Tell Him I'm Not Home

Being out of the reach of any telecommunication device for a week feels incredibly indulgent in this era of constant contact and interminable twitter. It can also create a nostalgic yearning for the days when a telephone was not a mobile device, but rather tied its owner to a place and provided them with an air of mystery which meant that the owner of a number such as Beechwood 45789, or 634 5789, could choose to not be 'in' when that phone rings right off the wall.

Soul song writers of the early 1960s understood the telephone as a device that could be used as a come-on or a rejection, encapsulating a world of wanting in the miles of wire that linked one person to the object of their desire. Songs that revolved around the telephone generally played on the pleading aspect of that simple phrase, 'Call Me'. Lucky guys or girls could get a 'private number' while unlucky callers could  ask an 'Operator' to connect them with a reluctant lover, although as the great Chuck Jackson understood, you could just as easily get the message, 'Tell Him I'm Not Home'.

Chris Montez and Astrud Gilberto bossa-nova'd their separate versions of the same 'Call Me' written by Tony Hatch in 1965 (Astrud liked 'phones), while Aretha Franklin and Al Green slow soul-stirred their different, self-penned  songs of the same title in the early 1970s, but probably the best-known disco song demanding a telephone chat was co-written by Giorgio Moroder and Debbie Harry. Blondie's 'Call Me' came about because Donna Summer didn't want to work on a song for a 1980 movie titled American Gigolo (she was a devout Christian, and was already regretting her moaning performance of 'Love To Love You Baby'). Donna's loss was Debbie's gain, and the song hit the top of the charts around the world. Blondie had demonstrated their penchant for telephonic communication in 1978 with 'Hanging On The Telephone', of course.

Like all the previously mentioned songs, Blondie's 'Call Me' is a cry to a distant lover to get in touch, albeit expressed to a slightly more uptempo backing than Aretha, Al, Shirley Brown ('Woman To Woman'), Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes ('Miss You'), Bootsy Collins ('What's A Telephone Bill?'), or Peaches & Herb ('Reunited')—Tavares' 'Whodunnit' mentions a telephone, but only in order to "call Sherlock Holmes". It wasn't until the 80s that telephone songs really became dance songs. Sadly, Anita Ward's 'Ring My Bell' has no telephone references in the lyrics.

In 1981 Luther Vandross' debut single (and album title track) 'Never Too Much' added bpm to the telephone's role as instrument of heartbreak and desire. Unfortunately Village People (Mk II) kept the bpm but made the telephone an object of ridicule in 1985 with 'Sex Over The Phone', but thankfully Pet Shop Boys made the telephone an instrument of isolation and abandonment with plenty of bpm in 'Left To My Own Devices' in 1987. More recently of course Lady Gaga (and Beyoncé) have made 'Telephone'. Despite the advent of the cell (mobile) telephone and its promise of 24-hour access, Gaga's lack of receptivity 'in the club' is a negation of human connectivity that echoes Chuck Jackson's 'Tell Him I'm Not Here'. Five decades on and the telephone is still a symbol of imagined, desired, virtual love for something we can't have. So let's dance anyway.

P.S. Anyone got any other telephone-related songs to add to this?

Too Tight To Mention

The events of civil unrest in England last week have been dubbed the 'JD Riots' in some quarters, because crowds seemed to target that sportswear chain above all other stores. JD Sports sell brands usually promoted by sports and music superstars; Adidas, Nike, Vans etc. The chain was started by two Mancunians who spotted a trend among the young male working class of their area who bought leisure and sports brand clothing from catalogues or in upmarket London shops that were far from mainstream garb for young people in the 1980s. They were known as 'casuals' because of their love of clothing made by the likes of Fila, Ellesse, Lacoste and other similarly casual smart clothing brands apparently designed to grace golf courses, tennis courts and mob bosses across America. Casuals loved dancing, fighting and football, usually at the same time: social anthropologists can trace their roots back as far as Skinheads and Mods—all linked through music and clothes, two things which disco conflated perfectly for a brief period in the 1970s.

