Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Simon Reynolds Page B

around like zombies. We must do everything possible to stop the spread of this plague.’
    – DJ Steve Dahl, 1979
     
     
‘I don’t know that I have any objection to dancing, I just don’t do it. Sort of like sucking other men’s dicks. I don’t feel that there is anything wrong with it, but it doesn’t appeal to me.’
    – Chicago rocker and technophobe Steve Albini,
speaking in Reactor #8.0, 1993
     
     
    Sucking, of course, was always the accusation levelled at disco. At the height of ‘disco sucks’ fever in 1979, Chicago’s Comiskey Park baseball stadium was the site for a ‘Disco Demolition Derby’, which was organized by Detroit DJ Steve Dahl, and took place halfway through a double-header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. But when the 100,000 plus records were dynamited, discophobic mobs rampaged on to the field; the rioting, post-explosion debris and damage to the pitch resulted in the game being forfeited to the Tigers.
    The ‘Disco Sucks’ phenomenon recalls the Nazi book burnings, or the exhibitions of Degenerate Art. Modern day spectacles of kulturkampf like Comiskey were impelled by a similar disgust: the belief that disco was rootless, inauthentic, decadent, a betrayal of the virile principles of the true American volk music, rock ’n’ roll. Hence T-Shirts like ‘Death Before Disco’, hence organizations like DREAD (Detroit Rockers Engaged In The Abolition of Disco) and Dahl’s own ‘Insane Coho Lips Antidisco Army’.
    Discophobia wasn’t just limited to white rockers, though; many blacks despised it as a soul-less, mechanistic travesty of da funk. And so the sleeve of Funkadelic’s 1979 album Uncle Jam Wants You bore the slogan ‘it’s the rescue dance music “from the blahs” band’. Funkateer critic Greg Tate coined the term ‘DisCOINTELPRO’ – a pun on the FBI’s campaign to infiltrate black radical organizations like the Panthers – to denigrate disco as ‘a form of record industry sabotage . . . [which] destroyed the self-supporting black band movement out of which P-Funk . . . grew.’ In 1987, Public Enemy’s Chuck D articulated hip hop’s antipathy to house, disco’s descendant, telling me: ‘it’s sophisticated, anti-black, anti-feel, the most ARTIFICIAL shit I ever heard. It represents the gay scene, it’s separating blacks from their past and their culture, it’s upwardly mobile.’
    Chicago house music was born of a double exclusion, then: not just black, but gay and black. Its refusal, its cultural dissidence, took the form of embracing a music that the majority culture deemed dead and buried. House didn’t just resurrect disco, it mutated the form, intensifying the very aspects of the music that most offended white rockers and black funkateers: the machinic repetition, the synthetic and electronic textures, the rootlessness, the ‘depraved’ hypersexuality and ‘decadent’ druggy hedonism. Stylistically, house assembled itself from disregarded and degraded pop-culture detritus that the mainstream considered passé, disposable, un-American: the proto-disco of the Salsoul and Philadelphia International labels, English synthpop, and Moroder’s Eurodisco.
    If Dusseldorf was the ultimate source for Detroit techno, you could perhaps argue that the prehistory of house begins in Munich. Here it was that Giorgio Moroder invented Eurodisco. Setting up Say Yes Productions with British guitarist Pete Bellote, Moroder recruited Donna Summer, then singing in rock musicals like Hair and Godspell , and transformed her into a disco ice queen. Moroder can claim three innovations that laid the foundations for house. First, the dramatically extended megamix: 1975’s seventeen minute long orgasmotronic epic ‘Love To Love You Baby’. Second, the four-to-the-floor disco pulse rhythm: Moroder used a drum machine to simplify funk rhythms to make it easier for whites to dance. Third, and perhaps most crucial, was Moroder’s creation of purely