Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (30 page)

At first blush, “The Hustle” is hardly the kind of record that you normally associate with a dance craze. After its great, almost mysterious intro, it devolves into the strangely rhythmless, inane, singsong, prim and prissy instrumental equivalent of Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight”—not exactly the fire and blood or blatant, unrepentant hucksterism that marks a great dance craze disc. But thanks to that infernal flute line boring into your skull with the savage ferocity that only elevator music can muster, “The Hustle” was inescapable and inevitable, the kind of record that crawls under your skin, subliminally taking root to the point where you find yourself whistling it while masturbating. It was the perfect record for the novocaine bliss of Nixon and Ford’s America: Brush years of stress and strife under an ornate carpet of strings and woodwinds, mollify the rage with a cheap come-on from a breathy bird, and placate the masses with tooth fairy promises and doe-eyed innocence.

On the week that “The Hustle” had fallen out of the top spot in the American charts, former Nixon speechwriter and
New York Times
op-ed columist William Safire hailed the hustle as a return to self-discipline and decorum on the dance floor after years of “frantic self-expression” and “personal isolation.”
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“Unlike their older brothers and sisters who took pride in a pair of dungarees, free-flowing, unkempt hair and ‘hang-loose’ dances, today’s young people value sleek clothes, fancy high-heeled shoes and a more stylized, structured form of dancing,” Safire’s
New York Times
colleague Dena Kleiman had announced a month earlier. “It’s no longer ‘anything goes’ but what looks good … Unlike the more vigorous, inner-directed dances of the 1960s in which contact between couples was to be avoided and shaking, jumping, and turning at whim was the mode, the hustle is a dance of posture, rigor, and coordination.”
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This wasn’t an instance of conservative commentators donning flares and open-necked Kiana shirts in an effort to jump on a passing bandwagon and look like they’re with it. No, they were hailing the hustle as the return of the purity of American culture, a homecoming of innocence and safety, as the reaffirmation of “standards.” “The political fact is that the absolute-freedom days of the dance are over,” Safire trumpeted. “When you are committed to considering what your partner will do next, and must signal your own intentions so that the ‘team’ of which you are a part can stay in step, then you have embraced not only a dance partner, but responsibility.”
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This wasn’t just rejoicing over the return of the repression and Victorian courtship rites of ballroom dancing and the reaffirmation of traditional gender roles where a man leads a woman around the dance floor, or even the triumph of “personal communication” over the ghastly and unseemly self-absorption of the freeform dancing that had been the rage since the twist and the filth and loose mores that characterized the ’60s. The hustle was the harbinger of a conservative revolution. “After a terpsichorean era of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation,” Safire asserted. “The geopolitician who fails to see this social phenomenon is out of touch with his time. As dancing requires instruction, genuine standards become the fashion; as eyes focus on and arms enfold a partner, responsibility and humanity come into vogue.”
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Seemingly, it wasn’t just Safire, with his conservative agenda and baggage, who was interpreting the hustle as a decisive break with the Age of Aquarius. “The ’60s was so solipsistic, so narcissistic: look at the way people dance!” a friend of journalist Andrew Kopkind exclaimed. “Disco is just as exhibitionist, but you create it with someone else, with another person on the dance floor. It’s a retreat from that scary chaos into patterns.”
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On the surface, the hustle seemed so regressive and sterile: the familiar old box steps of ballroom dancing, the man taking the lead, the well-groomed men in suits and the women in frilly dresses—there was something frightfully
Stepford Wives
about it all. Yet, the hustle’s origins were anything but anodyne. The word
hustle
(which comes from the Dutch word for “shake”) had long had currency in the underworld, where it was used as a term for describing the work of pickpocketers, scam artists, and prostitutes. The hustle was born in the Latino sections of the Bronx, where it was a vision of romance floating gracefully out of the squalor and decay of Fort Apache. It was men and women dressed to the nines, spending whatever they could afford in order to attain that one minute of ecstasy that dancing on the rubble could provide. “The first time I saw the Hustle was probably in 1972,” says Michael “Lucky Strike” Corral, who grew up on 181st Street in the Bronx and joined the Puerto Rican gang the Savage Skulls at the age of thirteen after connecting with them through pigeon flying.
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“I used to see them [the older members of the Savage Skulls] and the Javelins [a gang allied to the Skulls] dance on the rooftops … They started bringing radios to our coops while we were flying birds, so I got more into the music. And that’s how I got down [with the Skulls].”
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In order to become a full-fledged member of the gang, he had to run “the Apache line” (walk down the middle of two lines of ten people each who were throwing punches and elbows) and, finally, survive a game of Russian roulette (“losers” were unceremoniously dumped in abandoned buildings, where they would eventually be found by the police, who took them to be suicides). This probably wasn’t the return to civility and “standards” that William Safire had in mind.

