Gay or Eurotrash: Thoughts on Disco After the Proposition 8 Overturn

Here in the United States, the ban on gay marriage has been ruled unconstitutional once again, and so the long debate continues--astonishingly, since the arguments against gay marriage are among the most irrational, illogical, and (despite arguers' insistence to the contrary) obviously bigoted I have ever seen in print.

Of course, there has been a long and sorry tradition of homophobia in America. One aspect of that worth exploring is the relationship between gay and dance music culture.

Over the last year or two, the BPMs of American R&B have risen. This might be the result of a larger cycle; R&B and hip-hop beats were faster in the mid-to-late 1980s, then slowed down to appropriately dirge-like rhythms during the depressing 1990s when MCs were getting killed left and right. Lady Gaga's success with her Euro-influenced pop-dance sound deserves some credit for encouraging Americans to hit the dancefloor, but the growth of U.S. Latin culture over the last decade is perhaps of more significance (Hispanics became America's largest minority in 2003, and faster dance beats have long been a part of Latin pop music tradition).

Whatever the causes, it seems we are becoming a dance nation at last. Our new-found fondness for the 130 BPM song is the latest in a long line of Euro-pop-culture injections that (like the reality TV shows we have cloned from Dutch, Swedish, and UK ones) have taken hold of America over the last decade.

It's about time. After all, Americans invented disco, house, and techno music. But as soon as disco took off we crowned a European champion: Giorgio Moroder, the "Munich Machine" who produced all of Donna Summer's 1970s hits. Ever since, dance music has traditionally enjoyed a far higher level of popularity in Europe, both chart-wise and culturally, than it has in the United States.

Why? Well, you know why, because you know I began this essay with the subject of homophobia.

Disco music emerged from America's gay club scene. "During the late 1960s various male counterculture groups, most notably gay, but also heterosexual black and Latino, created an alternative to rock'n'roll, which was dominated by white — and presumably heterosexual — men. This alternative was disco," states Kelly Boyer Sager's in her general treatment of The 1970s. And so in its very conception disco was associated with sexual, as well as ethnic, minorities. And while a perhaps overly self-aware straightness prevailed over the popular 1977 movie hit Saturday Night Fever, that film explored a minority scene of its own--New York City's Italian-American culture, as the New York magazine article the film was inspired by demonstrates.

So despite its general popularity, disco remained a scene strongly associated with gays (Village People), gay blacks (Sylvester), Italian-Americans (Saturday Night Fever), and other American minority groups.

In 1979, a "Disco Demolition Night" was hosted by a radio station at Chicago's Comiskey Park during a baseball game. The publicity stunt called for disgruntled rock fans to bring disco records to the stadium; the records were to be blown up on the field. A crowd chant of "disco sucks" led up to the explosion. Afterward, rock fans took to the field and a surreal riot (of sorts; no one was injured) followed.

Wrote the New York Times in a reflective piece, "[Chicago DJ Steve Dahl] and his followers resented how disco threatened rock ’n’ roll." That thought is left undeveloped. How did disco in any way threaten rock 'n' roll? How does any genre of music threaten another? Craig Werner, in his book A Change is Gonna Come (as quoted in this Independent article) summed it up: "The Anti-disco movement represented an unholy alliance of funkateers and feminists, progressives and puritans, rockers and reactionaries. None the less, the attacks on disco gave respectable voice to the ugliest kinds of unacknowledged racism, sexism and homophobia."

In other words, disco was logically as much a threat to rock 'n' roll as gay marriage is a threat to the institution of marriage.

Disco remained popular for a few more years in Europe before it gave way to other sub genres of electronic dance music. But in America, the stigma of disco as a gay- and other minority-based counter-cultural movement warped and distorted white America's perception of the club sound for three decades. While America's gay scene rallied around house music, and more underground-minded sorts sniffed out warehouse raves, average Americans missed out on a lot of the fun enjoyed in the UK--no acid house summers of love, no sight of worried television reporters bemoaning the dangers of the drug-infused hardcore techno rave scene, no Gatecrasher style Euro-trance explosion in 1999. But if the latest crop of U.S. dance pop singles are any indication, perhaps we are finally putting that bigotry behind us. Put on your dancing shoes, America.

