by Josh Davis

Ask anyone on the street—at least anyone younger than thirty—about what comes to mind when they think of the 1970s, and it’s pretty likely that disco will be one of the first things they say. Perhaps more than any other type of music, disco’s place in the public imagination is tied to a single decade. Whit Stillman’s film The Last Days of Disco (1998) shows the passing of the ‘70s as taking away disco’s ability to live—after all, the infamous “Disco Demolition” at Chicago’s Comisky Park took place in June 1979, and Studio 54 closed shortly thereafter in February of 1980. In Wes Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), disco provides the soundtrack for the fun and carefree ‘70s, but almost immediately as New Year’s 1980 rolls around and William Macy’s Little Bill blows his brains out after watching his wife being screwed by another man for the last time, Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” and Dirk Diggler’s “(You Got) The Touch” take over the musical duties. Disco definitely lost much of its popularity with the end of the decade of its birth, but in actuality, it was only disco’s life as a popular, commercially successful musical form that came to a temporary end. American club music of the ‘70s went underground in the first two years of the ‘80s and was unnoticed by most Americans, but looking back at the numerous forms it had assumed by the middle of the decade, disco was the musical genre that most influenced the development of music in the last quarter of the 20th century.

We should start off by agreeing on a working definition of disco. The Allmusic guide defines disco as a music that grew out of the soul and funk grooves of the early ‘70s while changing their formulas by valuing the beat over vocals and instrumentation, thereby giving way to a music that was made expressly for dancing at nightclubs. Disco had its stars, but it was more oriented toward producers who largely remained outside the limelight. Disco DJs pioneered the use of 12”, instead of 7”, singles, and they were also among the earliest to mix records and segue between tracks. Early disco tended to utilize heavy bass lines, smooth vocals and lush horns and strings, but by the end of the ‘70s, books like Disco Dancing Tonite pointed out its “hypnotic, almost computerized sound.”

A few disco producers had already begun to rely exclusively on computers to craft their sounds by the decade’s final years. In the liner notes to his 1977 album From Here to Eternity—regarded by some critics as the very first wholly electronic dance album—Giorgio Moroder audaciously bragged, “Only electronic keyboards were used on this recording.” Moroder’s own music (as opposed to what he produced for Donna Summer) did not find warm reception from the DJs at Studio 54, which was dominated by more mainstream artists like Chic. Instead, the more progressive and electronic disco was championed by DJs like the Paradise Garden’s Larry Levan in New York and Frankie Knuckles of the Warehouse in Chicago. Levan continued to spin large amounts of disco into his mixes at the Garage well into the mid-’80s. Knuckles’ sets at the Warehouse between 1978 and 1983 paved the way for house music to emerge by the mid-‘80s, and to this day, it’s the child of disco most reminiscent of its parent.

Much less known, however, is the debt that hip-hop owes to disco. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the influence funk had on hip hop. More than any other genre, funk has provided hip-hop producers with melodies and hooks for their beats, and most hip-hop fans know about the enormous role James Brown’s music had on the development of hip-hop. Many people can also remember hostilities between the more midtown, black middle-class disco set and the South Bronx, poorer black hip-hop set. Still, disco really gave hip hop a lot of steam early on as it provided it with it many of its techniques. Take DJing for example. Sure, the Jamaican-born Kool DJ Herc’s soundsystem set the standard for block parties in the South Bronx in the ‘70s. Many people forget, however, that Herc didn’t really mix songs, but as Tim Lawrence points out in Love Saves the Day, he instead “notoriously faded from one record to the next without lining up the beats.” Kurtis Blow himself remembers that DJ Hollywood of Club 371, one of New York’s top “mainstream disco” DJs in the mid-70s, was the first DJ ever to feature rhythmic rapping over his mixes. Hollywood may also have been the first DJ to use the crowd-response chants “throw your hands in the air” and “everybody scream.” Kurtis also recalls that the block party MCs weren’t the only ones rapping in the ‘70s, because the early days were like a “hip hop tug-o’war—the disco rappers versus the B-Boys.”

One needs to only look at the tracks the early hip hop recordings were sampling. The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” sampled Chic’s disco anthem “Good Times,” while the Funky Four Plus One used Cheryl Lyn’s “Got to Be Real” for their “Rappin and Rockin the House”; similarly, in the first few years of their recording careers, both Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash borrowed liberally from charting disco hits to construct their melodies. As David Toop explains in The Rap Attack, hip hop producers took their favorite B-sides, usually from disco records, and had a studio band replay the melodies in a simplified form with just bass, guitar and drums. And as late as 1983, the Fat Boys were still using their original name, the Disco 3.

Hip hop producers depended almost exclusively on mainstream disco, along with funk, until 1982. That June, Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force effectively rewrote the rules of hip hop by releasing “Planet Rock.” By taking the melody from the German experimental electronic group Kraftwerk’s “Transeurope Express” and fusing it with disco, producer Arthur Baker single-handedly gave birth to electro. Three months later, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released their electro, conscious rap classic “The Message.” Although the electro sound dominated hip hop for only about two years, it gave rise to a number of splinter genres that continued to flourish after the mid-‘80s. The most enduring of these styles was techno, whose mechanistic, post-industrial take on electro was pioneered by Juan Atkins of Detroit. Atkins began his recording career with Cybotron in 1982, and he later introduced his fledgling electronic dance style to Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. Together they made up the legendary trio of techno progenitors, the Belleville Three.

