Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (18 page)

On the Jackson 5’s 1975 remake of the Supremes’ “Forever Came Today,” Motown stalwart Brian Holland took this technique one step further. Instead of the note merely repeating, the slurred note was now doubled in a different octave.
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While relentlessly robotic, the bass line on “Forever Came Today” also has a galloping quality—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding grimly forward toward Doom. This bass line is the backbone of nearly everything we now think of as disco: Diana Ross’s “Love Hangover,” Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” Village People’s “San Francisco (You’ve Got Me),” Donna Summer’s “Try Me, I Know We Can Make It” and, of course, the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing.” While some 60 to 70 percent of all disco records used some variation of this bass line, T-Connection’s 1977 hit, “Do What You Wanna Do,” is maybe its ultimate expression. During the main part of the song, bassist Kirkwood Coakley fleshes the riff out a bit with some slap runs, but during the breakdown the bass becomes dizzyingly hypnotic and incredibly precise. It’s then doubled by a keyboard riff that follows the blueprint to the letter. While the Bahamian T-Connection thought of itself as a funk band and not a disco band, this was effectively the first step in the Frankenstein creation of Hi-NRG, the ultimate automaton boogie that would attempt to sever disco’s connection with funk.

UTOPIA—ME GIORGIO

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.

—Oscar Wilde

And these ideas the writers are having about us using machines and becoming like machines—they must be making a joke. I know for sure that we are and maybe, as I think you say in English, we are having the last, longest laugh.

—Giorgio Moroder

About five months after T-Connection’s “Do What You Wanna Do” provided the basis for Hi-NRG’s shell, this barely nascent genre would receive its brains, bolts, and electric charge. With its dentist drill synths, perforator tom-toms, scalpel edits, and oscillator bass line (created with a digital delay), Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” seemingly had more to do with a hospital operating room than one of disco’s pleasure palaces. Nevertheless, it topped
Billboard
’s disco chart for three weeks and reached #6 and #9 on the the pop and R&B charts respectively in the summer of 1977. Synthesizer-based records were hardly shocking by 1977, but where records by Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Tonto’s Expanding Head Band had used Moogs and Arps to imagine the whooshing speed and gurgling weirdness of a possible future, and kitschy novelty records by Jean-Jacques Perrey and Hot Butter had poked fun at this brave new world, “I Feel Love” was probably the first record to consider what implications the machine would have on the human body.

Motion, escape, and fantasy had all been ascribed to the synthesizer before “I Feel Love,” but never corporeal pleasure or sexual gratification. With Summer’s mock-operatic fake-orgasm vocals set against an entirely synthesized background of syn-drums, stereo-panned percussion effects, and a Moog playing that galloping bass line from “Do What You Wanna Do,” “I Feel Love” was a masterpiece of mechanoeroticism. Set loose in this baco-foil hall of mirrors, Summer sings about the pleasures of the flesh as if she were disembodied, or at least lying back and thinking of Munich. The epitome of the cocaine chill and metal gloss (your teeth hurt after listening to it) of the ’70s, “I Feel Love” could have better encapsulated the decade’s obsession with the detachment of anonymous sex only if the record was sheathed in latex. On the other hand, though, never before had a record throbbed so tremulously, so basely, yet at the same time been so rapturous that there was almost a holy purity about it. Producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte surrounded Summer in a crystal and steel synth cathedral, and she responded by sounding far more like Aled Jones than any sexy soul vixen. Summer is frosty and distant, but she also has a beatific serenity that approaches the angelic.

“I Feel Love” was in many ways a perfect soul record. Its conflation of God and sex is surely as powerful and complex as anything by Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, or Al Green; it’s just that it’s not informed by the Baptist church but by something more akin to the Carmelite order. However, it was also the record that effectively set disco adrift from the soul continuum. The gospel tradition is almost a “faith to power,” if you will—do right by God and He will take you over—and this transferred over to soul. Summer’s was an ecstasy of surrender. While the Holy Rollers and Pentecostals often found themselves possessed by the spirit, it was only temporary. Summer, on the other hand, sounded like an Eastern mystic completely submitting her will to the glories she had just experienced.

