Camille Paglia's Soul/Funk/Disco playlist

That she can suck a dick for all I care.

Good playlist though.

I mean, I'd schtup Katrina Vanden Heuvel in a second, but I don't really need to read in a magazine that she recommends Bob Dylan.

Price plainly lacks the elegant musicianship of a true techno artist like Paul van Dyk.

Hee!

Also, way to make a disco list with every fucking song ever recorded on it. Helpful!

Is Madonna suffering Mick Jagger syndrome? Jagger, like Madonna, has tremendous managerial and business aptitude. It is he who single-handedly saved the Rolling Stones during Keith Richards' reclusive period of heroin addiction in the 1970s. But the end result was that the once-Dionysian Jagger became trapped in the crisp, precise Apollonian realm and was no longer capable of producing lyrics that match Richards' thunderous, blues-based inventions. (Full disclosure: Keith Richards has been my idol and role model for over 40 years.) As a lyricist, Jagger has fallen very far indeed from his glorious zenith in "Sympathy for the Devil"-- the greatest of all rock songs and demonstrably superior to Bob Dylan's exhilarating but over-cynical "Like a Rolling Stone" (which came in first this year in Rolling Stone's industry-wide poll of the Top 500 Songs).

I was into disco waaaay before anyone.

wow, this is an irritating sentence in so many ways.

In the 90's she decided Jim Morrison was "cool".

Quite the downward slide.

dude, she was one of the three good professors at uarts. of course, in comparison to other schools, she blew.

i like the sound of "uarts casualties". let's form a band, jess!

OMG, did you know a girl named k3rr1 [pronounced "curry"]? she was my roomate. biggest bitch in the world.

http://inside.binghamton.edu/March-April/27apr00/kessler.html

haha i got an A in kessler's class! take that, camille!

In a 1991 cover story on Madonna for London's Sunday Independent Review, I described disco as "a dark, grand Dionysian music with roots in African earth-cult" -- a defense that seemed bizarre because disco had yet to achieve academic legitimacy (which arrived in the '90s as more writers embraced popular gay history).

now who on ILM does THIS remind you of???

She was a big tough woman
The first to come along
She showed me being female meant you still could be strong
And though graduation meant that we had to part
She'll always be a player on the ballfield of my heart

I wrote her name on my notepad and the ink got on my dress
And I etched it on my locker and I carved it on my desk
And I painted big red hearts with her initials on my books
And I never knew till later why I got those funny looks...

She was a big tough woman
The first to come along
She showed me being female meant you still could be strong
And though graduation meant that we had to part
She'll always be a player on the ballfield of my heart

In gym class while the others talked of boys that they loved
I'd be thinking of new aches and pains the teacher had to rub
And while other girls went to the prom I languished by the phone
Calling up and hanging up if I found out she was home

She was a big tough woman
The first to come along....

I sang her songs by Johnny Mathis
I gave her everything
A new chain for her whistle, and daisies in the spring
Some suggestive poems for Christmas by Miss Edna Millay
And a lacy lacy lacy card for Valentine's Day
(Unsigned of course)

She was a big tough woman
The first to come along...

(Here comes the moral of the song...)

So you just go to any gym class
And you'll be sure to see
One girl who sticks to Teacher like a leaf sticks to a tree
One girl who runs the errands and who chases all the balls
One girl who may grow up to be the "gayest" of all...

She was a big strong woman
The first to come along
To show me being female meant you still could be strong
And though graduation meant that we had to part
You"ll always be a player on the ballfield of my heart!

oof. (or is the brill building secretly an african earth cult?)

I like that.

Disco became hugely successful and was exploited cynically by all kinds of writers and producers but could you explain to me what is wrong with that statement by Paglia about its essence as a form of music and how it was experienced at the time?

when disco achieved "academic legitimacy" = the day the music DIED.

intesresting discussion of disco & its (dis)contents here:
The "Blues-Free Environment" scroll down a bit...

