Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (39 page)

Autumn couldn’t come soon enough for most New Yorkers that year. It was one of the hottest summers on record: In the middle of July, it was over 100° for eight straight days. The Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional) continued its three-year-old terrorist campaign by exploding bombs in the Chrysler Building, the Manhattan offices of Gulf & Western and Mobil Oil, the American Bank Note Company, the New York headquarters of the FBI, a Madison Avenue building used by the Defense Department, and three Manhattan department stores. The city was further terrorized by David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” serial killer, who had murdered his tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth victims in June and July after several months of inactivity. And right in the middle of that July heatwave, on July 13, lightning struck an electrical transmission line in upstate New York, and by 9:35 p.m. the entire city was plunged into darkness. Unlike the blackout of November 1965 (or, indeed, that of August 2003) which saw quiet and orderly streets and a solidarity among complete strangers who helped each other out, looting and arson broke out all over the city within minutes of the 1977 power failure. By the time power was restored the next evening, there had been 1,037 fires, the city had suffered $300 million worth of damage, and the police had arrested more than three thousand people.
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The looters were variously described by commentators as “urban insect life,” “vultures,” and “a jackal pack.”
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Historian Herbert Gutman wrote an op-ed piece in
The New York Times
decrying such characterizations and comparing them to the way Jewish women had been described as “animals” and “beasts” during a meat riot in 1902.
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The reaction to Gutman’s article was just as fierce as the reaction to the looters themselves. Historian Joshua Freeman described the outpouring of hostility in the Letters to the Editor section of
The Times:
“Over and over, the letter writers proclaimed how different their impoverished forebearers had been from the current poor, how the 1902 rioters were engaged in legitimate protest, while the blackout looters ‘sought only selfish gain.’
A Times
editorial characterized the letters as raising ‘the “my grandfather” question: “My grandfather pushed a pushcart all over the Lower East Side to earn enough to feed and raise his family. He worked to make it. Why can’t
they?
”’ It left unaddressed the utter lack of empathy among the letter writers for New York’s poor, the meanness and self-satisfaction that pervaded their outrage at Gutman’s linkage of their ancestors with contemporary rioters in his effort to show that the animal metaphor always ‘separates the
behavior
of the discontented poor from the
conditions
that shape their discontent.’”
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New Yorkers may have lampooned the tax revolts of California and the born-again morality of the Bible Belt, but the failure of liberalism had instilled its own version of that mind-set in what was once liberalism’s capital city. “Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” had turned into “Round up the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses and get ’em off the streets—they’re stinking up the joint.” Even though it was never explicitly stated, the root of this shifting attitude was race: The looters were by and large black, the shopkeepers were mostly white. The dehumanized pack animals roared back by wallowing in the “go for yourself” greed and smoldering spite and projected it right back at white society.

If the dream of the 1960s was finally incinerated with the 1977 blackout, a new dream, a new set of values, a new way of seeing the world was born on that same day. Hip-hop had been slowly gaining popularity across the Bronx since Kool DJ Herc unwittingly created the aesthetic at his parties at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in 1973. Crews centered on a new breed of DJs like Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Grand Wizard Theodore, and DJ Breakout were proliferating throughout the borough. Two of these DJs, DJ Disco Wiz and DJ Casanova Fly (soon to become known as Grandmaster Caz), had brought their sound system to the park on 183rd Street and Valentine Avenue on July 13, 1977. Caz had just dropped the needle on DC LaRue’s “Indiscreet” (a disco record that appealed to him because of the long break highlighting the kick drum pattern, making it perfect to rap over) when two lights in the park blew out. “And then the streetlights started goin’ out one at a time, all the way up the block, like ‘poof, poof, poof, poof, poof,’” Caz told filmmaker Charlie Ahearn. “We looked at each other. I go, ‘Oh shit,’ ’cause we’re plugged into one of the streetlights, and I thought we blew out the whole street! The whole neighborhood went dark … People are like, ‘What’s happening?’ Then one person screams, ‘Blackout! Hit the stores!’… Everybody stole turntables and stuff. Every electronic store imaginable got hit for stuff. Every record store. Everything. That sprung a whole new set of DJs. It’s funny, ’cause I have a theory,” Wiz continues. “You know what? Before that blackout, you had maybe five legitimate crews of DJs. After the blackout, you had a DJ on every block … That blackout made a big spark in the hip-hop revolution.”
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While the nascent hip-hop nation was going for itself by any means necessary, disco’s revelers kept the party going by any means necessary and evoked a rather different “nation.” “The night of the blackout, people stayed over all night,” the Loft’s David Mancuso told journalist Vince Aletti. “We had candles and played radios and people were sleeping over, camping out. It was very peaceful, a little Woodstockish. The party still went on.”
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Disco may have traded the campfire sing-along of the ’60s counterculture for glitterballs and strobe lights, but underneath all the medallion-clad bravado and feathered airheadedness was a longing for community, a desire to belong. Disco may have had a hard gloss and an icy, metallic sheen, but it could still be warm and fuzzy when it needed to.

