The Blindboy Podcast - DeVitos teapot

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

Disco is the Real Punk Rock Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh Chuckie, our law, you wet Kevins. What is the crack? Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. How have you been? Have you been looking after yourselves? Because I haven't. I went on a three day lash because it was a long weekend and I'll do that once a year once a year i will engage in a wanton disregard for uh my health and go on the lash for three days solid usually around the bank holiday weekend because i had a gig went on a lash and then i had my friend's gig went on a lash and then I had my friends gig went on a lash for that and then continued it slightly into the next day and I feel like shit

but em I don't know I don't mind doing that once a year once a year to remind myself why I only do it once a year

pintless activity. But it does feel nice when you recover from it. Reminds you of what it's like to not have a consistent hangover. God bless. The good news is though, in the middle of this three day lash, I managed to purchase for myself a fully functional otter fountain.

It's a small water feature, which goes, in the catalogue it was called Playful Otters. And it's a little water feature that has a small family of otters on it. and it's a little water feature that has a small family of otters on it and it operates as a fountain which I wanted number one

because it's got a load of fucking otters on it and it's like a little shrine to your t-harn number two it has the continual trickling sound of running water which I find very beneficial

to my tinnitus but eh yeah the pump on it is a bit too loud of running water which I find very beneficial to my tinnitus but yeah the pump on it is a bit too loud it has a vibrating water pump which sounds like I don't know

a very aggressive fridge you know an angry fridge or a fridge that's experiencing some type of existential malaise so I think I'm gonna go online and buy a a much lower wattage

water pump and I'll put that into the statue and then I can reduce the see it's an outdoor water fountain it's meant for out in someone's garden but I'm like fuck that man. I'm turning it into the fireplace. You know.

What's better than a fire. An acrylic otter family. That where water comes out of their mouths. That's what I want. Fuck keeping my hands warm. But. Yeah I'm going to put a. A silent pump.

For indoor functionality. Into the otter fountain. And I will keep you cunts updating on that. Yart. It's what I want to talk about this week. If it's your first podcast by the way. Please go back to the start. Because I'm not wiping any arses.

I'm going straight in I think this week's podcast I'm going to start with a boiling hot take a boiling hot musical take I wish that disco music is the real punk rock. Okay? Now, when we say punk rock in a musical context, it generally refers to, like, you know, the music, punk rock, but it means more than that. It's an attitude, you know? People have described hip- hop as punk rock,

people will describe, I don't know, any band nowadays that seems kind of counter-cultural, you know, when we first came out, doing tunes with bags in our heads, singing songs about De Valera, taking yokes, we would have been referred to as punk rock and it refers to rebellious music and a diy attitude um a fuck you to whatever music is currently dominating the charts or popular consciousness but i am going to i think take you through the history of disco music and this can be seen almost as well like a continuation i did a podcast i don't know which one maybe 16 podcasts back more even actually it was one of the first podcasts but i did a podcast on Northern Soul music and historically this one kind of

it almost kind of takes off where that one left off kind of not in the sense that Northern Soul when it made its way over to England but Northern Soul as in Philadelphia Philadelphia Soul music and Detroit Soul music, you know.

Disco music is the real punk rock, in my opinion. That's my hot take. And this is why. The political roots of disco music. Right, firstly, yeah, firstly, what is disco music? Because it's one of this it's it's a music that's so ubiquitous that it can kind of be referred to any type of tune now can't it but original disco music what really characterized it was

it was it was centered around pure dancing the beat was four to the floor, which is boom, boom, boom, boom. There's not really any swing in it. It's not like funk. It's straightforward boom, boom, boom, boom, four to the floor. Disco music was very happy. It would have strings, you know, it would have strings you know to have an orchestral element and generally a cheerful celebratory music which to be honest we would not associate with being punk rock at all because disco is quite aesthetically pleasing there's nothing jarring about disco music

it's not distorted it's straightforward and aesthetically beautiful but this cannot be said for the cultural roots from which disco emerged if punk rock was the kind of rebellious aggressive voice of we'll say the marginalised working class white communities of New York, the likes of the Ramones, or in London, mid-70s, with the Sex Pistols. Disco comes from the incredibly highly marginalised LGBT community of New York in the late 60s. And to offer some kind of context for this I want to talk about

a place called the Stonewall Inn and the Stonewall Riots this month by the way is Pride Month so this podcast also kind of intersects with the history of gay pride of which Discco was kind of the soundtrack. Being gay or transgender or queer in 1969 in America. Firstly, it was straight up illegal, right? Firstly, it was straight up illegal, right?

