That was…interesting. It’s like the worlds longest intro. It seemed like I was waiting for the tune to start the whole time. It’s certainly long though.
This is more the type of thing I was thinking of:
Also; man, I get busy for a bit, come back, and the thread has exploded! 
ETA: Also, plenty of synth in it for @anon61221983
I’m not sure Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk are the best bands to hold up as shining examples of carrying on the concept album tradition. For me anyway, Talking Heads may have been better. I know you’re high on DM but, as you suspected, my mileage varies.
I’d heard of This Mortal Coil before but not their music, so I found a few to listen to; Song of the Siren, Kangaroo, and something else. Moody bunch. The vocalist has a good voice even if a little nasal at times.
Later in the thread you talk about some of the early synths and there was some interesting usage.
I like a little meat on my synth.
Thanks for the book recommendation, it looks interesting. I’ll check my local library. If they don’t have it I’ll ask them to order it, they’re pretty good like that.
Coming from a white boy rock fan black and gay had nothing to do with it. For myself and my friends it was just that it was so much fluff. Like most pop, for which I also have little love, it seemed manufactured and cheap.
The constant 2/2 beat in almost all of those tunes was tailor made for dj’s though. It made it pretty easy to string a bunch together and mix 'n match.
I stand corrected. The bass drum hitting every beat threw me off. I was just outside having a smoke and thought to myself “Maybe it’s actually a 4/2.”. Still wrong, lol.
Ah, the memories. Backstreet’s back was my jam.
I think it works - DM’s early stuff is more of a collection of songs, but albums like Songs of Faith and Violator work well as a unified whole. Same for TransEurope Express by KW. Talking heads, yep, for sure, especially the earlier stuff. Kraftwerk is certainly one of the most influential bands of the postwar period, hands down. Anyone who plays synths is gonna have been influenced by them, if not directly than indirectly.
It’s basically the 4AD supergroup side project, so there isn’t a single set of artists (other than people on the label). It’s rotating except for Ivo Watts-Russell. They do covers interspersed with instrumental bits. The first album has Howard Devoto, Gordan Sharp, Lisa Girrard, and Elizabeth Fraser on much of the vocals. I’d suggest Blood as a great example of an album that holds together well from them (although they all do). That has Kim Deal and Tanya Donnelly among others.
Just because that wasn’t your reason for disliking the music doesn’t mean it wasn’t a driving social force. And it might have seemed cheap to you, but that’s not true for everyone. It is pretty true that music that appeals to certain demographics (teen girls, gay community, black community, etc) tends to be more derided in the culture and taken less seriously.
I wasn’t trying to deny that. I guess I just felt a little defensive.
#notallwhiteboyrockfans
Yeah, no worries. I can understand feeling a little defensive. I hope you know it wasn’t remotely meant as a personal attack or an assumption that you’re racist or homophobic.
Just remember that when discussing structural racism, it’s not about necessarily pointing out individual acts of racism, just trying to better understand the structures that perpetuate it. That most certainly happened in the recording industry, with wealth generated by often black artists going up the industry to create wealth for white label heads.
And of course not everyone who disliked disco was acting out of some deep seated racism or sexism, But I think that was part of the whole thing, really.
I thought this was a pretty good take on the whole “disco sucks” backlash (that was largely driven by a mid-western shock jock dj:
But I certainly don’t want to suggest you run out and get a leisure suit and start doing the hustle if that’s not your thing!
Which, as the Grauniad article you posted mentions, culminated in just the kind of debacle you’d expect from a movement that appealed to bigoted knuckleheads:
As counterpoint, here’s a great Whit Stillman moment on the topic:
Meanwhile, Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was a massive global hit! Still one of the top selling albums. It went like 16X platinum in the US alone. People liked disco. ABBA were monster sellers, too. I’d guess they probably sold more records than any other Eurovision winner in the history of the contest.
It’s weird, because why you like something is so personally, yet, so very shaped by social, cultural, and corporate forces, that it’s hard to untangle and pin it all down. None of us are immune to the influencing machine of the culture industries, but we can all shape these industries probably more easily than just about any other industry on the planet. It’s such a weird phenomenon that I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the bottom of it.
Not that there’s anything wrong with 2/2. Oh wait… saw that as 2/4.
Tom Smucker had a good writeup (IMHO) about the disco era in an old Rolling Stone book. I started typing up an excerpt here the other night but other responsibilities intervened. Basically, Smucker describes rock’n’roll as having largely become the domain of white males by the mid-1970s, then disco comes along with its R&B/Latin hybrid (and appealing to both those audiences). Its roots were in gay culture (e.g. at Fire Island parties), although with The Village People, not everyone got the joke/reference of YMCA etc. And Saturday Night Fever (almost*) completely avoids disco’s gay context. Smucker also goes on to point out that if disco lyrics fixated on people as sexual objects, then at last they’re available objects, as opposed to targets for conquest.
I’m not sure it all holds up but it’s a good defense of disco written around the time of its ostensible demise, right about when this gag appeared in Airplane:
Lol, yeah, not much chance of that. Although I did get out and stumble around the dance floor a time or two, back in the day. The ladies liked it so…
Nice rendition. She’s good.
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