Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  The most charismatic players in the Bronx of the mid-1970s were both in their late teens. Clive Campbell had grown up in Jamaica, where the disc jockey was not just a supplier of music but a battle-hardened warrior. Kevin Donovan was a Bronx native, who at 16 had already bypassed the neighbourhood gang culture by forming the Mighty Zulu Nation, a collective of street kids who saw music as the key to harmony on the streets. Donovan was known to all as Afrika Bambaataa, a name he coined after a trip to Africa. When he gathered a crowd around him, fearlessly crossing the borders of gang turfs, his purpose was to raise consciousness, spinning records and spreading unity. ‘When the punk rockers first11 came to the Bronx River and started mixing with the black and Hispanic kids,’ he recalled, ‘people thought there’d be trouble. But there wasn’t. It was peaceful.’ Meanwhile, Campbell had rechristened himself Kool Herc, and his aim was to create a righteously funky wall of sound, which none of his competitors could match. In the foundation myth of hip-hop culture, Herc’s birthplace was a party hosted by his sister Cindy in the basement of their building. The handwritten invitations boasted that this was both a ‘Back to School Jam’ and ‘A DJ Kool Herc Party’ – 25₡ admission for the ladies, twice that for the men, running 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. on the night of 11–12 August 1973. All Herc did was play records, and keep his sister’s friends on the floor; but in the history of hip hop, this event has assumed monumental significance, a banner proclaiming: It Begins Here.

  Yet neither Bambaataa nor Herc had envisaged the technical innovations that would soon be achieved by their peers. Herc learned to cue up records on parallel turntables, and switch between them, but his cross-mixing wasn’t an exact science, and often the beats didn’t match up. Enter another immigrant from the Caribbean, Barbados-born Joseph Saddler, who dubbed himself Grandmaster Flash for his skill on the decks. His equipment allowed him to fade or switch at will across his decks, while experiment yielded another gift: ‘I found a way to start12 the first record with my hand physically on the vinyl itself. The platter would turn but the music wouldn’t play because the needle wouldn’t be travelling through the groove. However, when I took my hand off the record … BAM! The music started right where I wanted it.’

  Flash’s protégé, Theodore Livingston (alias Grand Wizzard Theodore), had the eyes and hands of a brain surgeon, able to replace the needle on a vinyl record in exactly the right spot without fail – even, in a triumph of self-belief, while wearing a blindfold. But his most enduring addition to the art of the record spinner was the invention of what became known – rather misleadingly – as scratching. This did not, despite its name, involve a needle being dragged horizontally across the grooves, thereby risking permanent damage; instead, Theodore would grab the outside of the record between his fingers as it was playing, and reverse it against the motor, letting it slip forward, dragging it back, until time and music were dislocated. Precision was the key, once again: the disc had to be handled as a percussion instrument, which would finally be released in perfect tempo with the original groove. With these interventions, the purely mechanical process of playing a record gained a human component – technology in service to its guardian, sound to be manipulated and reconstituted with the same ease and bravado that a guitarist would use to shape the howl and roar of feedback.

  Beyond these distortions of the ‘wheels of steel’, the South Bronx added an equally revolutionary element to the simple spinning of a record: the human voice. DJs had always been able to impose themselves on their audience – to convey information, or even to reel off a sequence of catchphrases and dedications, setting their personality at centre stage. Jamaican sound systems extended that tradition into a seamless blend of sound, the operator participating in the music, responding to it, cutting across it, being in it. Likewise the most flamboyant and egocentric of American radio DJs, such as Cousin Brucie, or Rosko, for whom the man was the show and the records simply the entourage. As the Bronx DJs extended their reach from a back room to a city park or square, they would pepper their music with grunts and shout-outs, encouraging the dancers to get down with the rhythm, move with the flow, all the clichés which fell off the lips of anyone with a deck at their control. Soon there were others alongside them who were more fluent, and the DJ became half of a double act: the bringer of sound with the master of verbiage, one controlling the groove, the other heightening the atmosphere. The deck-master was still ostensibly the star. But gradually the MCs began to ease them aside. Soon the crowd would be focused on the man with the microphone, exhorting, shouting, teasing, hyping the magic of the music, while the guy with those hard-learned skills of turntable manipulation stood silent alongside them. ‘With this seemingly unremarkable13 shift in microphone placement,’ wrote Mark Katz, ‘the relationship between DJs and MCs began to change. The DJ was no longer at the centre of the hip-hop universe; a golden age of the DJ was coming to an end.’ But before hip hop could step out of the Bronx and become a global culture, another industry had to move over – one that was still in its moment of creation when Kool Herc soundtracked his sister’s party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

  Such has been the impact14 of the discos of late that today the ‘sound’ has completely usurped the performer. It doesn’t matter who’s singing as long as that dancing beat is there.

