Last time disco came up on this list I pondered when it was actually around as a genre, and after a little bit of research it turns out it was a lot earlier than I thought, going back to the early years of the Seventies. What makes a track disco, specifically? Like most genres, it’s hard to pin down precisely. It’s funky, underneath, generally at a danceable tempo, with a bit more production over the top. I said before that it’s funk with strings rather than horns, but horns do crop up on some tracks on this album. The melodies are, perhaps, a key part.
And just as I made the claim that glam rock is only *really* glam rock when combined with the visuals, I think disco is as much the culture as it is the music. Without the clubbing scene that went along with it, the music is just music, infectious though it may be.
Nile Rodgers (guitar) and Bernard Edwards (bass) co-produce this album, and Edwards’ basslines are what drive the songs and give them the disco groove. There are a host of musicians and vocalists attached to this record (this is often the case with producer-led projects, apart from Todd Rundgren who does everything himself) but arguably it’s Alfa Anderson who contributes the most in this regard. Her vocals are on the big hits Le Freak and I Want Your Love, as well as the long track At Last I Am Free, a lush slower track that shows that Rodgers and Edwards can do more than disco dancing.
And it is one of those albums where when you get away from the famous tracks there’s a lot more going on. Still some funky bass and slick strings, but on tracks that are better for their lack of familiarity.
The other thing my research showed was how vehement the “anti-disco” backlash was. If you thought people getting angry about trivial matters was a modern thing, it seems not (but perhaps the presence of social media back then might have stirred the rhetoric to higher and darker levels). There’s a suggestion that, since disco was popular among black and homosexual groups, that the backlash was driven by racism and homophobia. You have to wonder, especially as one of the complaints was that there wasn’t enough (white) rock music on the radio. If you’ve followed this list so far, you may well roll your eyes about *that* complaint. [Edit: this comment turned out to be even more timely by the time this post got published].
For me, I think perhaps because I grew up amid that atmosphere, I never quite warmed to disco. I do, however, like funk, and if you listen to these tracks in that sense, they’re pretty good.
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