DJs have always had a significant role in pop history: ‘The DJ is more than someone who spins records,’ Poschardt writes. ‘He is one of the new “culture makers”’ (Poschardt is quoting Tom Wolfe writing about Murray the K in 1964).
Discotheques originated in occupied Paris during the Second World War. The Nazis banned jazz and closed many of the dance clubs, breaking up jazz groups and driving fans into illicit cellars to listen to recorded music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the Whiskey a Go-Go, where dancers would hit the floor accompanied by records played by disc jockeys on a phonograph. Pacine went on to open other clubs in Europe, while in Paris Chez Régine opened in 1960, catering to the self-styled beautiful people. The upmarket thrills of Régine’s enjoyed by the American jet-set in turn inspired New York’s Le Club, although it didn’t last long, closing soon after a new venue in New York took off in 1961: the Peppermint Lounge.
When Jacqueline Kennedy was pictured in newspapers dancing the Twist, its street credibility dissolved. Dance halls and discotheques – like pop music in general – gain little energy from the patronage of high society but have always relied on the enthusiasm of the young, the working class and the marginalised.
In the early Seventies black music emerged into the mainstream. Big soul and funk records – from Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Dance to the Music’ (1968) to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ (1973) – began winning over a constituency of fans who fell for the sharp, funky rhythms and filled the charts, particularly with Motown
What drew clubbers to these venues was the soundtrack, but also the buzz; key to the discotheque experience is the atmosphere, the community feeling generated in the halls and clubs. Discotheques began to boom as the Sixties ended: in an era of fragmentation and isolation – and a retreat into private lives and private housing – the dance hall and the discotheque became increasingly valuable, a rare public space. According to Truman Capote, ‘disco is the best floor show in town. It’s very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix.’
Some of the great days of disco, in 1976 and 1977, coincided with punk, but if you read any received history of popular music, you wouldn’t know it. The inveterate rock bias in the music papers, magazines and academia has left much dancefloor history still undocumented. The trad agenda set by commentators in the Sixties, heavy with value judgments – glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects.
I am not going to sound off too much or engage in the disciplined struggle’ of ‘theorisation’; I don't want to underpin a talk a post abuot DJ' with references to Foucault or the supposed gravitas or intellectual kudos provided by references to Adorno, Benjamin and Guy Debord, or engage in lycergically enhanced space vocabulary.
Just to say I have on occasion gone to Discos feeling low and the DJ saved my life. Well, not literally but you know what I mean
Source: Dave Haslam
.
Discotheques originated in occupied Paris during the Second World War. The Nazis banned jazz and closed many of the dance clubs, breaking up jazz groups and driving fans into illicit cellars to listen to recorded music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the Whiskey a Go-Go, where dancers would hit the floor accompanied by records played by disc jockeys on a phonograph. Pacine went on to open other clubs in Europe, while in Paris Chez Régine opened in 1960, catering to the self-styled beautiful people. The upmarket thrills of Régine’s enjoyed by the American jet-set in turn inspired New York’s Le Club, although it didn’t last long, closing soon after a new venue in New York took off in 1961: the Peppermint Lounge.
When Jacqueline Kennedy was pictured in newspapers dancing the Twist, its street credibility dissolved. Dance halls and discotheques – like pop music in general – gain little energy from the patronage of high society but have always relied on the enthusiasm of the young, the working class and the marginalised.
In the early Seventies black music emerged into the mainstream. Big soul and funk records – from Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Dance to the Music’ (1968) to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ (1973) – began winning over a constituency of fans who fell for the sharp, funky rhythms and filled the charts, particularly with Motown
What drew clubbers to these venues was the soundtrack, but also the buzz; key to the discotheque experience is the atmosphere, the community feeling generated in the halls and clubs. Discotheques began to boom as the Sixties ended: in an era of fragmentation and isolation – and a retreat into private lives and private housing – the dance hall and the discotheque became increasingly valuable, a rare public space. According to Truman Capote, ‘disco is the best floor show in town. It’s very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix.’
Some of the great days of disco, in 1976 and 1977, coincided with punk, but if you read any received history of popular music, you wouldn’t know it. The inveterate rock bias in the music papers, magazines and academia has left much dancefloor history still undocumented. The trad agenda set by commentators in the Sixties, heavy with value judgments – glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects.
I am not going to sound off too much or engage in the disciplined struggle’ of ‘theorisation’; I don't want to underpin a talk a post abuot DJ' with references to Foucault or the supposed gravitas or intellectual kudos provided by references to Adorno, Benjamin and Guy Debord, or engage in lycergically enhanced space vocabulary.
Just to say I have on occasion gone to Discos feeling low and the DJ saved my life. Well, not literally but you know what I mean
Source: Dave Haslam
.
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