When British author Nik Cohn handed in a piece of fiction instead of journalism, titled Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night in 1975, it was so convincing to the editors at New York Magazine that they believed he'd actually been into the Odyssey disco in Queens. In fact, Cohn chickened out of entering the club and instead invented his story, achieving a realistic effect in great part due to the sartorial detail of the story (which went on to become Saturday Night Fever).
The original piece begins with the lines, 'Vincent was the very best dancer in Bay Ridge—the ultimate Face. He owned fourteen floral shirts, five suits, eight pairs of shoes, three overcoats, and had appeared on American Bandstand'. The definition of 'Face' came from Cohn's past as a Mod in London, part of a small scene which emerged around 1960 in which young men wore hand-made suits (paid for with wages saved up for as long as it took), button-down shirts and ties, Savile Row-inspired (if not made) velvet-collared Crombie overcoats and Bass Weejun loafers imported from America. The Mod with the sharpest suits and shiniest shoes was forever known as the Ace Face in the crowd. Mods preferred to dance only to American soul records of the pre-Beatles era, the kind of girl groups also favored by the Fab Four (who wore mock-Mod suits). Which is why it made sense to Cohn that any disco-obsessed dancer in New York in 1975 be as smartly dressed as he'd been.

the site of the original Odyssey in Queens

In 1973 The Who messed with the notion of the 'Face' in Quadrophenia, making him a bellboy who had more mirrors on his scooter than anyone else, who wore an SS-style leather overcoat in place of the US-issue Army parka which the second wave of Mods (post-1963) wore to protect their suits from the oil and rain encountered while scootering between London and Brighton. Pete Townshend was both a big fan and something of a pal to Cohn, to whom he owed the inspiration for his Pinball Wizard; Cohn's Arfur is worth the hour or so it takes to read, if you're a fan of Tommy.

The Saturday night rituals ascribed to Vincent in Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night—the posing in the mirror, the imagining himself as Pacino or Lee Van Cleef, the hanging and posing with a posse of lesser 'Faces', strutting along the street in clothes too thin and exposing for the hard winter night—were repeated by real-life Vincents in every major Western city in the 1970s.

In Richard Price's Ladies' Man (1978), his central character Kenny Becker is Vincent only a few years older, living alone in Manhattan but just as obsessed with sex, soul and disco music (there's a great scene in the novel describing Kenny getting ready to go out for the night, he starts by 'dropping a Barry White and two James Browns on the machine', and carefully preps himself).
In his hugely successful debut novel The Wanderers (1974), Price had written what amounts to an autobiography about his time as a teenage member of a New York gang in 1963 (he was born in the Bronx in 1949). The novel (and movie, made in 1979) is full of music, all pre-Beatles doo-wop, soul and R&B. There's a scene at a private party in which the girls form a line and dance in formation to the Angels' My Boyfriend's Back, with moves self-choreographed just as much as Vincent's in Saturday Night Fever, and similar in many ways, too. The Wanderers wore a 'uniform' of baseball jackets, quiffs and tight jeans, Kenny favors 'pearl gray continental slacks, a thick wool hot pink turtleneck and my black velvet sports jacket'.

Clothes, music and Saturday nights have ever been a holy trinity for the working man in a modern Western free market capitalist state. As long as the man has a job, he is somebody in society. His wages are spent on making himself look and feel as good as any other wage slave. Mods worked for the weekend; working class Tories the lot of them. Vincent worked (in a paint store) for the weekend buzz he got from dancing, looking good and being watched. Kenny is proud of the money he makes in Ladies' Man (as a door-to-door salesman) but his life falls apart when he deliberately loss his job, and ends with him questioning his sexuality and his wholly uncertain future.

Last week's JD rioters have no job, have no dignity afforded by labor and their primary function as consumers has been denied them by that fact. Is it just bad luck got a hold of them?

Be For Real

Following the murder of Dr King in 1968, several American cities went up in flames as grief found vent in fury and destruction. It was as if people who believed in Martin Luther King's message of peaceful protest sensed the impossiblity in his dream and turned their anger on the physical world from which he'd been ripped. Huge swathes of America were resisting in 1968. Pro-civil rights, anti-war and anti-capitalist protests were many and frequent in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Birmingham and all across the country. As the free market capitalist state matured from the middle of the century it inspired resistance in many parts of Western society, particularly among people who did not fit into designated roles created to help the functioning of the materialist orthodoxy. The arts became the successful media of heterodoxy and  conveyor of a message of resistance.

The blues, rock 'n'roll, soul and disco music spread the anti-capitalist message with seductive beats and subversive message. It wasn't just 'underground' music which preached resistance, either. By 1968 even Tamla Motown had encouraged its pop superstar roster to record 'message' songs such as 'Love Child' by The Supremes, and the psychedelic 'Cloud Nine' by the Temptations. On the night following Dr King's murder of April 4, James Brown was called upon by the mayor of Boston to talk down expected rioters before performing a live televised concert. It worked and Boston was 'saved' from flames of indignation and resistance. In August that year he released 'Say It Loud—I'm Black And I'm Proud' and launched a raft of great early disco recordings in which black pride, anti-capitalist and pro-civil rights messages are forced home with a funky beat and honking horn sections.