Not only that, gay people were targeted by the government, by the American government, in the context of anti-communism, right? There was a thing in the 1950s in America called McCarthyism, which was a very severe anti-communist paranoia. And gay people were targeted by the likes of the CIA and the FBI because they were seen as very easy to blackmail and potential spies for Russia do you get me because being gay was was illegal. Also in 1969, being gay or transgender

was considered a mental illness in the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, which is a manual still used today to, within psychiatry, to classify mental disorders, disorders you know but up until 1973 being gay was considered a mental disorder so these are the three things facing gay people in 1969 it's illegal and you're mental all right in the area of greenwich Village, New York, in the 50s, 60s, it became kind of an unofficial congregative, I'm not saying the word, I can't say it, an area of congregation for gay people and for transgender people Greenwich Village, New York 50s and 60s, you had

artistic movements coming out of Greenwich Village in the 50s, the Beat Poet movement, where writers like William Burroughs or fucking Alan Ginsberg were pretty much openly gay, they were writing about being gay

you know so this all kind of it fostered a climate of Greenwich Village being kind of a haven for queer culture highly highly

underground queer culture and and the Stonewall Inn was kind of an illegal disco bar and it was seen as like

the you know place to go if first of all as well in New York it was illegal for two men to dance together you know

but in the Stonewall Inn you could do this now the Stonewall Inn was by do this now the Stonewall Inn was by all accounts an utter fucking shithole because I don't think they even had they didn't even have running water in there

they had buckets it was not a legal premises as such it was owned by the Mafia not out of the goodness of the Mafia's hearts but because gay bars were illegal the Mafia are the only ones who will actually run it because it's vice, it's illegal vice and they were overcharging for drinks for the patrons

because the patrons were, you know, they could be exploited what are they going to do, it's an illegal bar they were and the drinks down but also gay bars were being raided by police regularly um it started from aggressively from 1964 onwards because there was a mayor in new york who was very conscious that america that new york didn't look like it had a lot of gay people this had all this was already happening in San Francisco he didn't want another San Francisco so police were actively seeking out gay people transgender people it was illegal to dress in

what was considered you know not your gender So they were raiding these bars, but the mafia would pay off the police to prevent raids, or if there was going to be a raid, the mafia would at least know in advance, and this provided a certain level of protection for the gay community. So the Stonewall Inn was the place to be. Now, as well as that, though though with the Stonewall in particular it was seen as a place for the most marginalised in the gay community. Blacks, Latinos, transgender

people, sex workers, drag queens, butch lesbians. the Stonewall attracted these people. Also within the broader spectrum of late 60s US culture,-Vietnam movement, you know, protest and standing up for yourself, standing up against oppression. That was in the water in 1969 so at about half one in the morning 29th of uh or 28th of june 1969 there was a police raid in the stonewall inn and as i mentioned there was usually a tip-off if a raid was to happen you know not only was there tip-offs like the lighting in the store wall in it was it was black lighting so you couldn't really it was very very dark inside there

but if the police were about to come they turned on a special white light so people knew to crack so if you were dancing with another man or shifting a fella stop immediately and most importantly if you were wearing anything even resembling drag get the fuck out the back door that simple because people in drag were targeted the hardest by the police but anyway this night there was no tip-off and it was a full-on police raid caught everyone by surprise now some people were wondering why, you know, how did the police manage to do this? Some people say now that the mafia had stopped giving the police kickbacks altogether because they weren't making money from the bar anymore. What they started making money from, the mafia, were if wealthy clientele, gay clientele, were visiting the Stonewall.

