Sister Disco
Another Ottawa Citizen piece.
K.C and the Sunshine Band closing the Blues Festival!?
It actually makes sense, sort of.
“We were a rhythm and blues/pop band,” says Harry Casey (the “K.C.” of the Sunshine Band) about the roots of a band that was as big (the first band since the Beatles to score four #1 hits - Shake Your Booty, Boogie Shoes, Get Down Tonight, That’s the Way (I like it) - in one year) as you could get in the mid-1970s.
Fortunately – or unfortunately – K.C. and the Sunshine Band got swept into the disco wave that began in the mid-seventies. “There was a little resentment when it first started happening,” says Casey, “because we were really pre-disco. It was our sound that became what disco is today. I thought that when they renamed it they had once again slighted r&b as being something so popular. Even today they call it hip hop, but they won’t give r&b its due.”
But perhaps it’s disco that hasn’t received proper credit. Since the term was first used around 1973 (when it referred to music that was made for discotheques), disco has been slammed and ridiculed as a lame period in music history. For many, the term disco conjures memories of John Travolta strutting on the dance floor in his white suit and button down shirt from the film, Saturday Night Fever, or the shrill voices of the Bee Gees, or, worse still, Rick Dees’ novelty hit, Disco Duck. With its unsightly fashions, cheesy strobe lights, mirrored walls, and exclusive clubs, disco was viewed as a reflection of a crass new conservative and Narcissistic generation.
“Nonsense,” says Will Straw, Professor of Communications at McGill University. “Disco was, in a sense, what happens when city dwellers (blacks, Hispanics, gays) produce a culture which also appeals to white city dwellers, both middle class and working class (e.g., Saturday Night Fever.)”
If anything, disco and 1970s dance culture was an extension, not a rejection of the social movements of the 1960s. It was almost as though the new generation was saying, “look, enough talking, enough protests, let’s just shut up and dance.”
“To me the seventies was a celebration of what everybody picketed for in the 50s and 60s,” says Casey, “for peace, love, harmony etc… the seventies was a celebration of it all finally happening.”
“The late 1960s was all about the so-called rainbow alliance, where all of these groups could be more powerful if they came together and supported each other’s causes,” says Tim Lawrence, author of the acclaimed book, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979.
“By the early 1970s,” Lawrence continues, “these radical movements were largely in retreat, and my own sense is that the trajectory of these movements carried on, but in other forms. One of the most important of these was the dance floor, an underground and protected space where people could get on with their thing — express themselves — in relative privacy.”
In a sense, disco and dance culture did what rock, rallies, and protests couldn’t achieve. On that dance floor, race, class and sexual orientation vanished.
By the late 1970s, disco had become so popular that it became, as all things commercial invariably do, the target of ridicule and hostility. A Chicago DJ named Steve Dahl initiated the most infamous anti-disco stance. When the former rock station announced it was becoming a disco station, the Detroit DJ was livid and decided to do something about it. In 1979, Dahl asked listeners to bring their disco records to Chicago’s Comiskey Park (home of the Chicago White Sox) so that he could blow them up and end disco forever. As Dahl lead a chant of “disco sucks”, fans stormed the field and set fire to thousands of disco records. The event did not alone kill disco, but it certainly triggered its death knell.
Disco certainly wasn’t the first commercial craze to hit society, so why was there so much venom and hostility directed towards this seemingly utopian sub-culture? “In part,” says Lawrence, “the backlash was homophobic and racist and sexist — it was about white straight men who normally enjoyed occupying the centre stage of culture and politics feeling that they had been marginalized by a popular culture that was most obviously enjoyed by gay men, African Americans and women — so they wanted to seize back the centre ground.”
But it wasn’t just disco haters who turned on the genre. “DJ and dance aficionados also turned against disco,” adds Lawrence, “because the genre was “exploited” in the aftermath of Saturday Night Fever, when the major record companies jumped on the bandwagon and thought that anything they put out with a four-on-the-floor bass drum would sell records. A lot of it was simply awful music and it didn’t sell.”
These events played out during a testy time in the U.S. which was undergoing a economic recession. Disco provided people with easy outlet for deeper frustrations and fears. Before the decade was done, disco – and with K.C. and The Sunshine Band- put away its dancing shoes.
Disco became big again in the 1990s when a wave of 1970s nostalgia emerged. Casey, who had retired in the mid-1980s, came back just in time. Today, K.C. and the Sunshine Band are a popular touring group, but will anyone admit being a fan? Despite the passing years, disco seems toexist, like candy, as a guilty pleasure. Those who admit to getting down on occasion to “Boogie Man” (and I’m one of them) or “Stayin’ Alive” do so with the wink of an eye. On a cerebral level, we’re aware of how cheesy the lyrics are and how goofy the dance moves were, yet on a purely sensual level, we can’t help but shake some booty to the music. It just feels too damn good.
“Music in the present divided us,” says Straw. “Music from the past becomes everyone’s property, even if we hated it at the time. The surest way to get people dancing at a wedding is to play a popular 1970s disco song. So it’s mostly about how music ages, I think, overcoming polemics and taste war and becoming shared heritage. Disco is easily revivable now because it’s lost the faceless anonymity for which it was criticized in the 1970s.
For Harry Casey, the answer is simpler: “It was great music. You can’t deny it. The music picks you up and makes you feel good.”