Vote for DJ King Pigeon

Voting has opened for the DJ Magazine top DJs poll. Please vote for me, DJ King Pigeon.

I certainly need more help than DJ "I'm not Dead" Tiësto does. But neediness is not a good enough reason to solicit your support, so let me do something novel and list my qualifications:

1) Ambitious mixes like this one, which promote the whole of the European music scene (and beyond).

2) Articles written to draw attention to music acts that rarely receive English-language promotion, such as this one and this one.

3) A decade-long history of supporting and spreading the word about under-represented music scenes through blogs, parties, and social networking websites.

4) I'm kinda cute. I mean, check out my beautiful red eyes in the picture above.

I don't have the impeccable fashion sense, the globe-trotting lifestyle, or the fancy cars enjoyed by the top DJs, but isn't that really the point in voting for me? It's time to upset the status quo!

Vote for DJ King Pigeon. :-)

Selena Gomez

Another item to add onto the long list of things Selena Gomez and I have in common: we've both been to Budapest.

Mark Ronson & The Business Intl feat. Q-Tip - Bang Bang Bang

This is the second Mark Ronson song I've heard in the last few weeks that I like, and it's my favorite of the two. Plus, a terrific video to go with.

Set 32: From Midnight to 3:30 AM

At long last, my latest DJ set featuring songs representing many different voices in Europe (and some other places) is finished. You can download it from here.

I began to write an essay about what goes into making such a set, but several paragraphs later I abandoned the effort, largely because the more I went on about my "philosophy of dj'ing" the more I sounded like a total twat.

Bottom line: 66 songs in 3 hours 40 minutes, enough to keep a party moving from, as the title says, midnight to 3:30 am--and then a little bit more, because I always love to give just a little bit more.

Edward Maya's "Stereo Love" Gets a Second (At Least) Cover Treatment

Edward Maya's "Stereo Love" (feat. Vika Jigulina) appeared on the Romanian charts in May 2009. When I visited Kiev, Ukraine in January 2010 the song was blasted everywhere. The tune steadily conquered dance charts throughout Western Europe (for more on the Romanian roll-out strategy, check out this interesting recent Reuters article). Now it's being covered for at least the second time.

Here is the original version:



Dancelovers (feat. Dominika) released a version which I first heard in April 2010. It is a nearly note-for-note clone of the original, but performed in the Hungarian language. It sort of makes sense to redo it in another language if one imagines that there is an audience that would appreciate that.



But this week, on the Radio One charts, I find this useless remake charting. It's done in the same style as the original, and in the English language, also like the original. The English is stronger and more front-and-center, and I will always have a spot in my heart for Velvet ever since hearing her trashtastic take on "Rock Down To (Electric Avenue)," but this is just not worth the effort, in my opinion.



If you know of more covers of "Stereo Love," please post links in the comments area.

Eurodancehits.com is Closed

25 July 2010 -- The website, which seems to have nine lives, has been restored.



As I was preparing to add (another) link to the website from my own, I discovered that Eurodancehits.com had closed in June. I don't know the details; the most I have read about the subject came from this bulletin board. The poster, who had worked extensively on the Eurodancehits.com site, advances the idea that the site's webmaster, Kris, was exhausted and disheartened after battling a barrage of homophobic comments posted to the discussion forums (a lot of HiNRG compilations were promoted on the site, including the unabashedly gay-marketed Let's Hear it for the Boy comps).

On other forums, some suggested that the site had simply withered away, rendered increasingly irrelevant as sites such as MySpace and YouTube emerged. Kris's message reads "It is time to move forward," perhaps an acknowledgement that the web site had become mired in the past. I can only speculate.

What I do know is that it was a great website. I discovered Eurodancehits.com for myself back in 2001, shortly after I had become addicted to streaming Romanian top 40 radio on the internet (which had been the gateway into my whole Euro music fixation). I was delighted by the massive body of reviews and music samples the site provided for a sound that was, at the time, brand new and extremely exciting to me.