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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According to Corral, in the early days, the biggest hustle record was Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.” Van McCoy somehow must have intuited this because, with its string fanfaronade, cooing vocals, and jazzy guitar licks, “The Hustle” is almost a carbon copy of White’s arrangements for “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” and Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme.” While the hustle started in the barrio in the early ’70s, eventually worked its way through the outer borough Latin clubs until it arrived at the Manhattan discotheques in early 1975, and then exploded internationally with McCoy’s “The Hustle,” its roots can be traced back to the
guaguancó,
a 4/4 rhythm that was developed in the late nineteenth century when European-style marching bands attempted to play the more syncopated
son
and
rumba
rhythms native to Cuba. When these rhythms made their way to the United States with waves of immigration from Puerto Rico and Cuba, they merged with jazz to create the cha-cha and the mambo. This meeting with jazz caused the music to be further harnessed by the 4/4, and at New York clubs like the Palladium, the Cheetah, and the Corso, the mambo developed into a slot dance, a standard format of ballroom dancing in which the action of the dance, especially the woman’s, is defined by an imaginary line drawn on the dance floor. As Latin music in New York mutated into salsa (a mixture of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and American elements), the tempo increased and the dance, too, changed. “What [the Savage Skulls] were dancing was a mixture of salsa, that street salsa mixed with the hustle type of thing,” Corral remembers. “It wasn’t like your typical ballroom stuff.” To all intents and purposes, the hustle is a slightly faster version of salsa with a few more flourishes. “The hustle was more competitive,” Corral explains. “You could do aerial moves, which in the salsa they don’t really do that. We would do these incredible aerial moves. The salsa is just a little bit more conservative. It’s similar, but it’s not as well put together with strategy and acrobatic stuff. We was doing a lot of acrobatic stuff.”
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Corral was part of the Hustle Kings, an informal dance troupe whose members tried to earn money by competing in every hustle contest they could possibly attend. “We used to go to all the clubs, and I’m talking
all
the clubs all over New York, like three clubs a night, even the gay clubs, the Ice Palace, Crisco Disco,” Corral reveals. “I used to have to pencil in a mustache lightly so I could get in [laughs]. I was young and I had a baby face.” With his gang background, he wasn’t the kind of guy you’d expect to be hanging around Manhattan’s queer discos wearing flashy, skintight clothes. “I remember myself and little Lourdes, who was my partner, and Eddie Vega [leader of the Hustle Kings and future choreographer who taught Patrick Swayze everything he knew in
Dirty Dancing
], we entered
Dance Fever
[a televised weekly dance contest] and, well, I was one of the winners of the $1,000, which was like a national thing, and Eddie won the $25,000, which was the first place,” Corral recalls. “I should try to get the footage of all that. The way we used to dress was incredible. I was wearing an electric blue type of body suit. It was just how you dressed.”
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By this time, the hustle had mutated into myriad different styles and substyles. There was the New York hustle, Latin hustle, L.A. hustle, Bay Area hustle, Continental hustle, West Coast hustle, tango hustle, rope hustle, American hustle, street hustle, sling hustle, etc. “The music had progressed a bit and it got a little faster,” Corral says. “Then it was Cerrone, ‘Love in “C” Minor’ type of thing.”
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The popularity of the king of disco soft porn suggests that the hustle’s return to touch dancing had absolutely nothing to do with civility and everything to do with why dancing is so central to youth culture to begin with. For white folks the ’60s were all about “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.” Unlike the dolly birds who danced in London’s Ad-Lib club in the mid-1960s without so much as a glance from the men, discogoers danced as if they had been coated in Spanish fly. The hustle marked the return of dancing as a surrogate for, or prelude to, sex. The sexual revolution may have happened during the ’60s, when chemists unleashed the birth control pill and LSD at the same time, but disco dancing was the clarion call of sexual liberation.

But it was more than just the sexual body that disco was concerned with. The dance floor is nothing if not communal, and this group body was a polymorphous, polyracial, polysexual mass affirming its bonds in a space beyond the reach of church, state, or family. At the discotheque, the rigid boundaries imposed by such institutions were thrown out with the careless disregard of someone tossing a spent popper bottle. In this, the experience of Michael Corral—a Savage Skull member who felt more comfortable in the miniature Sodom of Crisco Disco than in the more racially and socioeconomically homogeneous clubs of his neighborhood
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—was typical. As long as you strutted your stuff on the floor, disco was essentially democratic (once you got into the club, that is). Even that bible of the ’60s dream,
Rolling Stone,
declared that “Because it
is
so democratic—on the boards, the dancer is the ultimate star—disco is probably the most compelling, artful and popular dance movement in generations.”
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In a sense, in the discotheque the ’70s practiced what the ’60s preached: The communion offered by the dance floor was the embodiment of the vision of peace that the ’60s yearned for. The naïve utopianism may have been ditched, but the radically different attitudes to race, gender, and sexuality born in the ’60s remained and flourished most evidently on the disco dance floor. As Le Jardin DJ Steve D’Aquisto enthused to the
New York Post
about the club, “even Saturday night ‘is like a little Woodstock, all races and creeds becoming one.’”
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On the dance floor, the politics is one of the body, not of rhetoric—it’s an internalized politics, a politics of gesture, perhaps reminiscent of the stance of many of the hard-line Leftist groups of the early ’70s for whom even the most mundane daily activity was imbued with political significance. “Back in my hippie days, we talked about freedom and individuality, and it was all bullshit,” declares Chic’s Nile Rodgers. “The fact is, you could tell a hippie a mile away. We conformed to our nonconformity. As the celebratory phase of the struggle, disco really
was
about individuality. And the freakier, the better.”
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