Sympathy for the Drummer by Mike Edison

Sympathy for the Drummer by Mike Edison

Author:Mike Edison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Backbeat
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00


Never Mind the Sex Pistols, Here’s the Rolling Stones. Live 1978. (Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images)

EIGHT

RESPECTABLE

The great genius of disco music is that it is all about the heartbeat, steady and throbbing. It’s easy to relate to the rhythm—you are already living it.

Most disco songs are just slightly quicker than the average resting heartbeat of a moderately excited adult human, enough for a thrill, but without actually being threatening, like that demonic rock music. Listening to disco actually raised your pulse beat and gave you a cheap rush, but it didn’t kill you, either, which is why disco was so popular at bar mitzvahs as well as in actual discotheques: because it was the perfect tempo for dancing, doing drugs, and fucking all night long, but Grandma could do the Hustle with little chance of falling over dead.

The perfect disco tempo is like a brisk walk—say, the way people walk down the street in Brooklyn, New York, eating pizza, two slices at a time, as seen in the film Saturday Night Fever, which was as much a catalyst for the late 1970s mainstream disco boom as anything else.

I say mainstream because this was the introduction for a lot of people to disco culture—John Travolta and the Bee Gees and the film’s bestselling soundtrack album. It was fucking ubiquitous in 1977, there was no escaping it.

What a lot of people have forgotten is that disco had as much to do with fashion as it did with music, so no wonder they found themselves at cross purposes with the kind of rock fans whose idea of a good time was to see Molly Hatchet or the Outlaws or Foreigner or what was left of Black Sabbath in a hockey arena, where the popular fashion was a worn concert jersey and faded blue jeans. These were the people who brought the cherry bombs to the shows. They were animals! And not that their ranks were rife with philosophy majors, but they sure seemed hip to the transcendentalist ethos, Beware all enterprises that require new clothes.

And so the “Disco Sucks” movement, such as it was, blossomed like a bad case of eczema.

Much has been written about the whole blot, with a lot of earnest vitriol accusing white rock fans who couldn’t accept a challenge to their own monoculture of being homophobic and racist, and defended by same white dudes calling bullshit: they hated disco because they couldn’t find a white three-piece suit that fit their beer-bellied, Shmoo bodies, and, anyway, why all of a sudden did they have to give up the very essence of their identity as fun-loving lunks who loved guitar rock to worship a polyester calf? Most of the Midwestern, hard-rocking Bob Seger fans who hated disco weren’t sophisticated enough to know that disco even had Latino and gay and African-American roots. America is a big country, and out in suburbia you got the shopping-mall version.

No one I knew didn’t like the Village People because they were presumed to be gay, mostly everyone



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