Carl Scott on Disco

Professor Carl Scott on What We Should Make of Disco

      Some quotes of interest from the latest entry in an excellent blog series written by Professor Carl Scott entitled: "Carl's Rock Song Book." This particular post (linked here and above) begins what I believe will be a series of posts on the pervasiveness of the disco form in all international dance-pop music for the last 40 years and what it means for us dancers.

(If you have yet to come across his song book, I suggest you follow the link above and check out the whole series):

"...[W]e first need to think about disco as a music, and to recognize that there are two distinct ways of speaking about it:
1) Classic 70s Disco.
2) Disco in the Broad Sense—the family of disco-esque Dance Musics that start from 70s disco and continue on into the far future.
In common speech, and in this essay, both of these get called “disco.”"

"[T]he first lesson: it is pointless to get all worked up about disco, about how bad it is, about how a bazillion ignorant people have “liked” Justin Beiber or T-ARA but hardly anyone knows about _________(fill in the blank). The fact is, some beautiful young person is probably learning to dance for the very first time to whatever disco tune it is you’re showering curses upon."

"[I]f we ask the question, “Who’s Afraid of Disco Music?” Geoffrey O’Brien, who in his day-job as editor of The Library of America really is a keeper of our literary heritage, has to sheepishly poke his hand up and say “I am.” And I think if we’re honest with ourselves, not a few of us will poke our hands up also. His fears are not just the concoction of feverishly creative writing, but are frighteningly plausible ones. They are fears akin to the “salutary ones” we find sometimes in Tocqueville:

When I come to imagine a democratic society of this kind, I immediately believe I feel myself in one of those low, dark, stifling places where enlightenment, brought from the outside, soon fades and is extinguished. It seems to me that a sudden weight is crushing me, and I drag myself in the midst of the darkness that surrounds me to find a way out… Democracy in America, II, 1.9, #16

To update his dark imaginary place all we need is a disco ball and some bone-rattling bass."

"Make no mistake, disco will be with us until the end of time, and depending on your theology of hell, certain forms of it may be eternal. From the moment Edison invented recording, various trends were preparing the way for it, and its full advent in the 70s and 80s was inevitable. Certain folks will always be figuring out that it can be made better, more like the R+B, soul, and funk it came out of, insofar as one brings live musicians thoroughly trained in Afro-American music into the “mix,” and into the “command booth,” so to speak. Various Dee-lites of that sort will always remain possible, and always ready to push back against robotic rhythms and canned sounds while winning over the dancers that have become used to them. One can hope that in our time, given the long dominance of pretty bad forms of disco, given the popularity of artists like Amy Winehouse and Adele,and  given a growing movement in favor of older recording and composing techniques, that a more serious push-back becomes possible, bringing us to the point where we might again be moved to call our dance music soul. Yes, the petering out of certain lines of musical apprenticeship do mean that certain elements Afro-American musical artistry may have been lost forever, but so long as we still have musicians, there is cause for hope."