Disco is having another moment.
Two powerful documentary films, a definitive coffee table book, and a $14 million high-tech Las Vegas experience have arrived in recent months to celebrate the music that dominated the 1970s.
These works not only offer an admiring look at a genre often written off as unserious, they're refreshingly centered on queers, women, and people of color, the engine of disco's cultural juggernaut, rather than the Travolta-inspired straphangers who climbed aboard the love train long after it first got rolling.
"Saturday Night Fever" premiered in 1977. The O'Jays' #1 single — one of the first disco records to top the pop charts — was released a half decade earlier
The Bay Area Reporter recently spoke with some of the gay creatives behind these projects to explore why disco is back in the spotlight.
The sound of self-assertion
One reason disco has not been widely commemorated until now may be its lack of a formal, authoritative definition.
DJ Nicky Siano, who is featured in the recent three-part PBS documentary, "Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution" (streaming online and reviewed in July) and spun at the opening night party for "DiscoShow" on the Vegas strip, points to a four-on-the-floor beat as a defining characteristic.
Others suggest that swelling string sections or electronic synthesizer sounds are key ingredients.
But Frank DeCaro, author of "Disco: Music, Movies, and Mania Under the Mirror Ball" (Rizzoli), resisted sonic specifics altogether when asked how he'd define disco for someone born after its decade of omnipresence during a recent interview with the Bay Area Reporter.
"It's music of joy, empowerment, and diversity. And you can dance to it," DeCaro said.
Marc Saltarelli, director of the documentary "Studio One Forever" which reflects on two decades of American queer life through the story of a quintessential Los Angeles gay nightclub, was similarly unspecific in his reply to the same question.
"It's music that you can dance to that's about joy and freedom and being yourself."
While neither of these definitions offers a precise description of disco's sound, the fact that both incorporate the word "joy" begins to get at the music's core emotional resonance.
Joy, of course, is also common parlance in Kamala Harris' campaign for the presidency. And parallels between the social circumstances in which that campaign is taking place and those of the 1970s help make disco's resurgence make sense.
www.studiooneforever.com
Bringing in the outsiders
"Disco was about the outsiders," said Michael Wynne, the writer of "DiscoShow" in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter. "It was the gays, the Blacks, the Latinos, and single women newly on the pill who were the first to go to the discos in the 1970s. There was a political undercurrent to the original 1970s scene, a demand for individual liberties."
The immersive, unseated, 70-minute "DiscoShow" at 3535 Las Vegas Blvd. invites audiences to dance with an ethnically diverse group of largely queer characters as they come into their own to a soundtrack of Donna Summer, Chic, Thelma Houston, Amii Stewart and other disco stars.
The cast, choreographed by gay Tony-nominee Steven Hoggett, perform on moving platforms amidst the crowd and on a catwalk-like stage that surrounds a central illuminated dance floor.
Characters and audience members alike are shepherded through the proceedings by "RuPaul's Drag Race" champion Eureka O'Hara, who summons the spirit of Marcia P. Johnson and other drag queens who served on the frontlines of the gay rights movement, while connecting the dots to today's conservative drag-bashing.
"It's kind of amazing," said Wynne, "that we have all of this going on in a Las Vegas show."
www.DiscoShow.com
Backlash and forward motion
"Studio One Forever" director Saltarelli said that Disco Demolition Night — the 1979 dynamiting of dance music albums between games of a Chicago White Sox double-header that is touched on in both "DiscoShow," a previous documentary "The War on Disco," reviewed in October 2023, and Frank De Caro's book —was as much a statement of homophobia as it was a rejection of a musical genre.
"People started to claim that disco music was corrupting their children," he remembered.
Saltarelli also said changes made to "Can't Stop the Music," a 1980 feature film originally built around the disco group Village People, as part of an anti-gay backlash at the end of the disco era.
Felipe Rose, who played the group's Native American character, was a Studio One regular and appears in the documentary, as does Bruce Vilanch, the screenwriter of "Can't Stop the Music."
"Originally, that movie was supposed to be a story about how the Village People was formed," said Saltarelli. "But the homophobic backlash was happening and over about 10 rewrites it was sanitized and made more heterosexual."
As released, the film focuses on a romance between characters played by Valerie Perrine and Bruce Jenner.
Author DeCaro dishes details on "Can't Stop the Music" and other disco kitsch in his photo-packed book, which includes a simultaneously appalling and irresistible chapter on disco's infiltration of network TV.
"Buddy Ebsen learning to do the Hustle on 'Barnaby Jones' is a classic," he said.
While poking good natured fun at disco throughout the book, DeCaro considers himself a genuine fan and believes that both the sound and the ethos of the disco era is once again on the rise.
"I don't think you'd ever have a song like Lizzo's 'About Damn Time' without the entire canon of Chic," he said. "And there would be no Dua Lipa without Donna Summer. Yes, there was a dark period with 'Disco Sucks' and the Disco Demolition at the end of the 1970s, but in the end, I think disco won out.
"It really is empowering," he said. "For the queer community and women and people of color, it's the sound of exuberance and perseverance and a refusal to back down. Do you remember a disco song by McFadden and Whitehead called 'Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now'? Well here we are, almost 50 years later and it's still true. We're still at it, still pushing forward."
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