I’d always been told it was Jamaican in origin (and the advantage in particular being that you can cut the grooves for heavier bass on a larger plate rather than have 20 minutes per side) Jamaican sound systems competing heavily on bass pressure. That said I have lots of heavy bass Jamaican 7 inch pressings and, I think, no old Jamaican 12s. I used to DJ.
Tom Moulton’s long disco edits were originally on tape I think though obviously as the 70s went on and the practice of djing changed 12s ruled.
ABBA had a great disco phase, but yes, Boney M were always amazing. I might not choose to play them very often but if they come on the stereo I’ll turn them up.
I mean it’s not the bonkers over the top stuff they are most famous for but, honestly it holds up in a set with legendary prog disco like Tantra say.
Might as well add the Patrick Cowley mix if you have a quarter of an hour to spare
Talking of whom I have two copies of this 12" because I feel love is my favourite song in the world ever (I had an epiphany as a child dancing to this in the disco of a car ferry) and sometimes 15 minutes didn’t cut it and I’d mix the song for an hour.
And to bring it back to tape, I live this Tom Moulton mix of Teddy Prendergrass singing don’t leave me this way in huge part due to the key change in the tape splice at the end - really let’s you know if you’ve left it on too long
Boney M are amazing indeed! For some reason, their brand of Disco goes well with Heavy Metal. Not sure where this falls on the Disco/Macho divide, but I like it.
I was 13 when Disco “died”, but really all that happened was that the faddish, novelty side of Disco flamed out almost as fast as it appeared. It still lived on, really, it’s just that FM radio stations ignored it while other styles appeared. People just OD’ed on it at the same time as an anti-reason backlash was building behind Reagan, so its “demise” was loudly crowed.
Discos as such were scaled back, expensive to maintain roller skating rinks gave way to arcades, everything seemed to happen at once. Drive ins also died at around the same time, but no one really blames disco for that.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go listen to some Daft Punk and then some Scissor Sisters before I put on some Gossip.
A thing is what happened in USA, and look that the happenings of these days are exposing that some isuues aren’t solved at all. A thing is what happened in other part of the world. @ robertmckenna cited “I feel love”.
In the '70 disco music was made in Italy copy the stles of american disco (Rumore by Raffaella Carra`)
Then a new genre was born, the Italo Disco
This is a mashup of a famous discomusic/progressive rock song and an electronic music one
Funny you should mention Italo Disco, as I am looking out of my window right now at where Musicland Studios used to be, in the Arabella Hochhaus. The place where Giorgio Moroder pioneered the style with Donna Summer in 1975. It feels kind of weird to be in an office with such a view.
To be fair I’d say most British people realise it. It’s such a huge part of British music.It’s funny how quickly it turned though, I was listening to some early Count Ossie the other day and it’s straight US copy R’n’B, add in a bunch of doo wop and you get the groups that all made the ska/rocksteady sound which moved into reggae. I mean they were doing the US stuff and the political consciousness created around Rastafarianism and in particular the musical traditions of Niyabinghi jazz which changed the rhythmic approach to the songs and very quickly, allied to technology, you had a revolution in music which shook the world. US to UK to Africa.
Had a post in the works with that in it!
Love a bit of Italo by the way. And now to attempt to tie the threads together, here’s an artist who moved from Jamaica to Paris and became a Euro-disco singer. Moved back musically to Jamaica and here remixed by the great Larry Levan. This sounds just so New York to me and I always loved dropping it in a set.
The fabled roller boogie (and roller derby, I guess) may have faded, but I thought roller rinks were still about and reasonably successful in the ‘80s. My local one seemed to be.
Oh, for sure… and of course anyone with a working knowledge of hip hop knows those connections, too. So to be more clear, I think most people in the US probably aren’t aware of the connections especially to music that’s not hip hop (if they’re aware of the influence there).
Yeah, but Africa had it’s own traditions that weren’t just fed by American/British music… Fela Kuti did a hell of a lot to bring in Yoruban traditional music into the mix of his work. But even there, the Jamaican connection is pretty important, given the number of Yoruban people who ended up enslaved in the Caribbean…
I know that plenty of books have been written on the influence of Jamaica, but there has got to be a great dissertation about how the music that came out of the 70s and 80s bear such a heavy influence from just one island…
Yep. Me too. One of our favorite places to go, skate, and play video games as a kid…