if wealthy clientele gay clientele were visiting the stonewall in particular we'll say lads from wall street who had a few quid who were who were gay and were looking for somewhere to go the mafia were identifying them and extorting them for huge amounts of money or else they would tell their families or tell their co-workers that they were gay so some reckon that that's what happened the mafia moved their operational money to blackmailing these wealthy customers and they stopped giving the police tip-offs they just stopped caring about it so anyway normally what would happen at a raid was everyone was to line up provide their identification and then if there was female officers they would take anybody who's wearing female clothes we'll say they were to go to the bathroom and female officers they would take anybody who's wearing female clothes we'll say

they were to go to the bathroom and female officers would check to see their sex you know and if you were in fact a man dressed as a woman that's it you're getting arrested this night the patrons were just like fuck this and the ones dressed as women were like I'm not going to the jacks no and then lads in the line were like you're not getting my ID people the people in the stonewall that night said no you're not fucking arresting us for having crack no we've had enough so the police kind of started freaking out because i think there was only about four of them and the crowd kind of you know they started to kind of get a bit confident you know um so they all went out onto the street and they kind of they toned up the kind of

the queerness of it you know they like people said know, they got a bit more limp-wristed, they started, you know, flicking their hair, being openly gay, as an act of protest, huge crowds started arriving outside, cheering on the people that were being arrested, so, there was an element of, like the police were there, but it started off with an element of kind of, Like the police were there but it started off with an element of kind of, I won't say fun but it wasn't hostile. Until one of the police got heavy handed with an African American butch lesbian called Stormade the Lavery. And Stormade the Lavery, she's considered the Rosa Parks of the gay community when the police hit her with a baton

for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight she turned to the crowd and said why don't you do something and at that moment an anger came about the crowd and they went apeshit

and in Storm made the Laveray's own words she said it was a rebellion it was an uprising it was a civil rights disobedience it wasn't no damn riot because that's the thing some people call it the Stonewall Riots

others call it the Stonewall Rebellion so what ensued was a huge crowd of gay people queer people transgender people going fucking ape shit throwing coins at the police throwing anything slashing tires of police cars the whole shebang and it caused the police to have to retreat inside the stonewall and the tactical police force which would be like or tactical patrol force to be like the SWAT they had to be called to save the police that were locked inside the stone wall in and this was hugely hugely humiliating for the New York City

police because they just lost you know they'd just essentially been beaten. And not only had they been beaten, they'd been beaten by the most marginalised underdog community in fucking New York City, which was a crowd mostly made up of queer people who were black or Latino. So this was very demoralising for the police, but that demoralisation led to a feeling of victory, a feeling of strength on the part of the gay community. So over the next few nights,

there was even more uprising and even more kind of community getting together and saying, fuck this. And graffiti, putting graffiti on the walls all around Greenwich Village things like drag power gay power legalized gay bars or gay bars you know all this carry on Marsha P Johnson a drag queen African-American drag queen she fucked a bag of bricks through the window of a police car she went on to become a founding member of a group called the Gay Liberation Front and what you have there with the Stonewall Rebellion is that's the roots of gay pride

that's why June is Gay Pride Month it's when the kind of disparate groups of lesbians, gay, transgender, drag queens, drag kings, queer people, they all united under one kind of collective banner and collective identity and said, we exist, we deserve rights, you can't silence us, we're not going away, we've always been here, my life should not be illegal, my, I have a right to exist and to have equal rights to you and that's the start of it and on a side note as well, like lads today I hear, you know, getting pissed off over gay pride, it's like that's the roots of it man you know would you get pissed off you know

it's a founding rebellious moment that deserves to be celebrated forever you know because there's work still to be done but it's what if someone said to you don't celebrate 1916

that would sound pretty ridiculous wouldn't it but that's what the stonewall rebellion is and that's what gay pride is that's its roots very important so stonewall 1969 that is the cultural and political context of disco music because the tunes that they would have been listening to in the stonewall stonewall inn was proto disco music okay it was something happened in the late 60s with soul and funk all right we spoke about philadelphia soul and mot. This very upbeat music that you dance to. Well at the late 60s it started to intertwine with psychedelic culture.

