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Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Turn the text and then the beat around..

A few hours of detailing the chapter on my theory of the seasonality of timeframes. Got a lot of useful comments on the concept of culture from Anke I had to fit in. My own philosophy checkpoint..
Rewriting is a bit frustrating, hours pass by and you still have the same text, only better written. After that I read a little about disco, which was, of course, the music of my youth, along with Glamrock (could write about that for pages on end.. the sillier the better, with Sweet and Mud). But, disco. Fascinating how this music could be so controversial in its time. But at a time when the ideal of a cultural melting pot was melting away and minorities searched for a separate identity (women’s lib, gay rights, black power, etc), disco rose above racial and cultural lines as the most democratic music ever.

For the first time, the audience was the hero: it was all about your behavior on the dance floor. And that gave blacks, gays, latinos and women all their moment of glory, if it was just for the night. Exactly that might also have started the counterattacks of the white suburban boys who detested disco (too feminine, too gay, too black: they were losing their ‘natural’ supremacy). A losing battle, though: disco temporally killed the macho rituals of seventies rock, with stadium crowds watching distant performers desperately trying to replicate the elaborate virtuosity of their studio performances on a high stage.
Instead it suddenly was ‘four to the floor’. Yippie. I was into disco from the moment I got my own radio-cassette recorder. Only later I discovered the signs before my time (Sly Stone, the repetitive beat and the handclaps of the great Law Of The Land by The Temptations). But I loved all Philly disco, Barry White, KC & Sunshineband, Eurodisco (yes, even Silver Convention) and was totally blown away when Donna Summer entered the arena with Love To Love You Baby and, a few years later, one of the best and most revolutionary songs of the seventies: I Feel Love. That beat was so amazing that ten years later it still inspired musicians in developing house music. But never mind. Did we dance? We moved to Funky Town, stepped into the Disco Inferno and it Made us Feel (Mighty Real). We haven’t stopped dancing yet.

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