  Roger St Pierre, NME, 1976

  The disco sound is a sound15 I abhor. It’s one monotone driving beat. It’s as if the human race is a bunch of cattle that’s got to be given a beat to move to.

  Record producer Richard Perry, 1976

  ‘The sensation that’s sweeping16 the nation’, explained the magazine Black Music in December 1973, ‘is “party” records (“party, party, party” must be chanted monotonously over a tight and right rhythm section) and “whistle blowing” records (where whistles are blown over a similarly funky rhythm section).’ Exemplifying both trends, the writer concluded, was ‘Funky Stuff’ by the black Jersey City band, Kool & the Gang. Their saxophonist, Dennis Thomas, admitted a year later: ‘We just got carried along17 on the disco thing. The truth is, most of us don’t go to discos, people had to tell us about the whistles and stuff … Most of us are very quiet guys … Partying every night wasn’t our scene. When “Funky Stuff” broke, the whole thing opened up for us. We got to a white audience who’d never heard of us.’

  ‘Funky Stuff’, and its more generic successor ‘Jungle Boogie’, arrived amidst a flurry of hit records which were bursting open the borders of black music. The Isley Brothers’ ‘That Lady’ was a Latin-funk jam which revealed how much lead guitarist Ernie Isley had learned during Jimi Hendrix’s brief apprenticeship with the band. ‘For the first time in my life18,’ reported Vernon Gibbs at an Isleys’ show in New York, ‘I heard a black audience reacting enthusiastically to a loud guitar solo.’ Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘Evil’ channelled the psychedelic Latin rock of Santana. ‘Ecstasy’ by the Ohio Players kept throwing off its centre of gravity, each new layer of sound adding to the glorious sonic confusion. Most experimental of all – and No. 1 on both the US Pop and Soul charts – was Eddie Kendricks’s ‘Keep On Truckin’’, which was almost an autopsy of the R&B tradition, each constituent part held up for display and then thrown away as if it would no longer be required.

  Black identity – or at least its musical representation – was also in flux. There was music from the ghetto, signalling out: the ‘blaxploitation’ soundtracks of Curtis Mayfield, or Stevie Wonder’s ‘Living For the City’. More voices came from the suburbs, stretching hopefully across the racial divide – the remnants of Berry Gordy’s crossover dream from the 1960s. Or from the bedroom, zooming in like a voyeur’s camera: the erotic tingle of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’, and the pillow talk of Barry White’s ‘I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little Bit More’. Or from the streets, where Latin-funk band War (in the person of Papa Dee Allen) described themselves as ‘anarchy in music’ before delivering a manifesto that would be echoed in Britain later in the decade: ‘We would like to think19 of our
selves as an extension of the people. The people look up to stars, but they look us in the eye.’

  Then there were the existing stars, who – like the Rolling Stones a decade earlier – wanted to celebrate the power of black music in the white community. Elton John and David Bowie were slowly working their way towards their respective destinations of ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ and ‘Young Americans’. The Electric Light Orchestra had abandoned their ambition to out-Pepper the Beatles by creating ‘Showdown’, which (lead vocal aside) sounded like a Florida funk record. Strangest of all, perhaps, was the example of the Osmonds, now working with an African-American soul arranger/producer, whose ‘Let Me In’ demonstrated how smoothly the sweet-soul sound of Philadelphia could cross from black to white. (It also, incidentally, perfected the ‘boy band’ balladry which would fuel teenage crushes throughout the 1990s and beyond.) Within a year, it would be possible for the sardonically named Average White Band to propel their Scottish brand of funk high on the US soul charts.

