Ten Walls? You listening at the back?Īs with any cultural phenomenon, there are many threads which merge to make a fine tapestry. Electronic music emerged from a scene that was alternative, diverse and mostly, very, very gay. The musical narrative that led us to where we are today began over thirty years ago. House music (and all its subsequent forms) wouldn’t be the phenomenon it is today if it wasn’t for the major contribution from an underground scene on both sides of the Atlantic that was black, queer and fabulous.įrat boys, R&B stars and TOWIE types are fist-pumping to EDM with a gusto that’s cheering, but also quite depressing. Ten Walls’ comments revealed an embarrassing lack of historical perspective. LGBT acceptance is still fairly fragile and far from certain outside city centres. There might be gay characters in Hollyoaks, but it’s not all rainbows out there. While the UK’s an apparent bastion of tolerance, Stonewall’s national figures suggest eight in 10 LGBT people have been verbally abused or harassed and one in 10 has been physically assaulted. His bigotry sent chills down the spine of anyone with an open mind and memories of less liberal times.įor many, reading such hateful views can be frightening. The post compared homosexuals to paedophiles and referred to the LGBT community as “another breed”. Then, in a strange move, which in the future will be seen as a case study for career sabotage, he wrote a homophobic rant on his Facebook page. The people who led that backlash, those in mainstream culture, were the Democrats who switched to voting Republican and brought Reagan to power in 1980s.Earlier this year, Lithuanian producer Ten Walls was riding on a wave of global love with his big-room smasher ‘Walking With Elephants’. So disco is a really liberating force and I’d argue that the backlash against disco at the end of the ’70s was in fact an attempt to scapegoat gay men, African Americans and women for the failures of the decade.
Singers like Grace Jones,Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer… the list goes on, had lyrics about survival of hardship and emotional resilience that were profoundly appealing to the gay dance crowd. It’s people who in everyday life were marginalised and faced discrimination who underpinned the energy of disco.įor example, a lot of most influential performers are were African American women who developed a really strong relationship with gay audiences. African Americans, Latino Americans and women – and a mixture of all these identities – all found a way to express themselves within disco. However, the crowds were very mixed in the early years, so a lot of other groups also found a home within disco too. So disco, with its freedom, became a way for gay culture to find an expression. The energy was so high, he started mixing together records so there was no gap. In fact Francis Grasso said his new DJ mixing technique was inspired by this this new crowd. And this new crowd changed dynamic of the dance floor. It was never exclusively a gay club, but they made it clear they were welcome. They had no training, no conventional musical skills, but developed a very refined and receptive sensibility to the culture they helped to create. They were music fans who wanted to play records and barely made a living out of it. The DJs were the organic experts of this culture. It’s an art form we rarely get to hear today. They not only created ten hour sets with strong musical arcs – really immersive journeys – but they’d match lyrical content and instrumental sections. In many ways the disco DJs' skills went beyond what is used now. I would say, looking at all DJ techniques that exist now, 90 percent of them were developed during 1970s disco. DJs then started to explore ways of extending records, say by buying two copies of the same single and then mixing them together. It started with Grasso using a pair of headphones to listen to the incoming record so he could mix the two together and maintain a continuous flow.
They developed all these techniques that would enhance that experience. For example, in the UK right up untill the end of the decade DJs would announce the song names between tracks! The New York DJs knew dancers wanted to lose themselves in the records because of the new form of crowd dancing. DJ mixing techniques, and the rise of the DJ as a new form of musician, primarily started in New York City in the 1970s.