I returned my Yosemite rental car before work yesterday, then at the end of the work day, walked outside my Burbank office building to catch the bus to the metro to Vermont/Sunset, where I hopped on a DASH bus up to the Greek. I had a ticket to see Blondie and Elvis Costello.
This kind of event is so easy here in LA, if you can work around the parking costs and the traffic into Griffith Park. The outdoor amphitheaters are huge, so you can always get a ticket. The settings are pleasant, enjoyable even if you're watching nothing. I wouldn't think to buy tickets to much of anything if I had to get myself uptown to the Beacon back home—I'm more a small event or more likely no-mainstream events-at-all person—but here events are more appealing due to the settings.
So I went to the Greek on the bus and watched Blondie and I thought about disco.
Disco was happening during my childhood. Donna Summer was the soundtrack to the 1970s, along with the Fifth of Beethoven, Play That Funky Music (White Boy), Gloria Gaynor, and as kids, we all tried to do the Hustle. Or something. I don't know if it was really the Hustle. But there were dances people would try to do, and I was certainly not great at them.
I remember a big "Disco sucks" movement, and I remember a student from Nigeria giving me a Donna Summer LP on my birthday once when we both worked at Roy Rogers. I stared at it, baffled. Had he missed the memo? I spent my nights at the 704 Club next door or sometimes over the river at the 9:30 Club. Donna Summer was not on my list of things I was interested in.
But Donna Summer was in my vocabulary, the same way the most popular music of your childhood is in everyone's vocabulary, even when you didn't actively seek it out as a kid.
Watching Blondie last night, I remembered seeing the album Parallel Lines for the first time, and knowing this was a thing. A moment. There was no way to understand it for a kid, but this was a crossover, where punk rock and new wave and disco all came together to be...a thing. An unquantifiable hybrid.
Last night, I found myself thinking about disco.
Which is not a sentence I am proud to type since I really ought to understand something I grew up around.
But disco. What the hell was that? Why were people protesting it? Why were they mocking it? Why did it vanish? Or...did it vanish, or was it just repackaged and renamed? Where did the name "disco" come from? Is there a racial component to the anger at disco? Or is disco just popular culture commodifying some kind of trend, as it usually does?
I could look all this up, I realized, and later I will, but at the moment, it was hilarious to me to realize that I needed to read up on disco. And that one of the great punk bands was also a purveyor of disco, and later rap, repackaging it in a way even the whitest person in the whitest suburb with the most sheltered life could understand. Sort of like Hamilton, but in the 70s.
This kind of event is so easy here in LA, if you can work around the parking costs and the traffic into Griffith Park. The outdoor amphitheaters are huge, so you can always get a ticket. The settings are pleasant, enjoyable even if you're watching nothing. I wouldn't think to buy tickets to much of anything if I had to get myself uptown to the Beacon back home—I'm more a small event or more likely no-mainstream events-at-all person—but here events are more appealing due to the settings.
So I went to the Greek on the bus and watched Blondie and I thought about disco.
Disco was happening during my childhood. Donna Summer was the soundtrack to the 1970s, along with the Fifth of Beethoven, Play That Funky Music (White Boy), Gloria Gaynor, and as kids, we all tried to do the Hustle. Or something. I don't know if it was really the Hustle. But there were dances people would try to do, and I was certainly not great at them.
I remember a big "Disco sucks" movement, and I remember a student from Nigeria giving me a Donna Summer LP on my birthday once when we both worked at Roy Rogers. I stared at it, baffled. Had he missed the memo? I spent my nights at the 704 Club next door or sometimes over the river at the 9:30 Club. Donna Summer was not on my list of things I was interested in.
But Donna Summer was in my vocabulary, the same way the most popular music of your childhood is in everyone's vocabulary, even when you didn't actively seek it out as a kid.
Watching Blondie last night, I remembered seeing the album Parallel Lines for the first time, and knowing this was a thing. A moment. There was no way to understand it for a kid, but this was a crossover, where punk rock and new wave and disco all came together to be...a thing. An unquantifiable hybrid.
Last night, I found myself thinking about disco.
Which is not a sentence I am proud to type since I really ought to understand something I grew up around.
But disco. What the hell was that? Why were people protesting it? Why were they mocking it? Why did it vanish? Or...did it vanish, or was it just repackaged and renamed? Where did the name "disco" come from? Is there a racial component to the anger at disco? Or is disco just popular culture commodifying some kind of trend, as it usually does?
I could look all this up, I realized, and later I will, but at the moment, it was hilarious to me to realize that I needed to read up on disco. And that one of the great punk bands was also a purveyor of disco, and later rap, repackaging it in a way even the whitest person in the whitest suburb with the most sheltered life could understand. Sort of like Hamilton, but in the 70s.
2 comments:
It was before my time- and I'm all the more glad to have not seen the Disco Reign Of Terror of bell bottoms and sequined shirts. :)
[Stage whisper] It never went away.
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