  Even more alarming for the record industry than racial ambiguity was the potential for hits to be created on the dance floor. ‘Soul Makossa’ by Manu Dibango (from Cameroon) wasn’t even on sale in America when David Mancuso began to play it at Brooklyn loft parties, arousing a demand for non-existent product. If DJs could conjure hits out of obscure African funk records, then the market was escaping the record companies’ control. Like every other jolt to the status quo, the explosion of ‘party’ music made the business of hit-making impossibly unreliable. Out of nowhere, a maverick producer such as Bob Crewe could reinvent celebrity hairdresser Monti Rock as the flamboyantly camp Disco-Tex & the Sex-O-Lettes, whose ‘Get Dancin’’ both celebrated and parodied the gay culture which had triggered the dance-club scene. Partying was no longer a mere pleasure dome: it was a statement of identity, or potential identity, which could find gay men and straight women, blacks and whites, parading in near-identical displays of sexual daring.

  The lord of dance-floor eroticism in 1974 was Barry White, entrepreneur, arranger, producer, songwriter, keyboardist, vocalist – and sex symbol. Dismissed in the press as ‘the first disposable King20 of Muzak’, the gargantuan White both controlled and liberated his predominantly female audience, as this description of a 1975 concert from Black Music illustrates: ‘16 to 60, Barry is hurting21 them where it hurts so good. One girl gasps, “Oh god, oh god”, over and over again as she slides into an almost hypnotic trance … two middle-aged ladies have to be dragged off the front of the stage as they make desperate but futile attempts to clutch at Barry’s velvet-clad trouser legs … Dozens of women leapt from seats and fell on their hero to touch his massive body and kiss his haloed head.’ White induced ‘mass trance-like euphoria of which 100 faith healers would be proud’. Male critics might carp about his ‘endless tedium22’, ‘almost complete lack23 of emotional substance’ and ‘Uncle Tom24’ demeanour, but they weren’t Barry White’s audience. When women danced to his rhythm, they had only one destination in mind: the bedroom.

  Almost every form of black music – funk, Philly soul, the swamp grooves of Florida, jazz, the calypso hybrid from Barbados known as soca, the Cuban-American collage of salsa – could be stripped down to its essentials and sent out as disco: a term that now referred both to a venue, and to the music which shook its walls. It didn’t matter if (for example) the leader of KC & the Sunshine Band was a white man, or George McCrae black; MFSB a faceless bunch of session musicians; Herbie Hancock a jazz genius; or Elton John a white, secretly bisexual Englishman. They were all food for the discotheque, where the only disqualification was if your music didn’t make people want to get up and boogie. Disco could be reduced to something as basic, and irresistible, as Hamilton Bohannon’s ‘South African Man’, which anticipated the house music of a decade hence with its shapeless application of the groove and nothing but the groove.

  This was not a genre which appealed to those who imagined music as anything beyond entertainment. Chuck D of Public Enemy remembered it as ‘the most artificial shit25 I ever heard’. An editorial in the rock magazine Rolling Stone revived an insult from the early days of jazz, describing the ‘disco mix’ as ‘an electronically boosted bass26 and dance beat that would do St Vitus proud’. The white British journalist Tony Cummings, an evangelist for black American music since 1963, complained that disco producers ‘seem totally committed to making27 singers subservient to accompaniments and hit potential – something gauged with the primeval thrust of the pelvis’. Disco, he added, was ‘music evolved to meet the artificial need of a pampered public [who] demand a computer-shaped, computer-age music which can pump the endless joy of “keep dancin’” good times’. But if the desire to dance was an ‘artificial need’, and ‘endless joy’ a sin, then what was the purpose of popular music? Black performers, it seemed, had to express social ills and political purpose. But what if the black audience, faced with prejudice, economic discrimination, and the fallout from the spectacular collapse of the black-power movement, might simply want the same freedom to be carefree that was a given for their white contemporaries? As Ernie Isley of the Isley Brothers insisted, ‘Rock and roll in its purest form28 was always dancing music … all it means is that rock and roll is going back to what its original concept was supposed to be.’ That didn’t prevent the Isleys recording the violently political funk track, ‘Fight the Power’, in 1975; it simply didn’t limit them to that mode of expression.

