This
podcast celebrates disco—or, dance music, if you like—from its peak, which I’ll
define as the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. It’s the music that grew up with and out of
the social unrest of the 1960s, unique to the underground tribes of the times (blacks, Hispanics, gays, feminists, progressives) as they moved from protest to forging
self-identity though celebration. As
disco became “a thing” (came above ground/went commercial) it warped into
something strangely plastic, ridiculously kitschy and brazenly aspirational (…everybody
wants to be/bourgié, bourgié, super bourgeois…). I love this euro-Frankenstein
version equally well—did someone say “Supernature?”. I grow less interested the
more the music moves away from “organic” sounds (real strings and horns), toward
the robotics of synthesizers, drum machines and vocal manipulations. That said, I think Donna Summer/Giogio
Moroder’s “I Feel Love” is the acme of modern culture.
The episodes tend to be organized around theme—a disco Theme Time Radio Hour—with those themes ranging from subject matter to genre to medium.