Disco Sucks
It's funny how era-specific nostalgia—the appreciation of a bygone, time-sensitive, societal motifs—is something that, itself, comes and goes. That is to say, it's possible to remember (in a nostalgic sort of way) a time when nostalgia of something even older was en vogue. Nostalgia about being nostalgic about something else.Let's use disco as an example of this.
Saturday Night Fever was 1977 and, for argument's sake, we'll use that as the zenith of the disco-saturated culture. Some people actually say that by the time it became that "mainstream" and the movie made it into something we'd always associate with the late 1970s, it was actually on the way out. In actuality, disco was happening earlier in the 1970s than you'd probably think and it lasted longer into the late 1970s than you also might think. But regardless of whether it was at it's height in 1977 or not, let's assume it was, on account of the fact that that's the perception most people have. Perception, ultimately, is what matters in issues of nostalgia.
I remember disco. I remember it first hand. I missed Woodstock, but I'm old enough for disco. "I was there." Sort of...
I say "sort of," because I wasn't partying at Studio 54. The pertinent number here is not 54, but 6. I was 6-years-old in 1977. I remember disco, I remember all the songs, and I certainly remember my father playing, "Bad Girls" by Donna Summer on the stereo, but I wasn't paying that much attention and had no appreciation of the cultural significance. I had a 6-year-olds perception, which means I had no great understanding of what it was all about.
What I understood much more—because it lasted way into the 1980s when I started hitting my "childhood prime" for soaking up youth cultural—was a concept that had as much to do with disco as anything else:
"Disco Sucks!"
Disco always had it's detractors, but by 1980 or 1981, certainly, the overwhelming popular opinion was "disco sucks." It wasn't even "disco's bad" or "disco's shit" or "disco's horrible," which all would have meant the same thing (albeit without the homophobic origins). It "sucked." "Disco Sucks" was the expression. And everybody who was 10 knew it!
When I 10, if anyone mentioned disco, I'd tell them, "Disco sucks!" I didn't really even fully understand what made a musical piece "disco," so this wasn't a legitimate statement about personal taste. I just knew that it was dreadfully uncool to like disco and you had to say it sucked. This is age 10, an age where homogeny rules. Fast forward a few years into teenage-dom and kids who, ironically, were pretty similar tried to pass themselves off as being "different from the crowd." But as a "tween," we didn't even want to be different. We just wanted to be like our peers, because we thought we, collectively, knew what was what. And our peers knew disco sucked.
In fact, there was only one time in my youthful life when someone I knew—a seventh grade peer—broke the mode and expressed a dislike for "rock" (that was what you were supposed to like), saying he, instead, liked disco. It was so strange and foreign I didn't even know how to respond. I think I just said, "Really????" And I, of course, thought silently to myself, "Disco sucks!"
Now, if we jump ahead to when I was in college in the very early 1990s. All of a sudden, late-1970s disco culture became kitschy, campy, and cool nostalgia. Not that any of us really got "into" disco, but people started appreciating it in a "this sucks so bad it's great" sort of way. Cheese is fun.
More importantly, people started enjoying it beyond just the fact that it was cheesy. We were a culture of 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds who:
a) after years of hearing about sock-hops and hippie love ins that we didn't have firsthand experience with, were finally were getting to an age where we were old enough to start having our own version of nostalgia
b) remembered hearing these songs on the radio and bopping around to them as 6-year-olds because we were too young and uncool to really know that they "sucked"
So, all of a sudden, it became cool to have a sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude towards disco, and it also became almost enjoyable to watch a crown of people bounce around the dance floor to a rousing rendition of "If I Can't Have You" by Yyvone Elliman or "I Never Knew Love Like This Before" by Stephanie Mills.
My wife (girlfriend, at the time) even bought a double-disc compilation CD from the "70s Preservation Society" called "Disco Fever" which included virtually all of those signature disco songs and it featured a cover with this really cheesy guy with a polyester leisure suit and gaudy necklace brushing his hair in anticipation of a night out of disco dancing. And you know what? It was sort of cool. It was fun. "Hey look at this guy. He rules!"But here's the thing. Like I stated in the opening lines of this blog, even nostalgia over things that have become "old hat" becomes, itself, "old hat." Once my wife got beyond the kitsch factor of hearing these songs again after not hearing them for many years, she suddenly realized that, enjoyable as they might be in small doses, they have a very limited shelf life. And the picture of the guy who is combing his hair? That's not so interesting anymore.
See, disco sucked and then sucky disco became cool again in a camp sort of way, but you know what I think is really lame? When people get off on disco nostalgia as if it hasn't already been "nostalgisized" over already.