And also Latin music. Cuban rhythms. And I suppose Woodstock was a big Woodstock was a big influence em and the sound of soul and funk kind of just getting a little bit weird do you know

fucking Sly and the Family Stone huge influence em the work of Jimi Hendrix Jimi Hendrix you know bringing Hendrix was rock but he brought a psychedelic sound towards what he was doing carlos santana santana bringing latin rhythms to funk

music all of these things together started to develop into what we would call proto disco music and it was this music. That the blacks. And Latinos. The gay blacks and Latinos in the Stonewall. Were like this is what I fucking want to dance. I want to dance with another man to this music. And drug culture was a big thing you know. They were taking quaaludes.

They were taking speed. They were up dancing all night. To this new type of. Proto disco music. that was characterized mainly by a four to the four four to the floor groove mainly the fourth of the floor i reckon the influence coming from latin percussion but this is what they were listening to and that's pretty fucking punk rock if you ask me do you know whatever about Johnny Rotten coming out of London and you know

the massive marginalisation that he would have experienced in London as a fucking an Irish man living in London in the 70s in fucking council flats and other shit and his anger developed into punk rock but I'm sorry but fucking.

I don't think Johnny Rotten was as oppressed. As a black drag queen in New York in 1969. And the anger of Stonewall. That's the punk rock soul of disco music. Even though disco sounds incredibly happy. And as far from an aggressive rebellion as you could imagine aesthetically that's its heart and soul and that's why disco is fucking punk rock now before i go more in depth let's have a crack at the etymology of the word disco

notorious dead sex offender jimmy saville has claimed to have coined the word disco notorious dead sex offender Jimmy Savile has claimed to have coined the term disco himself I call bullshit on it because he's a fucking spoofer

but what Jimmy Savile claimed was that in the he started using the term disco in the early actually no

mid 50s I think, mid-1950s, gigs in the 1950s, okay, in Britain, it was the show band era, so if you went to your local fucking ballroom to dance or to meet a partner, chances are it was a band, To dance. Or to meet a partner. Chances are it was a band. A show band. Who were a band that just did covers.

Of R&B or Skiffle. And Jimmy Savile was like. I can do a gig. That doesn't need a band. I'm going to play records. Now he was one of the first DJ's. That's a fact. But he claims that.

He would start doing these gigs and he would call them disc only gigs okay so if you're coming to this gig know that you're not going to see a band with guitars it's going to be discs only and then he claims that he abbreviated disc only to disc o um he made this claim in the 70s though when disco was already an established kind of name so i'm calling spoof on that most likely the term disco comes from the french phrase discotheque which referred to like just a library of discs and what makes disco music so well one of the things that makes it really unique is it's the first musical genre really whereby it was it wasn't that much about gigs it was about the music being played on vinyl. In clubs. And this would have been happening in 69. In the Stonewall.

Or. In a club just around the corner from the Stonewall. Called The Haven. Which was another gay club. And. The Haven Club really is. The start of disco. Because there was a DJ there called David Mancuso who was

Italian I believe a gay Italian man but that's an important thing to note about disco like the word disc is important to it this was music that was listened to more on vinyl in clubs than we'll say going to see a live disco band in the early days and of course this ushered in crucial to the disco era the dj it was the first time that it wasn't just like 50s with jukeboxes 60s with jukeboxes but at near the end of it it was like no we now need one person with a collection of vinyl who is going to like like it like i used to always shit on djs you know i used to think ah geez there's no talent in fucking playing music but no me myself having done gigs i started to realise that the skill that a DJ has is it's empathy a DJ must understand the mood

of an entire room they must have phenomenal empathy and they must they engage in a consistent conversation with the audience do you know just go to a wedding where they don't hire it like I've been to one or two weddings where people were like fuck DJjs will just have an ipod place falls on its arse you need someone

with the talent and empathy to read the energy in the room at that moment and know exactly what to do to what to play at what tempo and how to mix it to get that crowd consistently dancing. So that you never leave the floor. And that's what a DJ does. And disco is where we see the birth of the DJ. So disco music itself. It's stylistic origins. It's mechanics. Three real separate influences that make disco music.