You could never say that about hip-hop. Hip-hop’s raison d’être was the “battle”—a ferocious display of one-upmanship among DJs, MCs, b-boys, and graffiti artists where each participant would try to come up with the most outlandish flourish, the most original stylization, or the most damning insult. Its fierce competitive nature—its echoes of Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef meeting face to face at the big gundown—was precisely why it appealed to kids left to fend for themselves in the lawlessness of the ghost towns of the Bronx. The outlaw vibe was reinforced by the only community that hip-hop seemed to recognize, the “posse”: a group of DJs, MCs, bodyguards, friends from the block, and hangers-on affiliated to one another by bonds of loyalty, honor, and money. Hip-hop’s only pleasure principle seemed to be the art of survival. The musicians who were (and are) celebrated were the ones left standing after the microphone wars and turntable crossfire. Listen to tapes of the early parties and it’s all shout-outs to people in the crowd, “All the Scorpios in the house, make some noise!”; “Everyone from the boogie-down Bronx, I wanna hear you scream!”—as if acknowledging one’s very existence was reason enough to have a party.

Disco, too, was “born to be alive.” Like hip-hop, it was originally a sort of naming ritual: the declaration of the existence, rights, and pleasures of a group of pariahs. Through their use of much the same techniques, disco and hip-hop were in many ways the flip side of the same coin: one keeping the
groove
going in order to foster a communitarian, celebratory spirit, the other splitting and chopping the
beat
to highlight the virtuosic abilities of its participants. Both were after a sense of empowerment: one by the force of numbers, the other by individual heroics. It’s little wonder, then, that at the very beginnings of hip-hop, it and disco were hard to separate: DC LaRue and disco obscurity “Pussy Footer” by Jackie Robinson at the park jams; according to legend, Afrika Bambaataa attended some of the Loft parties; Grandmaster Flash was an original member of the Record Pool; the Sugarhill Gang rapping over Chic’s “Good Times”; the bulk of the Sugarhill house band being made up of members of Wood, Brass & Steel, a jazz fusion group that had a disco hit with “Funkanova”; early rap star Kurtis Blow opening up for Chic on one of its tours and playing at the legendary disco club Paradise Garage shortly after his first single, “Christmas Rappin’,” was released.

