Disco Stu should have Disco Ducked!

Generally I take the good people over at Pitchfork with a grain of salt, but not today. While I'm way too young to remember the short lived, and highly unnecessary "disco era" of our fine country I know enough about it to know how super lame it was. Pitchfork staff writer Stephen M. Deusner (probably pronounced dooze-nur, though I'm sure he tells people that the D is silent just to be pretentious) thinks otherwise about the disco-era and he discusses this in his review for The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Apparently it was just re-released, which was why the review ran in the first place. If this guy likes disco, that is ultimately his problem, but one of the main themes throughout his review is the idea that Saturday Night Fever turned disco from an edgy, underground kind of music, into a watered down, cheesy shadow of it's former self.

First of all, when the fuck has disco ever been edgy music???? Seriously???? Think about the musicians making music before disco even became semi-popular. I think it is safe to say that people like Jimi Hendrix and bands like The Beatles were way more edgy in their time than disco ever was. If anything, 70's dance music was a more mainstream, clean-cut "guilded" reaction to the dreary rock n roll scene that was evolving into something not as family friendly. Sure, when disco reached the heigth of its popularity it was largely associated with doing huge lines of blow off peoples cocks and shit like that but much of the music itself was still pretty friendly. If disco from the early 70's is what this reviewer considers to be be "edgy" then his homelife growing up was probably the spitting image of how Ned Flanders and his family are portrayed on The Simpsons only with more church and a few frontal lobotomys.

Lets compare two Bee Gee's songs, one from 1975 which was before Saturday Night Fever was released, and one from 1977 which is the year Saturday Night Fever was released. I'm going to compare the lyrical content, because if the "pre-Saturday Night Fever disco-era" was supposedly "edgy" then I'm sure Barry Gibb and company were expressing some really outlandish disco style thoughts.

The Bee Gee's "Jive Talkin" 1975
Its just your jive talkin
Youre telling me lies, yeah
Jive talkin
You wear a disguise
Jive talkin
So misunderstood, yeah
Jive talkin
You really no good

The Bee Gee's "Night Fever" 1977 Post Saturday Night Fever Era
And that sweet city woman,
She moves through the light,
Controlling my mind and my soul.
When you reach out for me
Yeah, and the feelin is bright,

Then I get night fever, night fever.
We know how to do it.
Gimme that night fever, night fever.
We know how to show it.

Ya, thats some captivating shit right there. They both sound pretty banal to me, though I'm sure the first song was somehow a metaphor criticizing The Nixon Administration's foreign policy tactics. Did the reviewer of this album even stop to think about how disco is pretty much a drop in the bucket on the musical timeline? Disco was super popular for about 3 WHOLE YEARS, not because people got tired of it, but because they realized how fucking lame it was! Disco got dropped quicker than the recipient of a Dale Hunter crosscheck so lets not go into some kind of quasi-intellectual debate on how "ohhh disco was once this untouched, pure, gemstone......UNTIL IT BECAME MAINSTREAM." Dance music has always been mainstream. Disco was just a subgenre of it that got extremely over the top and that is what it was meant for. There was never integrity in disco music. The only good thing that came out of disco aside from it completely imploding was the fact that people like Michael Jackson looked at it afterwards and thought "shit, disco could have been cool if it wasn't so fucking thoughtless and stupid, I'm going to fix it."