MCCS1977

As BDR reminds me, Motel de Moka is one of the best music blogs out there. The latest post, “Electronica 2008. The Age of Grand Unraveling,” is pure sonic pleasure. It brings back the days of burning the night away in my favorite clubs in Germany, MACH>1 in Nuremberg and the Airport in Wurzburg.

Growing up my musical influences were the Salt Creek Show, Willie Nelson/Johnny Cash, and Sergei Prokofiev. As I grew older and reached what is now called the “tween” age I started listening to the local college station and was subsumed in a deluge of new influences, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, The Pixies, Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, Dinosaur Jr. and so on and so on. And so I read the latest by our dear Captain Capitulation a bit wincingly:

I want to give you the ethical paradox at the heart of disco. Disco culture was, in my view, just mindlessly disgusting. Remember Studio 54? Idiot snobbery of the rope line, combined with an inversion of all values: vice as virtue, promiscuity as love, decadence as redemption, cocaine as enlightenment. This shit ate people alive, and by the time it did, they richly deserved it. Disco was a mirror of a disillusioned or actually nihilistic consumerism, and like I said vis-a-vis the funk, hedonism hurts. On the other hand, the songs listed below are made with consummate, meticulous craft. You can’t be a completely brainless buggerer and make records like Giorgio Moroder or Nile Rogers. Someone spent weeks in the studio getting every tiny sound exactly right. They positively shimmer with devoted making, which is actually the heart of their glamour. At the center of all this mindless sin, there is a Shaker ethic of devoted making.

Every point made about disco could easily be applied to Rock & Roll and all it’s derivatives. I’m starting to understand his criticisms of “space oddity” by David Bowie, “. . . it’s hard not to notice the utter gutlessness of the melody, the meaningless claptrap of the words.” The song is hardly gutless by the standards of the time, and Bowie’s metaphor for the detachment–drug induced or otherwise–one can feel from the rest of the world can hardly be characterized as meaningless, unless you yourself…

Anyways, I consider the House/Techno/Trance I listened to heavily from 99′ thru 03′ as much a direct descendant of Disco as Rock & Roll is of Country/Rhythm and blues, which I’m sure was looked on by it’s predecessors as “unnatural: artificially-produced frankenstein music, a disgusting simulation of music as a sheer consumer object.” You know, Elvis shaking his hips to misceginated gospel, rockabilly, and all that. I listened to that music, I danced in the clubs, I had the time of my life. The whole point was once you got out on the dance floor all the nihilistic consumerism and shitty meaninglessness of life was pounded away with every beat. The faceless DJ spinning anonymous tunes had none of the ego of a frontman like Scott Weiland or David Lee Roth, both who better embody the above critque of Disco than any of the artists at the eye of the storm of the culture around them in the 70′s.