i reviewed a donna summer show long about 1981 for the washington star. i remember saying something like this: 'the sex kitten stuff has distracted from what was there all along: the best soul singer of her generation.' now in the late 70s i went straight from grateful dead to ramones. the hippies and punks both coded as opposite of disco, though there were continuous overlaps as well. it was, in my imagination and that of a lot of others, authenticity as against artificiality, and sincere expression as against commercialized, pandering claptrap. i don't think i consciously had on board then the sexual-identity aspect of this distinction, which is not to say i wouldn't have said that disco was gay. also since then i have gotten very worried about the authentic/artificial distinction, in pop music and elsewhere: i got onto the post-modern suspicion at some point, and at some point it occurred to me that springsteen was as much enacting a gender role as was rupaul.
disco, like a lot of really straight-up pop, has aged well; it is unpretentious, for one thing. and in retrospect - as i suddenly saw at that donna summer show - it is more continuous with and central to the unfolding of african-american popular music than it seemed at the time. donna was framed in state-of-the-art production - not very stax - and actually had a pretty eclectic oeuvre (for example, the great 'hot stuff' sounds as much like foreigner as like gloria gaynor). but at the heart there was a churchy shouter: not that far from aretha, though more malleable. even if disco was a producer's studio form, donna put on a great live show. in the other direction, disco is as fundamental to hip hop as is funk, and herc and flash sampled nile rogers's 'good times' incessantly.
now however, i still gravitate towards an aesthetics of authenticity in pop music, even if i can't defend it. and in the culture wars of the 70s, i'd still go anti-disco every time. i have to say that the idea that hedonism is liberation is one i just can't gravitate towards: cocaine and promiscuity just aren't going to save you: demonstrably, i would say. so if you're nostalgic for gay bathouse culture of the late seventies, i'm just going to try to disguise my disgust at the whole thing. i still think the disco bands looked silly and that the production was too processed. i might still long for recognizable instruments, and not think that moroder's electronic tracks for 'i feel love' etc overall had the most positive influence.
but i do have a bunch of disco on my computer, and it did produce some insanely catchy and delightful music.