The recent events in London reminded me of the anti-materialist revolution of the 1970s (which went on to include punks and post-punk funkers of the 1980s), but not in a good way. It's depressing to watch 'rioters' using the cover of an ostensibly legitimate protest at police and state repression in order to ransack stores for products which they can't afford to pay for. The looting is inevitable but the people risking their lives and liberty for shoddy shoes made by slave labor in China do so in order to either show off their swag, or sell it on eBay. Everything taken by looters should have been piled high on the police cars burning in the streets. Why is there no real questioning of the status quo going on here? The London rioters are not volubly questioning the ruling doctrine of capitalism, and in their pilfering they are acting in support of a value system which gives material goods precedence over dignity. The rioters who looted acted like customers who have, for no reason of their own, malfunctioned and are unable to carry out the only role for which they are trained; to consume. Their crimes however are nothing compared with the bankers, politicians, businessmen and strategists who ensure that the 'free market' orthodoxy persists even in the face of obvious evidence that it is failing.

Riots of the inner city areas in America in the 1960s and '70s, and in the inner city areas of England in the early 1980s saw destruction of the slums which people were forced to live in because of their economic inability. The result was a rebuilding of homes and a focussing on the problems faced by residents of those areas. Riots on retail streets such as those of yesterday will only see plans to exclude the economically distressed from those streets drawn up by owners of the retail outlets. We might see plans for the reduction in police budgets ripped up when businesses scared of losing income by forced closure bring pressure to bear on the government of England which no-one voted for. They'll need to increase 'security' in retail areas.

Sadly, any further exclusion from consuming for the rioters is likely to hurt far more than the erosion of civil rights or the National Health service which their 'government' is forcing through. What people need today is a renewal of the message from forty years back, a message which you can dance to.
As Teddy Pendergrass puts it in his spoken word riff in Be For Real; 'don't make your own brothers and sisters feel bad…as long as you live, as long as you with me; be for real'.

The Dialectics of Disco

While researching Disco; The Times; The Music; The Era the realisation began to dawn on me that the formalist objection and resistance to the music and movement which spawned the true Disco experience, essentially came from frightened, conservative stooges of the fundamentalist rock music hegemony.  Because disco originated among gay, Hispanic communities and expanded to include people of all races and sexual orientation, it was the very epitome of a dialectic materialism, as defined by VI Lenin; 'it insists on the absence of absolute boundaries…on the transformation of moving matter from one state into another, that from our point of view [may be] apparently irreconcilable with it, and so forth.' Vladamir Ilyich could rock a mean downbeat, too. 

What the fundamentalist rock absolutists who comprised the odious 'Death to Disco' movement failed to understand, was that they were witnesses to, and complicit in, the end of their times. The predominantly white, male, homophobic and racist mob who invaded Comiskey Park field on the night of July 12, 1979 did so in objection—they thought—to the fact that Disco music had usurped their beloved 'rock' music on America's airwaves. In fact they were reacting impulsively and negatively to the natural process of the mature free market capitalist state which had birthed, exploited and enslaved them. They were outmoded, of no use to an emerging orthodoxy which would inevitably make them and their mistaken teleology extinct.

For that reason, the regrettable events at Comiskey Park resemble nothing as much as a Klan meeting, only without the hoods.  
In much the same way that the current Tea Party Republicans are waving their replica muskets at an inevitable development of materialism in a manner which resembles a congregation of turkeys demanding that everyone eat turkey for Thanksgiving, so invading hordes of 'rock' fans burned vinyl demanding that freedom of speech, sexuality, racial tolerance and artistic expression be banned. 
What would Elvis have thought, one wonders? Where would 'rock' music have been if those hordes of 'rock and roll has got to go' idiots who trashed vinyl and exhibited the same level of reasoned opinion as the Death to Disco advocates had in the mid-1950s?

Of course, after the release of Saturday Night Fever the Disco movement engulfed vast swathes of the suburban first world, from Pomona to Queens, from Basildon to Boulogne and from Vancouver to Rio. As it did so the nature of the movement altered, organically, materially and significantly. Disco flowered from subcultural roots to become the dominant international pop cultural orthodoxy. Previously anti-disco record companies bought into the music-altering skills of people like Tom Moulton and encouraged rock stars and mainstream entertainers  to record unfortunate disco numbers. Any recording which featured a dance beat, strings and electronic drums was considered 'disco' and the general public bought into the idea that Disco began in 1978 and ended in 1985.

In the true nature of dialectics though, there is no beginning or end to disco. And as long as we have Lady Gaga, Disco will continue to exist in a cycle which, 'Is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of being conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation' (Frederich Engels).

The dialectics of Gaga though—in which even heavy metal thunder is transposed onto Disco—is a whole other blog.