobeat, 20, 84, 89, 103, 106, 115–122, 137, 208, 228, 236, 244, 268, 284, 325 Exercise Disco/Fitness Disco, 157 F Face Record, 161 Fairouz, 225–227, 230, 232, 240, 246 FESTAC, 253–255 Florence, 83 Folk, 21, 82, 89, 103, 107, 112, 131, 163, 264 Foucault, Michel, 5–11, 76, 79, 282, 295, 315, 316 Frenéticas, 19, 54, 58–60, 62, 64, 65, 71n7, 71n8 Funk, 18, 23, 55, 57, 63, 65–67, 69, 70n3, 70n5, 71n10, 72n12, 106, 114, 115, 130, 131, 204, 207, 209, 210, 216, 239, 240, 288, 291, 292, 309, 311, 327

341

Funk Warehouse, 267 Funkytown, 19, 29–45 G Gazebo, 85, 86, 88, 92, 93 George, Nelson, 304, 306, 321 Gilbert, Jeremy, 319 Globalisation, 9, 21, 127–148, 153 Globo Television, 60 Godard, Jean-Luc, 199 Goody Music, 81 Gospel, 309 Gott, Karel, 180, 182 Gowon, Yakuba, 252 H Hanna, Toni, 235 Harajuku, 116, 117 Hardt, Michael, 304, 319 Harvey, David, 6, 7, 304, 313, 314, 318, 319 Hassan, Nazia, 133, 134, 137–139, 147, 148 Hayashi, Tetsuji, 114 Hebdige, Dick, 95, 202 Hedong (Hollywood East Star Trax), 161 Herc, DJ Kool, 311, 312, 324 Heterotopia, 1–25, 76, 79, 282, 295, 297, 317 Hi-NRG, 42, 43, 101, 117, 118, 120 Hip hop, 12–14, 16, 24, 66, 101–103, 118, 148, 278, 298n1, 303–312, 314, 318, 320 HIV/AIDS, 306, 321, 323 Hladnik, Boštjan, 206 HMV (The Gramophone Company of India), 103, 138, 139 Hobeika, Rafic, 23, 235, 236, 246n1 Hodge, Jim, 9, 10

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INDEX

Hollis, Phil, 270 Honda, Satoshi ‘Hustle, 107–116, 119 Hope, 11, 12, 18, 24, 25, 54, 70, 79, 114, 178, 206, 232, 282–287, 290–292, 294–296, 298, 332 Horkheimer, Max, 77, 87 House, 19, 84, 118, 205, 234, 244, 279, 332 Hurrah, 311 Hyperlocal/hyperlocalism, 12, 95n3 I India, 2, 21, 127, 128, 130, 132–135, 137–142, 144, 146–148, 284 Industrial (mode of production), 86 Italo, Italo disco, 20, 24, 41, 43, 75–95, 117, 119, 120, 161, 213, 268, 270, 293, 299n6 Italy, 20, 63, 75, 76, 78–82, 85, 90, 96n5, 116, 184, 239, 268, 319 J Jackson, Michael, 129, 131, 136, 140, 258, 331 Jacqueline, 23, 235, 236, 246n1 Jamal, Mohammad, 237, 246n6 Jameson, Frederic, 4 Japan, 20, 101–110, 112–117, 119–122, 123n3, 123n4, 123n5 Japan Victor record company (JVC), 107–110, 115 Jones, Grace, 70n5, 207, 216, 282, 291 Jovem Guarda, 65–67 Jugoton, 205 K Kerliu, Arian, 209 Kesovija, Tereza, 208 ‘Killer Joe’ Piro, 35

