I’ve been downloading a lot of disco today. I used to be one of those “disco sucks” kids, by the way. I remember very vividly being at some event or other with some friends in early 1992, chanting “four more weeks!” in ‘honor’ of President George the First, when some Republican turned around and said, “Hey, the last time the Democracts were in office, disco was in.” We started chanting “four more years!” post-haste. But my perception of disco changed when I realized A) how goddamn good so many disco songs are (“Stayin’ Alive,” “Keep It Comin’, Love,” freaking “I Feel Love”); B) Read Barry White’s summation of disco as music that made people feel beautiful. Well, damn if Barry isn’t right. This isn’t to say I like everything from the era: I can’t stand bar mitzvah classics like “I Will Survive” and “Let’s Dance the Last Dance”; some stuff, like the Village People and the Weather Girls, is fun but too cheesy to take seriously. But I love the joy, the exuberance, the excess, the queerness, the freakiness, the funkiness, the beauty.
I’ve also been skewing very heavily towards 80s electric pop in recent months. In part this is a natural outgrowth of my longstanding obsessions with David Bowie and Gary Numan. It’s also tied into all the delightful electroclash records that I, as a twentysomething involved in the arts in NYC, have issued to me biweekly by the New York Trend Authority. And I guess the final link in the chain is the epochal Frankie Goes To Hollywood scene in Brian DePalma’s gorgeously sleazy Body Double (that’s right: a Frankie Goes To Hollywood scene). But mainly it’s related to something that I remember Moby saying years ago: Everyone thought that all that 80s music was so disposable and forgettable, yet listen to almost any of it and it’s amazing how well it holds up, the level of creativity and craft that went into it. It sure holds up a billion times better than the EZ-folk of the 70s, which I think was the comparable mass-popularity music. “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” “Automatic,” “Everything She Wants”…tremendous, one and all.