After finding the site, I spent a giddy and extraordinarily happy couple of weeks digging through its archives. It was then that I was introduced to some of my all-time favorite songs, such as Mauro Picotto's "Like This Like That" and Angelic's "It's My Turn." It was where I first heard Scooter, those gleefully unapologetic village-idiots of hardcore dance whose music continues to damage my eardrums today. It also gave me my first taste of Infernal (the song was "Sunrise," a big trance tune quite unlike the more Eurodancy stuff that would follow from them). The site also taught me about pop obscurities of dubious talent such as fem@le, whose cover of J. Geils Band's "Centerfold" is...something else. The music video archives gave one a then-rare opportunity to see how European dance music was being marketed to its overseas audience. I still have several of those Real Media files burned to DVD.

I don't know him, but Kris was clearly a very accommodating person. When in 2003 I wrote in to inform him (just because I thought, hey, he might be interested) that one Scooter song on a recently-reviewed album was a reworking of Liquid's "Liquid is Liquid," he swiftly inserted my comment into the review and thanked me by name.

My favorite aspect of the site was its reviews of singles, but as time went on fewer and fewer of these were posted, until eventually, sometime in the mid-2000s I believe, the singles section ceased to be updated. This struck me as odd because dance music is a singles-driven market. That was the first time I worried about the site's future and wondered what was going on behind the scenes.

Review focus by 2006 had shifted towards compilations, and generally things there were limited to a few series: the aforementioned Let's Hear it for the Boy HiNRG series, which, to be honest, was often a little too, well, gay for my tastes, but clearly served its audience well, as shown by the series' many, many volumes. And then there were reviews of some epic Euro-trance comps. These appealed to me more. It was here, for example, that I was exposed to such awesome tracks as Dynni's "City Of Moving Waters (Robert Gitelman Remix)."

For many, the discussion forums were the site's biggest draw, but for me, after the singles reviews ceased, my favorite reason for visiting became the Euro mini mixes, which I greatly looked forward to each month. Sometimes the mixes featured classics, and other times they featured a ton of new acts I had never heard of before. The obscurity of some acts could be frustrating for a music fan; it was extremely difficult to find some of these tunes. On the other hand, successfully tracking down a Human Athletic Dance CD single after having heard it on Eurodancehits.com was, as they say, priceless.

The mixes were frantic, with songs blazing past after a couple of minutes apiece, often laced with a barrage of original samples (usually of the motivational shouted variety). This was the sort of place where (and I can't remember if it was actually featured, but it may as well have been) one would hear Dancing DJs' fantastic reworking of Roxette's "Like a Flower." That is to say (if you're not already looking for that song on YouTube), each mix was a sugar rush of pure pounding joy.

Admittedly, I found myself visiting less and less. I spent more time listening to streaming internet radio and checking the pop charts against YouTube video postings. The emergence of Web 2.0 took a toll on the site. Consider Eurodancehits.com's once-mesmerizing video archives of pixely Real Media files. These were abruptly marginalized by the rise of YouTube--a whole section of the site rendered obsolete in a single blow! As television and movie production houses are discovering, the world's attention is becoming increasingly divided. But every few months, right up until today when I found the site closed, I continued to check in on what was going on there, because the site was that important.

It's a huge loss.

I am hoping that Mr. Davis, the poster I linked to above, is not correct, that an entire website of such great musicological value (and dumb fun, which is a compliment) would be shuttered because of a single homophobe's comments.

So I would like to say, Kris, your work as both music archivist and promoter seems too important to be derailed by one hater's (or even a few haters') stupidity.

But if you have moved on because it just wasn't fun anymore, I hear you and I support that. Maybe that's our loss, but you have to live your own life for yourself. And hopefully your gain will become ours as well, if music continues to lead your heart to an even bigger and bolder venture.

In any case, huge, huge thanks for what you gave the world. The passing of Eurodancehits.com is something I will mourn like the passing of a friend. Haha, my friends will probably shudder at that! But no kidding. The site is irreplaceable.

Thanks to everyone who worked on Eurodancehits.com for a great ride.

-----


An interesting addendum, worth pondering if the site really is finished: CubeStat.com values Eurodancehits.com at $20,896.98. So, for any doubters out there, the site possesses more than mere sentimental value!