Kota, Tera, 277 Kuti, Fela, 255, 325, 327–330 L La Bionda, 81, 82, 93, 96n6, 241 Lagos, 9, 253, 261, 262, 266, 267, 328 Lahiri, Bappi, 21, 127, 129–131, 135–137, 139, 141, 146, 148n2 Latin disco, 331 Latin music, 71n8, 325, 329, 330 Lawrence, Tim, 2, 15, 17, 23–25, 36, 42, 45, 89, 90, 104, 158, 190, 197, 198, 292, 304–312, 317, 318, 320, 322, 324, 325 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 323, 324 Lear, Amanda, 216, 291 Lebanon, 2, 23, 223–235, 237–245, 246n3 Levine, Ian, 43 LGBTQ+, 264, 290 Licorne, La, 31–34, 37, 38 Lime, 43 Limelight, 29, 30, 33, 38, 39, 42, 45 Lipovača, Sead, 209 Loft, the, 307, 308, 311, 318, 324–326 Lokice, 210 Lombardoni, Severo, 85, 86 Lotringer, Sylvère, 24, 315–317, 320, 322, 323 Luković, Petar, 208–210 M Maalouf, Robert, 239, 246n5 Magnuson, Ann, 317, 322 Maia, Tim, 52, 63, 65, 67, 72n12 Makzoumeh, George, 229–231, 233, 234 Malavasi, Mauro, 81

 INDEX 

Mancuso, David, 17, 287, 307, 308, 324–326, 330 Mandić, Oliver, 211 Manuwa, Ricky, 267 Margino, 270 Marković, Goran, 210 Marx, Karl, 87, 199 Max’s Kansas City, 309 Mazierska, Ewa, 3, 5, 203 Mecano (club), 224 Meco, 282, 293, 294 Melody Maker, 202 Mengshi (Master Mix), 161 Mikulski, Bernhard, 80 ̵ Milošević, Sladana, 210 Mirrorball, 9, 10, 224 Mirzino jato, 205, 209, 216 Mitrev, Kire, 200, 201 Montreal, 19, 29–45, 246n5 Moroder, Giorgo, 204, 282, 284, 292, 293, 296, 297 Motta, Nelson, 19, 51, 54, 56–58, 60–63, 66–69, 70n1, 70n3, 71n8, 72n13, 72n14 Mousseau, Jean-Paul, 36 Mudd Club, 311, 317, 320, 330 Murray-Bruce, Ben, 271 Música popular brasileira (MPB), 55, 57, 62, 65, 70n4, 72n13 Mutant disco, 311, 314, 318, 330 N Naggiar, Freddy, 82–84, 86 Nakba, the, 225 NASA, 290 Negri, Antonio, 90, 304, 319, 320 Neoliberalism, 5, 9, 304, 323, 324 New Age, 53 New beat, 84 New Musical Express, 202 New soul, 107–109, 115

343

New wave, 22, 42, 84, 165, 176, 190, 196, 201–203, 212, 214, 236, 245, 257, 265 New York City (NYC), 9, 23, 24, 31, 36, 37, 39, 42, 44, 45, 54, 77, 252, 254, 256, 303, 305–313, 316, 319, 324, 329, 330 The New York City Discotheque (NYCD), 54–55, 68, 70n5, 71n8, 72n15, 212 Nigeria, 2, 23, 251–279, 328, 329 ‘Non-film’ music, 137–140, 146 O Oni, Femi, 265–267 Onyeabor, William, 257 Organisation, Recording, Music (ORM), 181, 182 Osibisa, 215, 258, 325, 329, 330 Ouimet, Robert, 29 Oz, 42 P Paradise Garage, the, 81, 287, 311, 318, 326 Parapara, 119, 121 Parapluie, 40 Peking Opera Disco, 156 Pepel in Kri, 208 Perpall, Pierre, 43, 45 Peters, Chez, 261, 262 Petrović, Boban, 195, 209, 212 Petrus, Jacques Fred, 81, 83 Phonodisk, 257 Pidgin, 20, 75, 94, 96n5 Polet, 197, 212 Polysound Studio, 240 Postcolonial/postcolonial condition, 332 Postfordism, postfordist, 86, 304

