Turn the Beat Around by Peter Shapiro

Author:Peter Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781466894129
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2015-06-24T02:59:09.482020+00:00

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DISCO AND THE “ME DECADE”

While Safire and Kopkind’s friends were praising disco for liberating society from the self-admiration of the ’60s, other commentators were bemoaning disco for its own brand of solipsism. “[T]he real thrust of disco culture,” Albert Goldman wrote, “is not toward love of another person but toward love of self—the principal object of desire in this age of closed-circuit, masturbatory vibrator sex. Outside the entrance to every discotheque should be erected a statue of the presiding deity: Narcissus.”14 As if to prove this, “the Mad Hatter [discotheque] in Tampa, Florida will offer the TV generation the ultimate audiovisual experience in the ‘I-want-to-be-in-pictures’ syndrome. It is installing video-dish systems that will record the action on the dance floor and then project it onto the walls of the disco in pictures sixteen feet wide and ten feet high. That way, the disco dancers can simultaneously watch—and star in—their own disco movie.”15 In his best seller The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Christopher Lasch wrote that after the turmoil of the 1960s, Americans retreated into the “purely personal.” “The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious,” he wrote. “People today hunger not for personal salvation but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.”18 Disco as shallow, self-centered quasi culture or as a regressive retreat back to safety from the anarchic free-for-all of the 1960s: Either way it looked like the death of politics, meaning and the Left.

Of course, on one hand the ’70s were all about “self-actualization,” “plugging in,” and Looking Out for #1—it was, as Tom Wolfe dubbed it, the “Me Decade.” When they found that it was easier to raise capital on the markets than it was to raze the Capitol, most of the ’60s radicals folded up their tents and dungarees in favor of BMWs and three-piece suits. However, as both Lasch and futurist Alvin Toffler noted, the distinction that separated people coming of age in the ’70s and after from previous generations was the lack of a sense of permanence and solidity brought on by postindustrialization and a feeling of severe rootlessness. The sense of time, too, had collapsed, where the past no longer informed the present. While this led to nostalgia (for the 1950s, disco’s fetishization of the 1930s and ’40s), this was also at the very root of disco’s liberationist impulse. As a form of trance, the most ritualistic aspects of disco culture viewed time as cyclical, unshackling it from Western teleology and returning to a pre-Christian notion of “salvation as liberation from time.”19

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