By 1984 another variation on electro, freestyle, had emerged in Miami, and to a lesser degree, in New York. South Florida producer Pretty Tony (Tony Butler) created club hits like Connie’s “Let the Music Play, while up in Brooklyn Full Force crafted monster jams like “I Wonder If I Take You Home” for Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. Meanwhile, Bobby Orlando produced Hi-NRG hits like The Filrts’ “Passion” and Roni Griffith’s “Desire,” as well as the Pet Shop Boys’ breakthrough hit “West End Girls.” Within a few years, freestyle had provided the inspiration for another South Florida dance music style, Miami bass, as 2 Live Crew released the genre’s generally acknowledged first hit, “Throw That D,” in 1986.

One of the more obvious, but also more commonly forgotten, forms of disco that came out in these years was the dance pop of a number of mainstream artists. At the high-water mark of the ’80s disco revival, the heirs of the quintessentially ‘70s sound ruled the airwaves in 1983 and 1984 by just adding more bass and synths to the previous decade’s club music. Ask anyone what type of music Madonna put out early on, and most people will tell you “’80s pop” or something like that, but the Material Girl herself came directly out of the disco scene. When she first moved to New York from Michigan, Madonna quickly joined the disco group Patrick Hernandez Revue, who had the hit “Born to Be Alive.” All of Madonna’s early singles, including “Holiday,” were basically synthed-up disco tracks, as was her self-titled debut LP, produced by dance stalwarts Mark Kamins and Jellybean Benitez. Although she basically abandoned this style for a more mainstream pop sound with her second album, Like a Virgin (1984) , Madonna still entrusted the legendary disco composer and Chic frontman Niles Rodgers with production duties for the LP.

So if you’ve managed to make it through this article all the way to the end, the one thing you should walk away with is the realization that disco did not die at the end of the ‘70s. Instead, disco just went underground for a couple of years until bursting back into the limelight in the forms of electro, freestyle and even pop in the mid-‘80s. If you’re interested in hearing some of this music, here are eleven recommendations of mine. Because so much of this stuff was singles-oriented and not even released on LP, a lot of these are compilations and greatest hits collections. I’m going to leave out the whole English synth-pop thing—New Order, Human League, etc. Even though those bands produced dance tracks, they were more inspired by rock, and there’s too much to write about them to fit in this article. Same goes for the decidedly non-dance artists on OHM’s The Early Gurus of Electronic Music (2000).

THE DAVIS LIST OF DISCO ESSENTIALS

KRAFTWERK—THE MIX (ELEKTRA 1991)
These guys probably don’t need much introduction, but even though many critics consider them the godfathers of electronic pop, it has to be pointed out that they didn’t make dance music. Sure, they definitely have some danceable tracks, but Kraftwerk just wasn’t making music for the dance floor. Still, they were a critical ingredient in what would later become electro. This hits collection covers its bases and is a good introduction.

GIORGIO—FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (CASABLANCA 1977)
Disco mastermind Giorgio Moroder, responsible for giving Donna Summer to the world, created this all-electronic dance album at the height of the disco craze (Saturday Night Fever came out the same year) when no one was ready to give up their strings and horns. Not as danceable as one might wish for, but still interesting and worth a listen, and Giorgio’s ‘stache is a sight to behold.

V/A—THE BEST DISCO IN TOWN (HIPPO 1993)
Hard-to-find comp shows the transition between the strings-based disco to the synth-based disco better than any other disc.

V/A—STREET JAMS: ELECTRIC FUNK, VOLUME 2 (RHINO 1992)
Newcleus, The Egyptian Lover, and even an early Ice-T round out this disc to make it an incredibly pleasing collection of hip hop infused electro tracks. Volume 1 is also worth checking out.

CYBOTRON—CLEAR (FANTASY 1983)
Originally issued as Enter, this album features all of Cybotron’s hits, including the title track, a monster jam that has appeared on almost every single Miami bass mix ever done.

BOBBY O—BEST OF BOBBY O (HOT 1991)
Straight up ‘80s Hi-NRG synth-disco. Along with his own stuff, Bobby Orland produced Roni Griffith and The Flirts. Borders on cheesy at times but has some great vocal dance tracks.

V/A—FREESTYLE’S GREATEST COLLECTION (SPG 1999)
Four-disc freestyle comp featuring tracks from all the biggies—Debbie Deb, Trinere, Stevie B, and Pretty Tony. Definitely worth it if you like the Miami sound.

V/A—DISCO (NOT DISCO) 2 (STRUT 2002)
OK, so the title of this disc is somewhat self-contradictory, but no doubt about it, this is disco, but of the more experimental, downtown/Lower East side variety. Laid Back’s “Whitehorse” and Alexander Robotnick’s “Problemes d’Amour” set it off right.

V/A—‘80S GROOVE SESSIONS (UNION SQUARE MUSIC 2002)
Though poppier and more R & B-flavored than most of the discs on this list, ‘80s Groove Sessions pulls together a diverse set of fresh-as-hell dance tracks, including D Train’s “You’re the One For Me” and In Deep’s “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.”

MADONNA—MADONNA (SIRE 1984)
This is disco. I promise. Maybe not “Borderline,” but if you don’t believe me, check out “Holiday” and less remembered tracks like “Think of Me” and “Everybody.” This is the real deal.

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