Compare this to the third great electronic record of 1977 (after “I Feel Love” and Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express”), Parliament’s
Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome,
a comic book funk fantasy that pits Star Child (“the protector of the pleasure principle”) in a battle to the death with Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk. The album is densely populated with all manner of synth squiggles and, on “Flash Light,” a preposterously funky Moog bass line that was made by stacking notes on top of each other, creating a springy sound of profound depth. Star Child’s principal weapon in this battle in the “zone of zero funkativity” is the “Bop Gun,” which features the lyric, “Turn me loose, we shall overcome.” The reference to the civil rights struggle was unmissable: The “Bop Gun” was Parliament mastermind George Clinton’s metaphor for the life-affirming power of dancing in the face of the pleasure-denying, sexless Puritans and the charlatan “urge overkill” peddlers who ran America. In Clinton’s hands, the machine and gospel tradition not only marched hand in hand, but the two fused to become a weapon—anything but Summer’s submission. The album’s textures and scenario screamed “science fiction,” but the album was all about “realness”—dig that title!—where true black music struggled against joyless funk poseurs.

“I Feel Love,” conversely, relished its “unreality”; its denial of the human element meant that it was that much closer to the surrender, oblivion, nirvana that the song is about. Inevitably, the keepers of black music deemed it too robotic, too sterile, too unnatural; James Brown might have sung about being a sex machine, but actually embodying one was a step too far. Whether it was intentional or not, here was a record that challenged (if not directly confronted) almost every stereotype of blackness there was. Yes, Summer sounded thoroughly oversexed, but she was not the dirty blues mama or sensuous soul sista of old. Nor was she after Miles Davis’s “cool” or the poise of Jerry “The Iceman” Butler—this wasn’t detachment as mastery but something far more ethereal. The music may have throbbed and had a pulse like a racing heartbeat, but “I Feel Love” was almost devoid of the physicality so often attributed to black people. There was no athleticism, no bump and grind, no sweat, no blood.

Of course, as both a mongrel genre that was pieced together from disparate styles and impulses and the expression of an outlaw minority throwing off the shackles of repression that were forged in the immutable steel of Nature, disco was skeptical of the “certainties” of the material world. “I Feel Love” once and for all banished the naturalism ascribed to dance music. Pissing on the concept of biology from a great height, Moroder and Bellotte had the African-American Summer playing a Teutonic ice queen with a machine heart singing about biology’s most fundamental act while surrounded by the most synthetic textures ever heard on a record. With songs like this and those of Sylvester (and the entire Hi-NRG genre), disco fostered an identification with the machine that can be read as an attempt to free gay men from the tyranny that dismisses homosexuality as an aberration, as a freak of nature.

From the
Imaginary Landscapes
of John Cage through Walter/Wendy Carlos, Throbbing Gristle, Sylvester, and Patrick Cowley to the contemporary transgendered interventions of Terre Thaemlitz and Matmos’s digital reshaping of the world, electronic music has been used as a vehicle to express sexual transgression, as a way of transforming society. As the most visible aspect of this largely invisible history, disco used the fantastic sounds of the new machinery to imagine a brave new world of sexuality. The hypnotic, otherworldly quality of the timbres and the rigidly insistent mechanistic throbs of the Moog and Arp synthesizers used by disco producers like Moroder, Cowley, and Bobby O summed up an aesthetic that sought to upset the “natural” order of things. As the outgrowth of both electronic experimentation and James Brown’s rhythmic dictum, disco was also very much a search for perfection. The metronomes, synths, sequencers, and drum machines created a music of delicious absolutism—the aural parallel to gay culture’s eroticization of discipline and its sole focus on process rather than result (procreation). Disco is the ultimate cyborg music, the ultimate coupling of organism and machine. In this way disco is a parallel to academic Donna Haraway’s championing of the cyborg as a way to undermine the “biological-determinist ideology” that stands in violent opposition to both the women’s and gay rights movements. “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world,” Haraway writes. “It has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense … The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and peversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence … Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden.”

