Define Disco

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

go!

[Phillycat]

1. "Don't Leave Me This Way"--Thelma Houston.

The definition of disco.

[CanuckAmok]

2. Sorry, I can't. Defining Disco is Rick Dees' job.

n/t

[bullimiami]

3. kc and the sunshine band. (nt)

[veteran_for_peace]

4. Here you go

Do I Shoot Cats often?

[rot0r_head]

5. The Passion of the Emoticon

I think this sequence should do the trick:

:wtf: :beer: :think: :crazy: :bounce: :silly: :hangover:

In that order.

[Phillycat]

6. That's fucking great!

[mac56]

8. you forgot

:puke:

[skygazer]

7. Dead

And rightly so.

[WoodrowFan]

9. Stayin Alive, Stayin Alive

(does that funky hand thing Travolta did).


Gawd I miss my shiny shirts, platform shoes and gold chains... :(

[calico1]

10. Disco ---

A tragic period in the 70's during which people lost their sense of fashion, musical taste and good dancing abilities! :P

[tridim]

11. Sounds made by cokeheads, for cokeheads

[ClintonTyree]

12. Shit

n/t

[Politicub]

13. Ask this guy, he will know!

"Hey - Disco Stu doesn't advertise"

[HamdenRice]

14. Unless you were in New York City, summer 1976, you probably don't know...

Because disco was both a kind of music, a particular dance and an overall style that was pretty much confined to "The City". Contrary to what most of you probably think you know about disco, it never really travelled outside of New York City and its environs, although some migrants took it to a lesser extent, to Boston and Philly. Everyone else in the country perhaps heard the music and saw Saturday Night Fever, but had narry a clue about what was really going on. That movie barely has any scenes showing the dance that all the real disco fever fanatics were actually doing in clubs like those portrayed in the movie.

Disco was the melding of two very specific cultures in New York -- Black and Puerto Rican -- "Boriqua/Moreno." Disco begins with the dance that was peculiar to it -- the hustle. Very, very few people outside New York did this amazingly difficult and complex dance. We New Yorkers always thought that people outside the City, dancing to disco and not doing the hustle, looked ridiculous. Why would you listen to this music, if you can't do the dance? we thought.

If you look at someone doing the hustle and draw a line straight down the person's body from his head to his feet, then the left side of his body (right side of her body) was doing the Latin Mambo/Salsa; the right side of his body (left side of her body) was doing the African American jitterbug. The turns and moves were a combination of mambo and jitterbug.

Because disco MUSIC was exactingly a DANCE music, and a partner dance music at that, like it's African American and Latin cousins -- big band jazz of the 1940s and Mambo of the 1950s and 1960s and Salsa of the 1970s to today -- it emphasized an extremely steady and predictable beat. This made it sound boring as a listening music. But what made people love it so much was that it was the DANCERS who improvised, both in moves and rythm, not the musicians. It was a form of expression that gave ordinary people a lot of freedom to express themselves artistically, with a steady, workmanlike musical background. It was extreme improvisation and extemporation in dance against a steady beat in the music.

Unlike every other kind of popular music since the beginning of rock and roll of the 1950s EXCEPT jitterbug, Mambo and Salsa, Disco was a music of big, big bands -- rythm sections of piano, electric bass guitar and drums, with latin congas, timbales and bongos; brass section of trumpets, trumbones and saxes; and for the really outre bands, strings thrown in. Crown Heights Affair, the Tramps, Salsoul Orchestra -- bands mixed of Black and Puerto Rican musicians named for New York (especially Brooklyn and Harlem) neighborhoods that no one outside of New York ever heard or heard of.

To match this staggering amount of instrumental sound, the big New York disco bands had to find real belters -- hence the rise of the diva lead singers, most of whom never even got credits on the albums. The alternative to divas was men with voices that had been trained to reach the back of big NYC or Phlly black churches and hence could compete with those big accompanying orchestras.

Disco was spectacle -- because of the size of the big bands, band masters brought back the flash and elegance of the big mambo bands, but of course in 1970s polyester. This inspired the dancers to throw off their torn 1960s jeans, and dress up, just like the Mambo and Salsa fanatics and jitterbuggers.

Disco drew from soul, Mambo, jitterbug, jazz and what was called the Philadelphia sound of the late 1960s early 1970s -- and didn't die, but morphed into the neo-soul and eventually hip hop.

But disco perhaps lives on most in certain kinds of latin music -- I'm thinking the gospel style vocals of "La India" sung in Spanish over a Mambo/Salsa beat, or Tito Nieves singing in English "I Like it Like That" over a Salsa orchestra, or the smooth salsa of the recent dance classic with the refrain, "Boriqua Moreno."