I'm so old that my college education predates postmodernism. So I've always considered pop culture study to be an autodidact's playground.

it's WAY over-mythologized. it's just something that came together out of a million already-existing forms of music bubbling above or near the surface of pop culture in the '60s and '70s. brill building and motown songwriterly R&B-pop, latin jazz, afrobeat, james brown, detroit and memphis funk, hippie jam bands, the hair soundtrack, tv game show music, library music, barbra streisand, the fifth dimension, art rock, synth bands, you name it.

you can tuck "jimmy webb" in there under the arm of the fifth dimension. donna summer's "macarthur park," anyone?

xpost- Yeah, Paglia should shut up for a dozen reasons.

The quote is that it had roots in African earth-cult which is not the same as 'African earth-cult music'. To me it's looking at aspects of the music itself (African 'polyrhythms' and so on), and the way it was experienced (communal hedonism, extended mixes, trance-like states etc. etc.) and suggesting cultural connections to something else, however distant. A notion that it was 'pure' or 'authentic', or that it wasn't also the product of the coalescing of a lot of different music that was around in the early '70s isn't at all implied in the statement as far as I can see.

As for her considering it bizarre, she doesn't. She suggests that it was considered bizarre by others in 1991, when she wrote it.

it's still overreaching. not all disco was (is) trancelike, or hedonistic, or even polyrhythmic. or frenzied, or shamanic, or collectivist, or the opposite of collectivist. why does it have to have "roots" in anything other than music for dancing?

i know... the FEELIES were more polyrhythmic than freakin' disco.

I suppose, thinking about it, if she said it in 1991 it's not surprising it has that ring to it.

why does it have to have "roots" in anything other than music for dancing?

By 'music for dancing' I presume you mean what you said earlier:

brill building and motown songwriterly R&B-pop, latin jazz, afrobeat, james brown, detroit and memphis funk, hippie jam bands, the hair soundtrack, tv game show music, library music, barbra streisand, the fifth dimension, art rock, synth bands

I think I see what you're saying - that she appears to be ignoring all the above as direct antecedents of disco.

But is the excessive (to me) demystifying of disco a vestige of a strategy of rehabilitating it to those who previously didn't like it, ie showing disco was ok because it's related to all the other stuff (funk/rock etc.) and downplaying any notion of it as a thing-in-itself because that would be like a mirror image of the demonised thing that rock fans were told not to like?

Disco was very exciting and 'different' to me AT THE TIME and I think that's what I picked up in what Paglia said.. a sense that her words came at least partly from being personally caught up in the moment and not just of slinging out half-baked theories on something she knew nothing about. On the other hand I remember Tommy Erdelyi (Tommy Ramone) remarking to me in 1979 when I told him how much I liked Chic that he used to be in a bar band with Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards so I fully understand how it was all intertwined, as you say.

this triggered a "wtf" initially though I suppose it's similiar to the "arena full of Queen fans = Nuremberg" analogy so popular in the 70s. More interesting to me is disco's routes in the original discotheques of occupied postwar Paris where jazz records were played for dancing and drinking pleasure because the Nazis had banned (racially subversive) live jazz bands in clubs.

But is the excessive (to me) demystifying of disco a vestige of a strategy of rehabilitating it to those who previously didn't like it, ie showing disco was ok because it's related to all the other stuff (funk/rock etc.) and downplaying any notion of it as a thing-in-itself because that would be like a mirror image of the demonised thing that rock fans were told not to like?

OK I think I agree with this overall! Disco's underground roots are important as both sociology and music, my argument here is that this first phase has been over-mystified and romanticized while the ensuing explosion of disco as a national phenomenon has been trivialized and misunderstood. The disco fad represents a titantic shift in musical tastes that still reverberates today, not to mention the start of a technological revolution that's rocking the music business even as we speak.

showing disco was ok because it's related to all the other stuff (funk/rock etc.)

as far as I can tell, this is the net effect of the Kogan/Eddy approach to disco scholarship. Maybe not their intent, who could really say, but where it all ends up nonetheless. To me current books on disco like Shapiro or the superior Last Night A DJ Saved My Life can feel like revisionist history at times, inserting a neat but overdetermined & anachronistic view of "gay history" in the midst of a messy, interesting and prescient time in pop culture.

Bridging the gap between disco and rock, mainstream and minority taste so effortlessly is what makes Chic perfect pop music IMHO.

Oak's last post expresses the "you are there" passionate intensity of the original disco experience in a way that Paglia's word soup does not. Guess it comes down to prose style: a question of taste.