344 

INDEX

Post-punk, 42, 84, 119 Psychedelia, psychedelic, 13, 57, 106, 228, 239, 240 Punk, 22, 24, 42, 84, 176, 190, 196, 197, 201, 202, 212–214, 216, 303–312, 314, 320 Q Qigong Disco, 155, 156 Queer, 10, 166, 308, 311, 314, 320, 321, 324, 325 R R&B, 105, 106, 306, 309 Race, 53, 59, 60, 65–69, 89, 283, 285, 315 Radio, 4, 5, 17, 22, 30, 39, 42, 54, 67, 85, 95n3, 109, 117, 132, 144, 176, 181, 182, 188, 199, 205, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233–235, 268, 271, 288, 309, 325, 326 Radio Lebanon, 225, 227 Raggi, Issam, 236 Rahbani, Assi and Mansour, 225 Rahbani, Elias, 226–228, 236, 240, 243–245 Rahbani, Gassan, 243, 244, 246n1 Rahbani, Marwan, 23, 237, 238 Rahbani, Ziad, 230, 243 Rap, 267, 303–312, 314, 321 Reagan, Ronald, 306, 313, 318, 321, 322 Reggae, 102, 118, 237, 244, 277–279 Regine’s, 40 Reissues culture, 15, 24, 274 labels, 17, 235, 274

Rio de Janeiro, 51, 54, 56, 57, 67, 72n13 Rock, 30, 42, 43, 56–58, 67, 69, 84, 101–105, 107, 112, 117, 131, 138, 141, 142, 151, 177, 178, 180, 196, 199, 201–203, 210, 215, 228, 239, 241–243, 245, 262, 265, 267, 288, 308, 309, 312, 325 Rock ‘n’ roll, 71n10, 117, 128, 141, 142, 197, 204, 213, 216, 288 Roppongi, 105, 106, 118 Roy B. Records, 270 Russell, Arthur, 318 S Sabah, 225, 227, 228, 235, 243 Salsoul records, 268 Sao Paulo, 5, 55, 56, 66, 72n13 Saturday Night Fever, 9, 115, 142, 204–207, 211, 223, 254, 287, 305, 310–311, 313, 326 Schlager, 23, 177 Science fiction, 281, 285, 287–291, 297 Self-management, 198, 214 Shinjuku, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 116, 118–120 Shonibare, Segun, 262, 265 Silver Convention, 113–115 Simjanović, Zoran, 209, 210 Simonetti, Claudio, 81 Sly & the Family Stone, 267 Sobota, Mirko, 211 Socialism late socialism, 22, 184, 186, 189, 195–217 state socialism, 285 Solar records, 268

 INDEX 

345

Sollo, Jake, 258 Soul, 12, 13, 55, 63, 65–67, 69, 70n5, 71n10, 72n12, 77, 81, 84, 87, 89, 106–110, 112–116, 158, 207, 262, 265 Space age, 282–286 space exploration, 283 Space disco, 24, 204, 281, 291–298, 299n6 Space music, 288–291 Spacthèque, Mousse, 38 Spaghetti dance, 81 Spaghetti western, 81 Square dancing, 157, 163, 165 Star Wars, 291, 293, 294 Step dance, 105, 111, 117 Studio 54, 64, 207, 211, 212, 282, 287, 295, 305, 310–313 Summer, Donna, 24, 30, 113, 115, 135, 205, 207, 209, 268, 284, 291, 292, 296

U Ukraden, Neda, 208 Utopia, 6–8, 10, 24, 76, 225, 281–298, 316

T Tabù Club, 83 Techno, 43, 103, 279, 282, 287, 299n6, 332 Terrorism, 20, 76, 78, 95n2 Three Degrees, The, 123n5 Tondelli, Pier Vittorio, 78 Toop, David, 4, 304, 306 Tower of Power Unlimited, 266 Travolta, John, 205, 206, 211, 260 Truxx, 41 Tsutsumi, Kyohei, 110, 112, 113, 123n4, 123n5 Turatti, Roberto, 84

Y Yugoslavia, 196, 198–200, 202–205, 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216 Yurchak, Alexei, 22, 186, 187, 214–216, 217n2

V Van McCoy, 109, 111, 204, 216, 269, 330 Village People, 101, 180, 191n7, 291 Vilović, Nenad, 209 Vocoder, 245, 290, 293, 298n5 Voix De L’Orient, 225, 226, 228, 229, 235, 237, 238, 240, 245 Vukojević, Branko, 208–210

W Whisky à Go-Go, 262 World Disco Dancing Championship, 213 World music, 4, 15, 284, 331

Z Zahr, Raja, 238, 246n1 Zgarka, Dominique, 39 Zhang, Qiang, 152, 157, 158, 163, 166, 166n3 Žižek, Slavoj, 214 Zukin, Sharon, 314