Disco fixes every problem we believe./Image: Licensed Adobe stock, Anna Khomulo.
Rock on, red-state reactionaries!
Doesn’t it feel like spring is finally coming, like a long, hard winter is ending, and life is beginning anew? Well, it’s not. Trump is still president, it sucks, life sucks, and so does everything else.
One music genre that seems never to acknowledge life’s difficulties–which is one reason we at Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW) are so enamored with it–is disco! We’ve never understood why it got such a bad rap, no musical pun intended. Two thousand eighteen has seen the revival of many-a-music trend, just one example being the 90s nostalgia -inspired “Finesse” by Bruno Mars featuring Cardi B. Disco’s making a comeback too, perhaps because it was the dominant musical style when the Watergate scandal occurred, and a similar scandal–except much more horrific–was perpetrated by the Trump Admin, though we on the Alt-side of life apparently refuse to believe it did. SYRW’s own Tony Deaf caught up with three bands using disco to call out the Trump Admin.
Friday Night Massacre Fever
Saturday Night Fever, was, of course, the film that sent John Travolta’s career into stratospheric territory. It also happens to be a unanimous favorite of the members of The Aye Gees, a disco tribute band that three Republican ex-Attorneys General formed late last year. John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey, and Alberto Gonzales shared a strong bond based on their professional history and political affiliation, getting together often to talk about their tenures as regressive Republican law enforcers.
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Just after Christmas, 2017, Gonzales and Mukasey made their twice-a-month visit to Gonzales at his current home at El Pasto, an assisted living community for elderly people of Hispanic ethnic origin. “One day we were all sitting around eating applesauce when Ashy [the group’s nickname for Ashcroft] started humming ‘Celebration’ by Kool and the Gang as news of that day’s Trump-related un-awesomeness played on the screen in the home’s community room,” Mukasey recalled. The rest, as they say, is disco-tribute history.
“We’re really proud of ‘Constitutional Inferno.’ It’s about how we’re horrified by the Trump Administration, but we’re pretty much powerless to do anything about it–so we might as well dance! ‘Burn, baby, burn,'” Mukasey said.
C’est Chic!
It’s said that the members of the band Chic, who penned ‘Le Freak,’ another disco classic, when Steve Rubell refused them entry into Studio 54. They went back to their studio and started riffing, and they began singing, “Aaaaaaaaaa–f–k off!” That, of course, was cleaned up to be “freak out,” and the song eventually rose to the number one spot on Billboard’s Hot 100.
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Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards reunited in February, but this time they named their band Le Leak as a nominally-rhyming tribute to Chic and a nod to the constant leaks to the press from behind-the-scenes of Trump’s White House.
“Black Lives Glitter” is the first single from their album “Bad Times” about the life in the Trump Era, in contrast to their 1970s record “Good Times,” which was about an altogether more innocent time.
“We just hope that as our nation internalizes the vital message of the BLM movement–one that is so important as Trump and his government advance the opposite position–we can also point out that black lives are fabulous and sparkly, too,” Rodgers said.
Ooh-Wuh, Ooh-Wuh!
The mid-tempo, smooth-as-caramel song “Ladies Night” inspired Kool and the Gang to get back together and record “First Ladies Night.”
“Bobby called me and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we recorded a track letting Melania know that if she leaves her nasty old man, we got her back, and so does the entire nation, really?” band member George Brown said of fellow Gang-member Robert Bell. He said Bell agreed and the next day the two of them were back in the studio with Ronald Bell and JT Taylor, the remaining two members of the band.
Some of the most unforgettable lyrics from their original disco classic barely needed rewriting to be relevant in 2018.
The original song contained the lyrics, “Romantic lady/Single baby/Mm, sophisticated mama/Come on, you disco lady, yeah/Play with me tonight, yeah.”
“We just changed ‘single’ to ‘hopefully single’ and ‘Come on you disco lady,’ to ‘Come on you Slovenian lady,'” said Brown, laughing.
Music’s appeal is coded into the genetic makeup of us humans, so one never knows what it has the power to do, right, readers? Perhaps Melania will hear this song, march into the Oval Office, and toss her engagement ring in Agent Orange’s face! As Alt-a-holes here at SYRW, we love our dear Trumpykins, but we can’t deny it would be pretty epic if she did.
The Family That Boogies Together
Sister Sledge, who recorded the disco anthem, ‘We Are Family,’ confessed they simply re-released that energetic, joyous disco classic on iTunes unaltered in early March.
“We’ll be donating all the funds to the campaigns of Democratic politicians running for Congress. Blue is the new red, baby!” said Debbie Sledge, one-quarter of the quartet known to fans as Sister Sledge.
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Debbie, Joni, Kim, and Kathy Sledge symbolized sisterhood and togetherness in their first iteration, and they hope they provide a similar inspiration to fans today.
Trump’s White House is the opposite of united or loyal, so the four hope their bond–still strong after all these years–serves as a much-needed antidote to it.
Divided We Fall
If only 2018’s political scandal were as innocent as 1972, right, SYRW readers? That may be putting way too rosily-colored glasses on as we gaze behind us, we admit. But we do think Trump/Russia is a lot scarier than Watergate, because it involves a hostile foreign power whose leaders will poison people with Polonium if they feel slighted! Much as the loony Nero is said to have fiddled while Rome burned, we Americans may have no choice but to do the Bus Stop, the Hustle, and the Electric Slide while democracy disintegrates before our eyes. At least we’ll have these fun, fun, fun tunes to do those classic 1970s jigs to, though!
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© 2018 Akbar Khan