Of course, both disco and hip-hop were originally figments of the DJs’ imaginations and fingertips: In the early days, it was the respective DJs’ taste that determined what was or wasn’t a disco or hip-hop record. Like all twins (it’s up to you which one sports the pencil mustache and wears the black leather jumpsuit à la Michael Knight’s evil twin in everyone’s favorite episode of
Knight Rider
), hip-hop and disco share the same DNA—the break, the short section of a record where most of the instrumentalists drop out to “give the drummer some.” The archetypal disco breaks are the ones on Titanic’s “Sultana” and Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl You Need a Change of Mind.” The Norwegian rock group’s “Sultana” is the blueprint for Eurodisco: cod-Latin percussion to connote summertime on a beach in Ibiza and an unchanging “groove” that resides in some strange netherworld between rock and funk where uptight librarians thrust and shake their hips in an unconvincing manner. Spacious and spacey, with congas twisting around Kendricks’s short vocal interjections like a reggae dub mix, the break on “Girl You Need a Change of Mind” was like an old-fashioned gospel breakdown, slowing the pace, giving the dancers or worshippers time to relax, put their hands in the air, whoop and shout hosannas to the DJ or the Lord before the main thrust of the record comes back in for a rousing finale. The hip-hop break was just the opposite: It was the most intense part of the record, the part that the dancers waited for to showcase their most devastating moves. As Danny Krivit, one of the few DJs who spun for both crowds in the ’70s and ’80s, says, “A lot of that [hip-hop] stuff was a lot livelier. If you played Titanic and Tribe [another early disco prototype] next to that, it came off very straight and disco. They really had a consistency and straightness to it, and the style of dancing didn’t lend itself to that, they didn’t explode on records like that. These other records that they focused on were a lot harder, and when you saw the style that they danced, you could tell right away that something like Titanic was too straightforward.”
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The hip-hop DJs were after a kind of low-end militancy, and the records they chose were full of drum tattoos, black holes of bass, scorched-earth screams, and searing guitars. The two archetypal hip-hop breaks were Jimmy Castor’s “It’s Just Begun,” in which a roiling bass line and insistent flanged guitars built a manic intensity that was brought to boiling point by the Latin percussion and scything guitar solo, and the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache,” which sounded like a drum phalanx marching on the bandits in a spaghetti western flick. It’s not just coincidence that most of the titles of the classic hip-hop breaks are imperatives (“Get Into Something,” “Listen to Me,” “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat”) or filled with warlike images (“Apache,” “Theme From S.W.A.T.”). Marking a break from the gospel-inspired soul continuum, hip-hop wasn’t turning the other cheek; it was staking a claim and asserting itself.

However ridiculous the imagery may have been, disco was fixated on a romantic vision of the good life—the syrupy strings and lush chorales were the aural equivalent of soft-focus boudoir photography. Hip-hop, on the other hand, was about the here and now and self-determination; there was no time to waste on romance. Just as the DJs didn’t bother with the niceties of buildup, tension, or contextualization and went straight for the climactic break beat, hip-hop culture couldn’t be bothered with foreplay either. Echoing Steve Dahl’s complaints about disco’s alleged superficiality, Grandmaster Flash derided the Trammps, Donna Summer, and the Bee Gees as “sterile music.”
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The sexual metaphor couldn’t have been more apt. While there was some class resentment in both disco critiques, the main focus of the “disco sucks” brigade and the hip-hop crews was disco’s questionable sexuality. In the mass consciousness, hip-hop began with the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 single “Rapper’s Delight,” which featured “Big Bank Hank” Jackson rapping, “She said, ‘I go by the name Lois Lane / And you can be my boyfriend, you surely can / Just let me quit my boyfriend called Superman’ / I said, ‘He’s a fairy I do suppose / Flying through the air in pantyhose / He may be very sexy or even cute / But he looks like a sucker in a blue and red suit … He can’t satisfy you with his little worm / But I can bust you out with my super sperm.’” It may have been fairly harmless, but this was only the beginning of literally hundreds of antigay rhymes in hip-hop, most of which are a lot less funny.

However, it would take hip-hop several more years before it would become a constant presence in the mainstream. Instead, disco’s hustle to the top of the charts was largely hogtied by hip-hop’s racial inverse, country music. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the American Top 40 was filled with ditties by Dolly Parton, Crystal Gayle, Kenny Rogers, the Oak Ridge Boys, Johnny Paycheck, Alabama, and Eddie Rabbitt. Perhaps the most significant of these hits was “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by the Charlie Daniels Band, which hit #3 in the summer of 1979. Hardly your archetypal country song about Mom and the good old days or crying in your beer because your woman left you, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” told the tale of Satan challenging a cocky good ol’ boy named Johnny to a fiddling duel. The devil was joined by a “band of demons” who played a pretty mean disco-funk vamp over the top of which Beelzebub improvised some evil
Psycho
-style string gashes. Johnny, on the other hand, played it strictly traditional, like you could hear on any Appalachian back porch. Despite the protests of millions of people who knew nothing about the eternal verities of old-timey string band music and thought that Johnny was cut by Mephistopheles, Johnny won the duel and saved his soul. While the record would never have crossed over to the pop charts without its disco touches, the implicit antidisco message of the song couldn’t have been clearer either. The South’s reaction to disco was perhaps most succinctly summed up by an album by Arizonan Western Swing group Chuck Wagon & the Wheels titled
Country Swings, Disco Sucks.