Disco's Dead. Long Live Disco!

Disco may have died with the '70s, but its essence throbs on. Four-on-the-floor thrives in today's pop, from Blige to Beck and beyond.

When the stage version of Saturday Night Fever opened on Broadway last month, theater-goers might have expected its disco-style dance music to seem somewhat quaint. The John Travolta movie version came out 22 years ago, after all, heralding disco's heyday. But even now, the old music doesn't seem that distant. The fact is, in all but name, the disco era never really ended; only those '70s haircuts truly became obsolete.

Dance music, disco's first cousin, still echoes in clubs from the U.S. to Japan, and the disco beat, that steady thump that deejays call "four-on-the-floor," remains with us. Not only are disco songs from the late 1970s all over movie soundtracks, but the music has stuck around in more stealthy ways as well. Nearly everything that was once reviled in disco--its monotonous rhythm and gimmicky sounds, its disposability, superficiality, and its notion of music as pure, dumb fun--remains part of the pop mainstream. Just give a listen to the Backstreet Boys or Mary J. Blige, Ricky Martin or Beck. Disco simply served as the roots for much of what followed.

FORGET ART, LET'S DANCE!

1980s

No one called it disco, nut Madonna's club tunes had a big beat and thin lyrics.

Historically, disco first began percolating in the mid'-70s at dance clubs where disc jockeys favored uptempo soul songs that pulled people onto the floor. The deejays tended to like instrumental passages and interludes of pure rhythm that they could stretch out (using two records on two turntables) to keep people moving.

Eventually, major record labels picked up the music and helped push it onto the radio. And through the years it evolved, incorporating Latin percussion, electronics, and even big-band arrangements.

Not everyone became a convert, of course. Disco often generated angry reactions from blue-jeaned rock fans who dismissed it as mechanical, formulaic, and forgettable which, of course, it was. Disco was meant to sound good on turntables rather than onstage (and when disco stars appeared in concert, they usually sang along to their taped studio tracks rather than to live bands).

In 1977, the Bee Gees' soundtrack album for Saturday Night Fever hit the stores and eventually sold 15 million copies (the most for any album ever, until Michael Jackson's Thriller finally surpassed it six years later). But eventually fans stopped buying disco. Since the songs had the shelf life of day-old bread, it was cheaper to keep up with the latest tunes on radio than to collect albums.

Sales plummeted from 726 million LPs, singles, and tapes in 1978 to 576 million in 1982. The Grammy Award category for Best Disco Recording lasted exactly one year (won by Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive") before it quietly disappeared.

THE BEAT WENT ON

But the music kept evolving; in the 1980s, the primitive synthesizers and drum machines that characterized early disco grew more complex. Variations of the music began to acquire names of their own: electro, hi-NRG, Latin freestyle, house, techno. Punk-era rockers like Blondie and Talking Heads allowed themselves to use four-on-the-floor, and performers in all sorts of genres let their songs reappear as remixes with a steady dance beat. Through her rise in the 1980s, Madonna never tagged herself as disco, but her music bubbled out of the dance clubs and onto the pop charts. And the disco-inspired notion that music could, and should, be manipulated after it was recorded--in dance-floor segues and overlays or in long, rhythm-happy remixes--resurfaced with the birth of hip-hop.

And a quarter-century after disco's birth, even hip-hop bands still plunder the music for material; in 1997, Wyclef Jean went back to Saturday Night Fever to recast the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" as "We Trying to Stay Alive."

Disco, for all its repetitiveness, is about immediate experience, about getting lost in the euphoric present. In the 1970s, despite its tackiness and its cliches, its crassness and its silliness, it reached for something that rock had almost abandoned--dance-floor boogeying and bootyshaking. It restored pop's connection to direct physical release with a beat so elementary that anyone could feel it. By reminding the pop audience that it could simply enjoy the sensations of the moment, disco made its own moment last far longer than anyone could have guessed.