a series of interviews
apparently the february issue of spin has a feature called "the return of disco"?
here are the long form interviews, via beta blog:
morgan geist
mike simonetti
dj harvey
james murphy
thomas rub n' tug
johnny jewel
these rumblings of " the return of disco" are kind of seriously starting to weird me out.
i would tend to side with harvey in thinking it never went away ... just manifested itself in different forms. but of course, people need stuff to write about and i do understand the need to generate trends. reading these histories made me wax nostalgic. i was born in 77, my earliest memory of music is blondie, and i had the good fortune of living in a city that exposed me to house music at the age of 13. thank god for late nite radio and girls' brothers' 3rd gen house mixtapes. i spent my teens liking hip hop, rnb, house, and all kinds of raves (and a ton of other non dance related stuff. HELLO 90's indie rock!) .... learned about samples and eventually tracked it all back to funk, soul, rare groove, and disco. and then the power of the internet was unleashed upon me and i found out about all the european stuff. i wish i could say that i had spent time working in a record store, but i was always too nervous to apply. too bad for me.
you know, while "the return of disco" taglines are gimmicky, i have to say that it's kind of nice that there is an obvious continuum here and that it is NOT only dependent on youth culture. it's really quite cool that 50 something year olds like baldelli or loda can play alongside dudes half their age, and that people who are new to it are able to discover and recontextualize stuff in their own way.
anyway. i don't know if that's ALL the interviews (maybe not. he said he did heaps of them), but what i want to know is:
a. why didn't you interview any gay dudes?
b. why didn't you interview anyone under the age of 30?
c. is this the strictly white guy history of "the return of disco"?
d. why's it so american?
this whole series of dj interviews actually makes me want to start my own series of dj interviews called "do you dance?"
in other news, i bought my first set of turntables today. better late than never, right?
here are the long form interviews, via beta blog:
morgan geist
mike simonetti
dj harvey
james murphy
thomas rub n' tug
johnny jewel
these rumblings of " the return of disco" are kind of seriously starting to weird me out.
i would tend to side with harvey in thinking it never went away ... just manifested itself in different forms. but of course, people need stuff to write about and i do understand the need to generate trends. reading these histories made me wax nostalgic. i was born in 77, my earliest memory of music is blondie, and i had the good fortune of living in a city that exposed me to house music at the age of 13. thank god for late nite radio and girls' brothers' 3rd gen house mixtapes. i spent my teens liking hip hop, rnb, house, and all kinds of raves (and a ton of other non dance related stuff. HELLO 90's indie rock!) .... learned about samples and eventually tracked it all back to funk, soul, rare groove, and disco. and then the power of the internet was unleashed upon me and i found out about all the european stuff. i wish i could say that i had spent time working in a record store, but i was always too nervous to apply. too bad for me.
you know, while "the return of disco" taglines are gimmicky, i have to say that it's kind of nice that there is an obvious continuum here and that it is NOT only dependent on youth culture. it's really quite cool that 50 something year olds like baldelli or loda can play alongside dudes half their age, and that people who are new to it are able to discover and recontextualize stuff in their own way.
anyway. i don't know if that's ALL the interviews (maybe not. he said he did heaps of them), but what i want to know is:
a. why didn't you interview any gay dudes?
b. why didn't you interview anyone under the age of 30?
c. is this the strictly white guy history of "the return of disco"?
d. why's it so american?
this whole series of dj interviews actually makes me want to start my own series of dj interviews called "do you dance?"
in other news, i bought my first set of turntables today. better late than never, right?
posted by jaime at 1:57 AM
6 Comments:
These interviews are so good.
I'm loving the acknowledgment of punk and disco as both similar and opposites, in tension with each other and also needing each other (even though those terms just fall apart kind of when you really try to nail a definition to them).
I grew up reading maximum rock n' roll and listening to DOA say that disco sucked -- but there were just too many contradictions to bear (Clash, Blondie etc.)!
Thanks for putting all the links together like that--A. Beta's site seemed weird in not clearly linking a bunch of the interviews.
Your qualms are valid, Jaime, but the people are all the people that immediately come to mind, aren't they (plus, I dunno, let's say Prins Thomas, Daniel Wang and maybe Daniel Judd/Sorcerer for some Pacifica representation)?
You're right--the culture of the dancers, from disco through to house to today's cherrypicking era, is something crucial, though, and very different to the record-nerd or fashionable/social event sides of things; getting to see the balletic lifers doing warmups the one and only time I went to the Loft was real eye-opening that way. Not that I ever go out (or go out to gay clubs with any frequency, nevermind ones that have played music I dug), but I'd never seen that in Toronto, not even mentioning the amazingly mixed crowd, etc.
i had a big fight about this on ilx some time ago, but "disco" was seriously a bad word for many many years, and while there was always dance music that echo'd disco, and it evolved and morphed, the specific signifiers of disco, both culturally and sonically, were looked down upon for the better parts of the 80s and 90s.
dan selzer
and I love all the comments about how bad "italo" is from DJs saying they don't know much about it and/or don't like it. I hate to say it but they're distancing themselves from a particularly trendy buzzword. Italo doesn't work on a dancefloor? Kano? I'm Ready? c'mon!
i wanna know which thread you fought in dan! i totally thought disco signifiers were "cool" in like, 89 - 91 and maybe a few years in the late 90's? and this particular revival i see extending back for kind of a while now. i don't know, maybe i can just trace the strains back a little too strongly which is why i tend to see this as more of a media thing than a music thing.
and i agree about the second thing!
craig, i was thinking danny wang and andy butler, for sure some more europeans ...
this is what i get for not google alerting myself, so apologies for the late response. it should be noted these posted transcripts on Beta Blog were stop-gaps while i was out of the country for a few months.
in response to your questions:
a. interviewee's sexual orientation was not a factor.
b. age was not a factor either. why didn't i interview anyone over 50?
c. this newer strain of disco is mostly "white guy," is it not? many references to disco's roots in gay/ black/ latino culture were edited out of the final piece (as was mention of live disco groups like Escort and the entire disco edit scene), focusing instead on "italo." not my decision.
d. the article features quotes from Lindstrom, Prins Thomas, and Sally Shapiro (no response from Terje and Pilooski), but i just didn't find these email interviews strong enough to post separately.
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