Donna Summer: I feel…

Donna Summer, late 1970s.

… like a startled moose, about to be hit by a truck, in which there is a considerably more startled driver? … like a disco Nefertiti luchador? …. like somebody’s making a transgender blacksploitation biopic of Aleister Crowley? … like I really need to stop taking so much coke and agreeing to these completely mental photo shoots?

This ridiculous picture comes to you courtesy of the fact that I am still researching my disco show for next year. I will bus stop, hustle, YMCA, roller disco, etc. and so will you. Be afraid.

Semi-related note/semi-related eulogy

When Donna Summer died earlier this year, (Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch) Chaka Khan (… Chaka Khan… Chaka Khan) offered this non sequitur tribute to her late friend:

“She is one of the few black women I could speak German with…“

Tausend dank, Chaka! You should get yourself over to Germany, love. There’s loads of women who speak German over there, even with the weird stipulation that they have to be black. What about Boney M, why don’t you give them a call?

Semi-related Afrofuturist error of judgement made by the production team working on Doctor Who in 1979

Doctor What the Fuck?

I believe we were meant to take this look seriously. See also “Grandad, why was there a disco backlash?” In this story the Daleks take the “disco sucks” mentality to the Nth degree, devoting considerable effort to exterminating these Egyptian disco androids. Although the Movellans were armed only with spandex catsuits, a selection of dayglo sex toys and a limited repertoire of stilted dialogue, apparently they beat the Daleks in the end. Henceforth the Daleks grudgingly admitted that they’d been listening in secret to the Bee Gees, Sylvester and Gloria Gaynor all along and actually quite fancied having their head turrets refurbished to resemble disco balls.

“Grandad, why was there a disco backlash?”

Staying Alive: Travolta bears some responsibility but I suspect he could go for the Nuremberg defence here, because a large number of people must have made numerous unforgivable decisions in order for this image to come into being.

Answer: Because no matter how bad disco cash-ins got (Staying Alive, disco version of the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Xana-fucking-du), somebody always somehow managed to find a way to make something even worse. I have a certain fondness for disco music and style, including some of the stuff that’s entertaining but nonetheless still was and is undeniably not very credible. Both the camp, silly futuristicness and the genuine sense of homo, hetero and bisexual freedom had a massive and in many ways a very positive effect on Western culture and the whole world’s culture. Disco was an enormous influence on Bollywood musicals in the late 70s and early 80s, for example. The same goes for disco’s unjudgemental and/or indiscriminate fusion of black and white musical or cultural influences, and its parallel mixture of black, white and other participants or fans… but if disco had stayed alive (see what I did there?), sooner or later I think it would have escalated into some kind of cataclysmic cultural singularity of awfulness, powerful enough to negate and annihilate the very concept of culture.

And frankly, The Apple is pretty close to being exactly that kind of Strangelovian disco doomsday device.

Footnotes:

1. Startlingly prescient vision of 1994, an unthinkably remote epoch from when this film was made in… er… 1980. And you shall know you are in the future by the squads of disco nuns, and all the real cops and bikers shall be as camp as the pretend ones from The Village People. The perpetrators of this film weren’t wrong about one aspect of the future, though: “the world is controlled by one power: THE APPLE.” True. WHOOOOOAAA PRAISE THE APPLE and their full range of devices, apps and accessories including Mac, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, Final Cut, Safari and iPad.

2. “I waaarntered tooooo rerlease Biiiiibiiii frohom herrrrr contrrrrrract” [BEAT.] “Cheers.”

3. “I’ve never been so high in my life!” [FOR NO APPARENT REASON HER BOYFRIEND CRASHES THROUGH A WINDOW SCREAMING.]

4. “A special experience in movie-going entertainment.” Yes, well, that’s one way of putting it I suppose.