Whenever one of those Saturday Night Fever songs plays at a wedding, there's always one guy out there who thinks he is funny by going out there and ironically hitting all the John Travolta poses. You know, all that shit with pointing your finger in the air. I apologize if this is you, one of my close, blog-reading friends, but, whoever is doing that, I have this message: Dude, you gotta stop that shit.
You see, it's not that Saturday Night Fever moves aren't funny. They are.
Moreover, it's not even that mimicking Saturday Night fever moves in an ironic sort of way isn't funny. It's friekin' hysterical! But it's also so 1991!
In other words, we've all seen it. The first time I saw someone do that in the early 1990s, I was on the floor. "Check it out, dude! I remember that movie, too! Ha ha, that's so funny! 'Disco sucks,' dude!"
But now it's just trite. We all know that trick. There's no "edge" to that kind of mockery anymore. Good mockery and camp-nostalgia has got to have edge.
posted by Steve @ 2:45 PM
3 Comments:
Extraopolating from all this, there will come a day when ALL the music of our lifetime will just be thought of as "20th century" or "21st century," and will seem old and out-of-date. Few people today, aside from classical-music afficianods, can differentiate between Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart, even though they probably seemed extremely different when they were contemporary.
We tend to see the distant musical past by much broader eras than the 10-year periods in which we view the more recent past. Back to the 1920s, we can break music down in our minds by decade, but before that, it becomes much less specific: "Rennaissance era," "Civil War era" and so forth.
Each of these eras probably encompassed a wide range of musical styles at the time, but for us, looking back, they each represent a single package. It has few instruments aside from a banjo, and it pertains to frontier or agricultural themes? "Old West folksong." It has a fife and a lute and follows a sprightly tune? "Medieval music."
But when it really WAS the Old West or Medieval periods, I'm sure people could name a laundry-list of subdivisions that are meaningless to us now. "I can't believe he's still writing fife diddies about the Battle of Vordoor! That's so 1260s! These days, the in-thing is heralding the triumphs of King Aravold and the Forest Maidens! He's so out of touch."
Some day, I'm sure, in the not-quite-so-distant future, '50s rock-and-roll, '60s British Invasion tunes, '70s disco, '70s war-protest songs, '80s New Wave tunes and so on will all be lumped under a single title describing our era. The main difference, of course, will be that the advent of recording technologies has made it possible to document all of it for posterity, so those interested in learning more about the nuances of each current-day music form will easily be able to.
It could be the fact that we're still living relatively close to the 90's, as well as currently in the, for lack of a better description, the "00's", but it really seems like era-distinguishing music and culture died with the 80's. I mean, rarely do you hear "The top 500 songs from the 90's" radio programs, and to be honest, the "I Love The 90's" VH1 specials don't have anything over their 80's counterparts, and to my knowledge there are absolutely NO 90's-centric clubs, displaying memorabilia from those bygone days. Maybe I just don't see it because in my mind nothing worth anything ever came out of the 90's, but I doubt we'll be seeing people dressing up in clothes they owned 12 years ago for Halloween, because I seriously doubt anyone would give a crap.
P.S. Some of you may have been cringing throughout that entire comment, wondering if I know I'm not supposed to put an apostrophe in the years (as in the 80's); the fact is... I do. However it just looks SO bad to me, I couldn't help but throw them in. So sue me.
Rich, Interesting thoughts. Although I'm inclined to beleive that while we probably lump things into huge categories like "Medieval Music" because of ignorance, you can't argue that things changed much more slowly pre-twentieth century. While there have been 10-jillion subcategories and sub-sub-categories in the last 40 years, I don't think there really were THAT many 100s of years ago because a) the lack of recording technology thing you mentioned and b) the fact that people weren't exposed to new things as readily because there was no mass communication devices.
So, while I could be wrong, I seem to think that the Beatles will continue to be recognized as different than whatever the heck is happening right now.
And Paul, I agree that the 90s sucked, but that could be a product of our ages and biases.
And, I also agree that NONE of the "I Loves" on VH-1 held a candle to the original one, which was "I Love the 80s" (or even "I Love the 80s Strikes Back".) And I'm a fan of the 70s as much or more than the 80s, but even I love the 1970s wasn't as good, in my opinion. That could be because the prime commentary guys like Mo Rocca and Micahel Ian Black and Hal Sparks are actually about our age, ie., prime 1980s kids. So they had insights and camp-level-observations on the kitch of the day that not only were the same as ours, but they were real and organic thoughts that you could only get from being there. As much as I consider myself a well-informed student of 1972, I was a baby at the time....and so was Mo Rocca.
Post a Comment
<< Home