Village People: Go West : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Recently, seven of the Top Ten singles in America were disco-related. Having made it as the Next Big Thing, disco now faces the challenge of sustaining its popularity against the relentless monotony of its four-beat.

Not since the late Fifties, when the music business jumped on the rock & roll bandwagon, has so much junk been shoved onto the marketplace so hastily. With the obvious exceptions of Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and Rod Stewart's "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?," most of the recent rock-disco crossovers have aimed low rather than high (the Beach Boys' "Here Comes the Night" and Wings' "Goodnight Tonight" being the most egregious panderings). How bright can disco's future be when the year's finest such crossover, Desmond Child and Rouge's "Our Love Is Insane," failed to score because it was rhythmically too subtle— and maybe just too good?

If disco is to continue dominating the singles market, the formula will have to be stretched and improved, or the bottom will soon fall out. Still, there's plenty to be said for disco. It's always healthy to shake up the status quo, especially since, by catching the music business off-balance, this populist upsurge has temporarily forced open the doors of the establishment. Now, having gone corporate, can disco survive its success? Or will it be frozen to death in the name of marketing "science"?

Eurodisco remains disco's avant-garde and deserves credit for having pioneered longer, more experimental pop-album forms that were unimaginable even five years ago. Because it lords the franc and the mark over the dollar and exalts in sound effects as it promotes skin-flick and travel-poster wet dreams. Eurodisco epitomizes subversive pop decadence to many Americans. That's probably one reason why its most ambitious electronic/futuristic manifestations have gone out of style. Though fascinating, they're just too threatening.

The Eurodisco currently in style is a comfortable compromise between science fiction and squeally party music, with emphasis on the latter. Fly Away, the second LP by the French studio outfit. Voyage, is the most ingratiating recent example. A seamlessly stitched collection of luxury-liner tourist fantasies, it leads off with the roar of a synthesizer and a Folies-Bergère come-hither chorus ("Souvenirs"). Fly Away poignantly evokes compulsive escape with a mere hint of menace.

In the strongest cuts from Gino Soccio's debut, the Canadian composer/producer/instrumentalist echoes Eurodisco with short, zingy synthesizer licks and abstract chant. Soccio forgoes Eurodisco's soft-focus glamour for a Spartan, gymnastic sound that relates sci-fi to high-tech fashion. Outline is tugged, marathonlike disco music, as calculated as it is trendy.

Both garish and accessible, "The Chase," a lengthened excerpt from Giorgio Moroder's Oscar-winning Midnight Express soundtrack, is a brilliant example of pure Eurodisco at its spaciest and most tuneful. Here, even more than in his work with Donna Summer. Moroder plays the mad scientist of the synthesizer, mingling technological nightmares and savage carnival humor.

The Village People are mereasingly turning Eurodisco into low camp. "In the Navy," a mock recruiting song with a John Philip Sousa beat and an S&M subtext, is neither as catchy nor as provocative as "Y.M.C.A." Though Jacques Morali's goose-stepping pastiche of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff's productions for the O'Jays remains as glossy as ever, Go West's martial rhythms and bullish choral pageantry strain beyond parody into farce. This isn't dance music so much as Busby Berkeley-style disco jingoism targeted for Broadway.

Like Eurodisco, American R&B disco has become noticeably more conservative in the past year and a half. While R&B disco has yielded dozens of first-rate singles, it's produced no great albums (aside from anthologies) and almost nothing that challenges Gamble and Huff's best work. Gloria Gaynor's Love Tracks, a potpourri of post-Motown pop-soul formulas concocted by writer/producers Dino Fekaris and Freddie Perren, is forgettable except for its extraordinary single, "I Will Survive."

The success of "I Will Survive" is the most convincing evidence yet that a long-lined narrative song needn't be chopped to pieces by disco rhythm. Fekaris and Perren's other hit collaboration, Peaches and Herb's 2 Hot!, is a slick collection of pop-soul hooks by professional lovebirds in disco drag. This short-form bubblegum with a beat—the antithesis of Eurodisco's open-endedness—harks back stylistically to Motown but lacks the spiritual animation of prototypes like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.

Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, another top R&B-disco production/writing team, seem more like minimalistic aural interior decorators than songwriters. C'est Chic perfected their polished signature sound, which echoes Thom Bell's classic Spinners discs. Voices and strings hang like a satin backdrop behind Edwards' elegantly defined bass and Rodgers' scrubby guitar. "At Last I Am Free" is almost Eno-esque in its spareness—a haunting dirge for mannequins.

On Sister Sledge's We Are Family, Edwards and Rodgers lightly embellish the same sound with funky trimmings. Unlike Chic, who recalls the Fifth Dimension vocally, the four Sledge sisters have real soul power, which adds welcome emotional depth to such posed ennui as "Lost in Music." The title track, beautifully sung by Kathe Sledge, is a near-perfect fusion of gospel fire and disco cool.

Intensity, humor and dramatic flair are qualities that Sylvester, the San Francisco-based androgyne, possesses in reckless abundance. The highlight of Stars, his follow-up to last year's Step II, is a feverishly eccentric, ten-minute version of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's standard, "I (Who Have Nothing)." With its angular string chart, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink percussion and lyrical gender scrambling ("She gives you diamonds"), this poor-boy's lament becomes a glittering banshee strut. If nothing else, Stars confirms Sylvester's status as disco's reigning personality voice.

For all their craft, none of these records sustains the transcendent balance between the spiritual and the mechanistic that Gamble and Huff struck in the early Seventies and that the Bee Gees rediscovered in 1977 with Saturday Night Fever. (This is ironic, since the relative slowness of the Bee Gees' movie score doesn't conform with the rigid guidelines for disco that were devised after the film became popular.) If disco remains an almost totally disposable music, it'll be because its creators, having opted to concentrate only on the sure thing, will have smothered to death the wild child they so lovingly helped bring into the world.