What went from proto disco to actual disco three influences were as i mentioned psychedelic sound sly and the family stone that type of crack then the emotional use of orchestras and strings which comes from philadelphia soul and strings which comes from Philadelphia soul right Philly soul was very much about the orchestras also there's a bit of Motown in there you know the slap bang wallop of Motown music and then finally Latin and Cuban rhythms those three things is what created the disco sound. So as I mentioned, up around the corner from the Stonewall, there was a club called The Haven, which was a gay dance club. And the first kind of proper DJ,

or who's recognized as the proper DJ, is a lad called Francis Grasso. And he DJed at Haven. and what Grasso is kind of credited with doing is creating the notion of the set, get a collection of records and that they're not just like a jukebox where you're going there and listening to a lot of songs one after another, Grasso was curating songs side by side to create a real sense of narrative throughout the night to empathically influence the mood of the dance floor. Okay?

And from the behaviour of the likes of Grasso, this would then influence what the early disco musicians were making. Because what they found too was that they were selling their records to clubs. So the musicians started to change up their style to reflect this new audience that wanted to dance to these tunes. this new audience that wanted to dance to these tunes. So that as well, it caused more and more artists to be making songs that had this four to the floor beat. Because if all your songs have the same boom, boom, boom beat, chances are they're all going to get thrown into the set together

so that they mix. It's very weird to go from four to the floor to a more complex rhythm or something with a swing do you get me and that's where we said the style of what then became known as disco comes from to give you kind of an idea of the type of tunes that francis grasso would have been playing um i'll play for you a tiny bit of soul sacrifice by car Santana. And what you have here is, you can hear what Santana, Santana who was kind of a rock-funk musician,

bringing in the Latin rhythms into the music. Thank you. so that's soul sacrifice by carlos santana 1969 and this would have been one of the tunes that they'd have been playing in haven and this would have been one of the tunes that they'd have been playing in Haven and also would have been playing in the Stonewall and from that groove would have come you know a lot of what we would later call we said disco music

another essential thing to disco music was the sound system okay it wasn't just like i said jukebox speakers anymore it was taking the size and the fidelity of the sound system very very seriously this music needed to be fucking loud and records were not associated with loudness not in 69 it was if you were lucky you're a shitty fucking record player at home but playing massive fucking tunes on a massive system that has its roots in jamaica with jamaican

sound systems a lad called cox and dodd but it found its way to new york and expressed itself in early disco another crucial crucial thing to disco music was the creation of the 12 inch vinyl single now singles if you've ever if you've ever fucking seen vinyl singles are very small okay and a full album is massive that's 12 inches that's the size of a plate but something happened by complete accident which was to change how we listen to and experience music now i'm moving on a couple of years to the early 70s and to a nightclub called the loft and a dj called david mancuso um now i might be wrong with attributing this David Mancuso now I might be wrong with attributing this to Mancuso because I'm not sure

and it's hard to find a lot of info about this stuff but like I said albums were being made on 12 inch vinyl large vinyl and then I might have this fucking wrong or right

but here's the gist of it some DJ I might have this fucking wrong or right, but here's the gist of it. Some DJ wanted to take fag breaks during his set, okay? And he was playing albums. So if you think of an album, there's maybe six or seven songs on one side. And he wanted to be able to play a song and leave the fucking, leave the DJ box and go and smoke a fag. So he went to some fella who presses records and said to him, is there anything you can do for me whereby you can make a song longer or something like that?

