“Disco Sucks” goes the old adage. But does it really? For a few years in the seventies disco ruled the charts and presumably no one was ashamed. Then punk struck and four-to-the-floor suddenly sounded offensively obsolete. So harsh was the punks’ contempt that many of disco’s main players are still trying to dodge the label. Witness Nile Rodgers, a dance music pioneer, quixotically insisting in his memoirs that Chic was in all actuality a misunderstood R’n'B band. Even Donna Summer, the Queen of Disco, spent the last three decades of her life distancing herself from that title. While I’ll never warm to The Bee Gees castrati choir high notes, I’ll argue that disco fever left a few gems that deserve to be appreciated on their own merits. Summer, for one, was a better and more versatile singer than her moaning and groaning on Love To Love You Baby would lead one to believe. The main problem with disco, as I see it, was its sheer escapism. It was superficial, it was repetitive, it had zero lyrical content. But it was fun. Today dance music has come full circle from reviled to inescapable, ruling the airwaves as it hasn’t in decades. The time seems right to finally start appreciating the glitzy fun of Sister Sledge, a group whose only goal in life was to make you dance.
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