Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Disco Lady Vs. Uncle Jam

"Disco Sucks". We're almost 30 years removed from the sorry summer of 1979, when such was the rallying cry of rockist neocons and crypto-bigots everywhere. We like to think we're past it, but in fact the disco/rock split informs how we hear just about everything we hear today, consciously or not. Soulja Boy, anyone? 16-year-old kid creates dance, sneaks in dirty reference, ruins hip-hop - did I miss something?

Stupid little dance tunes have been rock n' roll's bread and butter since Louis Jordan invented the shit. Cowering helpless at the feet of the Rock Godz (all that rollin' was just jive; no room for teenyboppers in the house of worship...) we tend to forget the original impulse that begat Messrs. Berry, Presley, Diddley, Penniman, Dylan, Lennon, McCartney was to get all the kiddies to dance - and in Eisenhower's 1950s dancing to a brand new beat was a subversive act indeed. Hate to break it to the Tull contingent, but if we didn't have 13-year olds twisting and shouting to those four longhairs with funny accents in 1964 we wouldn't have "Sgt. Pepper" and hence art-rock.

As everybody ought to know by now, "Pepper" along with Dylan's 1965-66 output was the bedrock upon which the towering edifice of Rock criticism was built - and the point at which meaty beaty big and bouncy "rock and roll" became static, self-serious, self-regarding "Rock". And it was sometime after this that all pop music which didn't aspire to the pomp and circumstance of "high art" became suspect in the minds of would-be revolutionaries and displaced jazzbos everywhere. Before the Beatles came along and Changed the World almost nobody took pop seriously, so maybe this was progress. But the good ol' boys at FM radio seemed to miss the point entirely as they set to the task of resegregating the airwaves long about 1968. By the outset of the 1970's, the deacons of industry had succeeded in dividing the pop audience into "Top 40" and "Rock" (read: white) and "R&B" (read: black) constituencies, and despite the advances of hip-hop and music video fragmentation continued apace for decades afterward.

-To be continued-

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