[Susang]

16. You're about 25% right

But disco did not start in New York and you certainly did not have to live there to know what it was. Particularly considering it's roots. Here's an excerpt from an interesting article I think you might enjoy:

--Disco, such a common word today, but its origins actually started in the Big Band era with the radio DJ's (disc-jockey). The Disc-Jockey would be the one who made the announcements and played the 33 1/2 LP and 45 rpm records (a flat 6" or 12" Disc with recorded music). The DJ's would eventually have their own TV, Radio and Movie shows such as DJ's - 'Dick Clark and Allan Freed'.

-- This was to eventually get the "DJ's" into the nightclubs and start the disco trend (using records/discs rather than live bands). It was much cheaper for the club owners than hiring the bands and the music was much more varied and up-to-date. The first Disco club was the Peppermint Lounge in Paris, France which opened in the 1950's. This would open the door to other establishments over time. The first Disco in the USA was the "Whiskey-A-Go-Go" on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood (now named The Whiskey).

-- By the 1960's a new dance fad had started named the "Twist" and the Peppermint Lounge in NYC was to become famous, this started many night clubs dropping the bands and hiring a Disc-Jockey. Playboy had started a sexual revolution which was not yet realized and the 'Pill' was gaining momentum. Many of these clubs would follow the whiskey and Peppermint Lounge with some adding a touch of burlesque such as the topless Batman-A-Go-Go in Los Angeles whose dancers would dance in golden cages. Others would have male and/or female erotic dancers dancing on pedestal stages, in cages etc., sometimes scantly clothed, sometimes not. One of the original and popular Los Angeles DJ's of the time was Kenny Wetzel who talked the owner of the Staircase nightclub in Downey, California to hire him as a DJ, He became a major success till he retired in 1998.

-- In the Late 1960's, the disco dance craze was not really apparent yet. Some Cuban dancers in Florida where dancing a form of salsa and swing to the experimental disco sounds in the late 1960's. About 1968 a new type of electronic music (synthesizers) was making an impact and a new music was being born. The Cubans and the new music formed to create disco music ... a kind of hard hitting, thumping continuous beat that could be mixed from one song to another without stopping the music. By 1970, these couples would start doing what was finally tagged as 'Disco Swing', the public would later become confused and call it the Hustle (Van McCoy), which was actually a line dance, however the name stuck for the better. The discos were now getting high tech and the money was being invested in fancier nightclubs. The sexually free public was now comfortable with being a Playboy/girl as well the 'Pill' being a normal thing and was ready to let loose.

More at: http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3disco.htm

[HamdenRice]

19. NO no no -- now repeat after me...

Whoever wrote this does not know what they are talking about. This article is confusing the phenomenon of the "discoteque", which was a mostly white craze of having clubs use records and risque dancers, which was sometimes shortened to "the disco", a noun referring to a kind of club, and disco music and culture, which was pretty much unique to the east coast.

The writer is laughably wrong about the hustle. Whoever wrote this is a fan of "swing dance" or "disco swing dance" which is a ludicrous partner dance for people WHO CAN'T DANCE, and he is trying to confuse that with the hustle, which is a very, very, very difficult dance based on the mambo and jitterbug.

The hustle, a line dance? Is he crazy? The line dance of that era was called the bus stop, and in New York it was also very, very difficult unlike the silly electric slide that embarrases people all over the country at weddings.

There is also a racial/ethnic component to this. Disco innovation in the early 1970s was coming exclusively from New York and Philly in Black and Hispanic communities and like so many other cultural trends coming from the inner city, was coopted by the broader community. But very, very few people outside these neighborhoods could learn, let alone master, the hustle, so they began marketing "swing" so the music could be marketed elsewhere.

But calling that disco is like calling Ricki Martin's "La Vida Loca" salsa -- it's just not what it is.

[tsakshaug]

15. 4/4 beat at 120 bpm

How can I top the above post? that says it all

[a_random_joel]

17. I say this as a pretty big disco fan...

Disco doesn't rock.

[mwdem]

18. Worst. Music. Ever.

:puke:

[HamdenRice]

20. some more underground disco you never heard of ...

Tavares ... "Heaven must be missing an angel"

Ramsey McDonald ... "Calypso Breakdown"

Deodato ... "Thus Spake Zarathustra"

[HalfManHalfBiscuit]

21. Heard of the first one

Poppy elevator music

[maveric]

22. Fecal matter floating in a scuttle of hepatitus infected urine.

But during the 70's all the hot chicks went to discos.