For this effrontery, Chuck and I will never invite you to join our Dionysian earth-cult.

this triggered a "wtf" initially though I suppose it's similiar to the "arena full of Queen fans = Nuremberg" analogy so popular in the 70s.

no it isn't. he's talking about an actual youth cult called Swing Kids that arose in opposition to hitler's crackdown on nightlife/attempt to make german kids into perfect little aryans

interesting to me is disco's routes in the original discotheques of occupied postwar Paris where jazz records were played for dancing and drinking pleasure because the Nazis had banned (racially subversive) live jazz bands in clubs.

yes, according to shapiro this was the next stage after the swing kids/inspired by them

http://www.return2style.de/amiswhei.htm

and that's not even close to being the best slave track.

the great pagoda of funn = otm

Yeah, I was gonna say. There's still a lot of rote dismissal of disco in the broader culture. And probably in academia too, especially 20 years ago. I don't doubt that Paglia encountered a lot of stuffy sniffiness over the years.
-- gypsy mothra (meetm...), December 3rd, 2005. (later)

I've said it many many times and gotten in trouble for it but yes, despite all the efforts of the Experiance Music Project and book publishers and journalists and madonna and the fact that most people enjoy and dance to disco, normal people still laugh when I say I'm a disco DJ.

That was just one of many WTF moments in that ridiculously long essay.

However, with all that said, I do prefer Paglia's writing in short doses so I don't know if I could have handled the day-to-day classroom experience.

DAN WILL YOU PLAY DANCING QUEEN AT MY COUSIN'S BAT MITZVAH

brill building and motown songwriterly R&B-pop, latin jazz, afrobeat, james brown, detroit and memphis funk, hippie jam bands, the hair soundtrack, tv game show music, library music, barbra streisand, the fifth dimension, art rock, synth bands

couple of things. we like to think of rock/pop as kid music, first and foremost. what always gets brought up about disco is how it's "for adults" (in a way that's either R-rated or sophisticated), but in the history books we always hear how it's the kids that hold the patent on having a good time, and it's the adults that are always trying to recapture that (especially former '50s kids who take all that shit personally). disco wouldn't have happened without the '50s/'60s parallel universe of mellow swinging adults inspired by their kids' rock 'n' roll rebellion. kids dance (at school dances), adults dance (at discos).

but it's true that disco was so pervasive in '70s popular culture that it was very often not FOR dancing, specifically... there were times when it was just functional, quotidian background music. which has nothing to do with african earth cults. and that incidental music probably would have sounded the same if there weren't an existent genre known as disco.

i dunno. it's weird. back (pre-1972 or so) when it didn't have a name and it wasn't so streamlined/concentrated as one thing, did anyone really have a stance on the sounds that were most commonly mutating into "disco"? would anyone have taken a torch to a stack of samba records?

They were responding to different things. Both the music and the culture: the music, because it wasn't rock (it lacked the most distinctive ingredient of rock - the distorted/fuzz guitar sound), but much more importantly the culture (women, gays, blacks in the ascendant, as you say).

The other factor is the apparent hegemony of disco. It was perceived as taking over and becoming too dominant in the music scene. If it had continued to bubble under it would simply have co-existed and not excited the hatred it did.

You mean like Library Music that sounds very disco-ey? But surely that kind of background music is always informed by the dominant genres of youth-oriented popular music at the time. Therefore when disco became very popular it became suitable for recycling in a watered-down form into library and other incidental music.

There IS a thread running DIRECTLY * from the 'parallel universe', as you put it, of easy listening and 'hip adult' music of the '60s-70s into disco but isn't the hard funk and soul scene more central to disco's development?

* I'm thinking that perhaps disco provided opportunities to string/horn arrangers and so on from the lounge/easy/'hip adult' scene to whom rock was a closed-off world.

Regarding the demographics of the disco scene. I'm not sure if it was older. I would think it would be predominantly 18-25 (30 at a pinch) for both disco and rock (pretty much as it is now for actually going out to see bands or going to clubs). One thing that comes amusingly to mind is my friend Rob's tendency (in the early 1980s) to dismiss disco and jazz funk as 'wine bar music'. But I think that crossover to a more sedate adult clientele surely only came AFTER disco had established itself with younger people.