Glee: Saturday Night Gleever pt2

[babydraco]

Do high school kids really currently hate disco? I went to high school in the 90s, and for most of that decade, the 70s in general were anywhere from the hot thing to acceptably fashionable. This 1970s American Girl Doll bedroom is exactly like the furnishings sold to teenage girls in the 90s, it’s so Delia’s it hurts. Now, I can believe that disco has fallen out of favor somewhat since then, but I also don’t believe it’s sunk all the way back down to the levels of rabid hate encountered in the mid 1980s. Would they even really understand the whole “Disco Sucks” movement?

Because we don’t live in a mid 1980s world, even though I also realize that these kids entered their teen years in a much more conservative culture than my teen years were…and that Ohio might be even less hip to what’s hip than the place I grew up in. The attitudes of the 1980s didn’t really come back with the clothes and the music and décor. Disco was largely rehabbed by the 90s revival and while it isn’t big now like it was in the 90s, it’s not evil either. We live in a world where Lady Gaga is one of the top selling musical artists and this song is charting well among kids a bit younger than the characters- the original Selena would’ve loved it, it’s practically a Donna Summer song. Disco rarely ever actually went away, and even when it did, things that were eerily similar rushed to fill the void.

But then people have a lot of weird cultural assumptions about genres of music. A lot of people talked about what a cool new thing Foster the People did with “Pumped Up Kicks”, and all I heard when I listened to it was “this could totally be a Velvets song, it’s almost like he went back in time and stole it from them”. Seriously, from the ironic hipster black comedy of gunning down a bunch of kids because they all wear the same type of shoe, to the backing vocals and particular scratchy bootleg style of the production, Mark Foster even kind of sounds like Lou, although I bet Nico would kill it as well. I wish she was still alive to cover it. It’s a song Lou would’ve written, recorded the way Lou would’ve recorded it and everyone would’ve been like “What’s wrong with you?” because they didn’t get it.

The cast of Glee is largely played by people in their twenties and thirties, so they may have no context for what it was like to live in a world where disco didn’t fling people into uncontrollable rage. Between say, 1983 and 1993, the 1970s were an embarrassment in a way most teenagers wouldn’t understand today. The writers, of course, are a little older than me and therefore were likely preteens or teenagers during that period when you didn’t touch disco with a ten foot glittery pole. But when the characters say “Disco Sucks” they can’t really understand the cultural context that movement took place in, they have no personal understanding of why disco might suck, only that they’ve heard people thought it did. They were just saying it to say it. I know Will tried to make them do disco in the first season, but it was a bad routine done to a particularly unappealing example of the genre and they were all much less confident in themselves in every way.

Furthermore, if anyone liked disco, it’d be this crowd, once someone explained to them what disco was really about. Which Will has never done. Disco is glittery, fabulous, unrestrained and fun. And its original adopters were racial minorities, gay men, and young single women and was originally based on salsa music. In other words, the majority of the Glee club would’ve been huge disco fans if they’d been teenagers in the 70s.

Which was a huge but frequently unmentioned reason why the 1970s equivalents of Puck and Finn were so adamantly against the genre. Oh, disco did eventually get overdone, overblown and annoying (and the clothing did not flatter most adult men unless they had perfect bodies). But much of the backlash against it was actually rooted in the racism, homophobia, and misogyny of young, white, male, straight, fans of hard rock who didn’t understand the phenomenon because it wasn’t about them and what they liked.

Sometimes people will try to argue quality, "disco is brainless and repetitive". Oh, and "I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day" isn't? It extends beyond KISS fans though, into a way of thinking pervasive in the music snob crowds. They think they have good taste in music because they don't like music that's any fun. Because they're convinced that music has to have a point beyond being...like...something for dancing, like the dancing can't be, by itself, a revolutionary act.

Anyone who understands the history of pop music and/or dance knows this is dead frigging wrong, of course.

Rest in Peace, Dick Clark, host of the first racially integrated music and dance show on national American television. He almost lost his job for letting black kids dance on tv.

The original disco people were doing this semi underground thing that was a bit ahead of what the world was ready for. Right now, at least from the examples I've seen it appears that the fashions are for the 1980s, and the early 60s, depending on what type of person you are, but since the 90s 1970s revival came after the 80s, and the 70s obviously came after the 60s, so that means embracing a rerevival of the 70s is going to be on trend again in five or six years. Maybe less, as I said, the 70s never really entirely went away that second time.

As far as Saturday Night Fever itself goes, there’s some messed up stuff in that movie that people who barely even know the soundtrack are unaware of. But maybe the kids have never even seen Saturday Night Fever, they only vaguely know, like, that one song and that the soundtrack is almost entirely disco. So they say “Disco sucks” but they don’t really know disco at all, they’ve never even seen the most influential disco movie ever.