Tag: music-history-tag/features

Nile Rodgers could see the backlash gathering in April when he told Rolling Stone, “Disco is the new black sheep of the family, so everyone has to jump on it”. Two days before Disco Demolition Night, the New York Times published a column called Discophobia, in which Robert Vare equated disco with national decline: “The Disco Decade is one of glitter and gloss, without substance, subtlety or more than surface sexuality… After the lofty expectations, passions and disappointments of the 1960s, we have the passive resignation and glitzy paroxysms of the Disco 1970s.”

Even in a world without “Disco Sucks”, then, pop music would have been ready to move on. In his book Major Labels, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argues that the disco crash made way for new forms of blockbuster dance-pop such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Madonna’s Like a Virgin (produced by a rejuvenated Nile Rodgers), not to mention the rise of hip-hop and the birth of house music. (In a pleasing twist, the first ever house record, On and On by Jesse Saunders, was co-written by Vince Lawrence, who had been an usher at Comiskey Park on 13 July 1979.) Far from dying, dance music became more innovative and diverse. Modern club culture is indebted to the rise of disco but also to its fall.

This is not to deny the toxic currents of racism, misogyny and homophobia that erupted at Comiskey Park. Dahl and his Coho army certainly wanted to kill disco, but they should not be credited with doing so. As a ubiquitous consumer phenomenon, disco was destined to collapse. As a form of music, and a fine way to spend a Saturday night, it lives on.

The Saint of Second Chances is on Netflix.

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10. Do You Want to Build a Snowman? (from Frozen, 2013)

This poignant song was almost considered too gloomy for Frozen – but it proved a stand-out (as much as the belting Let It Go). It also demonstrated songwriting couple Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez’s forte for unusual blends – from showtunes to meditations on mortality (which would infuse their music for 2017’s Coco). “Each generation is learning about different parts of the human experience,” Anderson-Lopez told me in a 2019 interview. “I was a Psych and Theatre major; I approached storytelling with all of that knowledge of research on shame, what happens when doors of communication are closed, clinical ways that families in crisis can move forward. Songs like Do You Want to Build a Snowman? sung through a door, and Love Is an Open Door, are absolutely springing out of a post-’90s Psych background.”

11. We Don’t Talk About Bruno (from Encanto – 21 languages version, 2021)

Disney has historically translated its hits for different territories, with an increasingly fine attention to detail; as musician and historian Alexander Rannie explains: “They might reanimate certain moments for different countries to make sure that a joke lands… they do separate dubs for European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese”. In the digital age, we can easily access the global range of a mega-success like the Colombian-themed Encanto (with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wonderful soundtrack), which has been translated into 46 languages. This clip of Encanto’s biggest anthem brilliantly showcases 21 of them – including English, Spanish, Hungarian, Dutch, Korean, Thai and more – without missing a beat: Disney music as a universal groove.

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