There is a ghost in disco’s cyborg machine, though: camp. “I Feel Love” was as camp as a pink poodle wandering onto the set of a Busby Berkeley musical. Never before, with the possible exception of Eartha Kitt, some of the French yé-yé girls, or the most over-the-top Dionne Warwick production, had a record so reveled in its own artifice. Summer swoons like the woman in Rossetti’s
Beata Beatrix
or Millais’s
The Crown of Love,
utterly rapt by some power greater than herself. Summer is hardly the epicene figure so venerated in the camp aesthetic, but her femininity is so exaggerated (as it was on the back cover of the
Love to Love You Baby
album, where she’s decked out in white Victorian/Southern belle finery, on a swing covered with pink flowers in a pastiche of Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s
The Swing
or Jeanette MacDonald sitting on the same swing being wooed by Nelson Eddy in
Naughty Marietta
) that her gender is dissolved into the sexless synths.

Although she supposedly learned to sing in church, Summer’s extreme stylization owes more to the Great White Way than to gospel’s “Milky White Way”—there’s a reason that she had to travel to Europe to make it on the
schlager
circuit. Disco’s naysayers criticize disco singers for having more in common with Broadway vocalists than with soul’s more “authentic” expressionists. With Summer they’ve got a point—her phrasing wasn’t all that different from Ethel Merman’s or Barbra Streisand’s—but this is the very reason she was crowned “the queen of disco.” The fact is, with one or two exceptions (1982’s “State of Independence,” where Quincy Jones’s
West Side Story
–style production suited her to a T, and 1983’s “She Works Hard for the Money,” in which the brittle synth stabs and guitar runs paralleled Summer’s eggshell vocals), Summer ain’t a good singer—listen to her version of “Could It Be Magic,” where she gets cut by both Barry Manilow and, umm, Take That. What kept Summer out of both the canon of camp and the soul pantheon was that none of her records (particularly “I Feel Love”) had the anguish, the torture, the wrestling match between guilt and desire that mark out the greatest divas.

However, with apologies to Loleatta Holloway and Grace Jones, disco wasn’t about divas; disco was producer’s music par excellence, and with Donna Summer disco found its ultimate blank canvas. As Summer told Anthony Haden-Guest, “That was Marilyn Monroe singing [‘Love to Love You Baby’], not me. I’m an actress. That’s why my songs are diverse.”
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Summer was an unknown singer from Boston, Massachusetts, who was in the Munich production of
Godspell
in 1973 when she met Giorgio Moroder. Their first record together, 1974’s “The Hostage,” was a big hit in both France and the Netherlands, but it had nothing to do with disco and sounded like something you might find on the
Kids from Fame
soundtrack. Moroder’s first attempt at disco was on his kung fu craze cash-in effort, Roberta Kelly’s “Kung Fu’s Back Again” in late 1974, but it was when he decided to imitate the Philly soul sound with that German backbeat you just can’t lose on, an answer record to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus,” that this pop hack was transformed into the prophet of dance floor automation.

In its own way, Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” is just as robotic as “I Feel Love.” Quite aside from the relentless dull thud of its machine-assisted drumbeat, there’s a distinctly pushbutton (pun not entirely intended) quality to Summer’s vocals. Meanwhile, those icy keyboard fills in the background are strangely reminiscent of the ghostly antisepticity of the Jupiter probe sequence of
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Moroder claims that Philly soul was his inspiration for the arrangement, but it sounds like a dead ringer for the Temptations’ “Masterpiece,” which is from the same album as (and features similar production to) “Law of the Land.”