  If there was something acutely uncomfortable about white critics setting the agenda for black musicians, what about the colonisation of what had been a black art-form by white producers, arrangers and entrepreneurs? By 1975, artists as unlikely as pre-rock vocal star Al Martino and German bandleader James Last were making disco music. Bob Dylan’s protest single ‘Hurricane’ was described by a zealous evangelist of dance music as ‘Dylan goes disco29’. Producer Richard Perry, who had expressed his abhorrence for the relentless sameness of the disco beat, masterminded singer-songwriter Leo Sayer’s entrance into the genre with ‘You Should Be Dancing’. By the end of the decade, the craze or contagion had reached Barbra Streisand, Andy Williams, vaudeville veteran Ethel Merman, Engelbert Humperdinck, Petula Clark. Even Frank Sinatra participated, as his trademark ‘Night and Day’ was retooled for dance consumption, though the one-time crooner was still able to find space within the skintight arrangement to toy with his phrasing as if it was Nelson Riddle’s band behind him, rather than a computerised backbeat.

  Commercial necessity inspired most of these adventures; few of these artists (Streisand aside, perhaps) would have chosen to roam so far from their natural turf. But disco did not define them as it did Donna Summer, an African-American working as a studio background singer in Germany. ‘Love to Love You Baby’ – a title she had suggested to producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte – was extended into a seventeen-minute erotic suite, on which Summer was required to breathe and groan as if transported with sexual delight. ‘I love the music30’, she said when the record was a global hit, ‘I just wished that I hadn’t sung it.’ No matter: Ebony magazine proudly revealed that ‘Disco’s greatest fans are women31 and gays, and both groups seek her out backstage whenever she appears in public. They tell Donna how they listen to her records while making love, and they thank her for helping them discover how, finally, to “let go”!’ Yet Summer herself shared none of their ecstatic liberation; nor was she thrilled by Moroder and Bellotte’s next experiment. To balance the all-too-human emotion of ‘Love to Love You Baby’, they concocted ‘I Feel Love’, set to the futuristic accompaniment of a Moog synthesiser, sending out its rhythms with robotic indifference. Once again, Summer was tasked to convey carnal pleasure, but in keeping with the sci-fi ambience of the track, her consummation sounded as if it was taking place in an icy trance, perverse but curiously alienated. This, one reviewer noted, was ‘the music of the brave new world32’. But for Donna Summer, her fame as an erotic icon reduced her to a ‘commodity’. She tumbled into prolonged depression,
and attempted suicide, before finding redemption in evangelical Christianity.

  If Donna Summer’s success could be interpreted as racial or sexual exploitation (even though she was, in theory, a willing accomplice), the equally rapid transformation of one-time Beatles copyists the Bee Gees found them being accused of perverting black culture for their own ends. The combination of Barry Gibb’s agonised falsetto lead, and producer Arif Mardin’s slick dance grooves, created a sound that was both commercial, and totally unlike their previous work. To sidestep the preconceptions of disc jockeys who regarded them as passé, the group sent out promotional copies of their ‘Jive Talkin’’ single with blank white labels – hiding both their name and their racial identity.

  In the Bee Gees’ hands, disco became the basic language of popular music. Their success coincided with a shift in perception of the discotheque’s function. It was no longer an arena for subverting society’s sexual mores, and breaking taboos, but a proof that one belonged inside the mainstream – or, in select circles, within the social elite. Billboard magazine asserted confidently at the start of 1977 that disco ‘is expected to move purposefully33 forward in the new year to shed its dubious image of freaky phenomenon and assume the more positive mantle of a sophisticated industry … The man or woman behind the music must take control and ensure the absolute enjoyment of the fan who plunked down hard-earned dollars to be entertained, or the club will pass from glittering lounge to abandoned warehouse.’ If that sounded like a recipe for standardisation – and there were now chains of discos across most Western countries – it was quickly followed by the opening of Studio 54 in midtown Manhattan. It was unashamedly a disco, and equally unashamedly intended as an assembly hall for celebrities. On one level, this was merely returning the discotheque to its pre-soul roots in French resorts; on another, it promoted disco music as a vehicle to attract the rich and notorious, nothing more or less. The antics of Andy and Mick and Bianca and Cher commanded regular column inches; their presence outweighed the pleasure of the dance, let alone the substance or otherwise of the music.