So what the lad who was pressing the records said is, how about for the crack we put one song on a large 12 inch okay and what this meant is that an extended mix was created a 12 inch is a large uh fucking it's a dinner plate size so you now have one song on one dinner plate sized thing, which meant there's more room for more information. So an extended mix, a song that's maybe, you know, singles were traditionally between two minutes and three and a half minutes long. Now with a 12-inch single,

you can have songs that are eight minutes long, 12 minutes long, the extended mix. So one DJ, it might have been mancuso i'm not sure came to the club with this extended 12 inch vinyl that played long enough for him to be able to go out and smoke a fag and come back to the dj box one of the unintended consequences of this was because you've now only got one song on this physically massive space of vinyl, it meant that the grooves in the record were larger. And because they were larger,

they had much, much higher fidelity. The music all of a sudden became much clearer and way louder to accommodate these huge sound systems and this was an accident so now you had this this music that was fucking pumping out of the sound system and the best quality audio fidelity that has ever been reached is the 12 inch single there's your spotify can't fucking can't recreate that sound, nothing can recreate that sound, the 12 inch vinyl single is the best audio fidelity available, if you have the right needle and the right turntable, the closest thing, if you want to get something close to it and hear how good

12 inch vinyl is, go on to YouTube and look for 12 inch singles in in hd right at the highest setting on youtube and you can hear extended mixes from the 70s and 80s of songs the fidelity is unbelievable you can hear every single instrument while still being really loud there's no compression there's nothing squashing it as such you know i've digressed into some severely nerdy audio talk there now. This is the type of shit that. Gets me very excited though. So from the 12 inch. Fucking singles.

You had this new DJ market. And disco bands started going. We have to make the 12 inch mix now. We have to make a mix. That is. Has a fucking two minute breakdown of just the beat and sure of course the audience went fucking mad for this because they were coked out of their heads you know at this point now in the mid 70s it kind of started to leave

actually now i'm nearly writing out fucking larryvan another hugely important DJ of the mid 70s massively important would be the likes of Larry Levan ok so David Mancoso was the DJ who ran The Loft in New York early 70s and one crucially important thing about The Loft in that in order for the loft to function as this

gay nightclub no drink was served there was no liquor so then Larry Levan opened up a place called the Paradise Garage the same business model no liquor if you've got a bunch of cunts dancing all night

with no liquor, what are they going to do? off their tits on stimulants speed coke the origins of ecstasy you know ecstasy mdma ecstasy was you'd been used as a a kind of a secret drug within psychotherapeutic circles it started to see its emergence in the mid 70s in new york at the likes of the Paradise Garage that's when disco starts to really kind of ramp up the speed you've got Larry Levan seriously mixing tunes to to the point that it's now a creative act he's now a real proper DJ mixing tunes and people would go to see Larry Levan's sets. Frankie Knuckles is another character

of equal importance. But from this underground, incredibly exciting punk rock community of resistance, you know, the gay community, the black community, the queer community,

transgender community, Latino community, all getting together, the queer community, transgender community, Latino community all getting together, the Italian community getting together and celebrating and expressing culture and sexuality through this new type of dance music in these clubs that don't serve drink in a relatively, a more relaxed climate we we'll say, legally, than Stonewall, you have this new kind of thing emerging,

but then naturally what happens is it starts to, you get tourists, you know, it becomes a very, very cool thing. The Paradise Garage became unbelievably cool. So you get tourists, you get straight people turning up, you get rich people turning up you get uh rich people celebrities turning up and that's where studio 54 comes out of disco music had started to get on the radio and become quite popular by the 76 1976 onwards and then you have studio 54 which was a very debauched nightclub but it's the world's it's seen as the world's first kind of huge fucking nightclub nightclub and you know with

queues outside and celebrity djs inside there and all of this shit uh open sex open drug use but not necessarily a queer space anymore there certainly would have been you know, gay people and people of colour there but it started to get a little bit more mainstream and a little bit more white with Studio 54 also disco music starts to get more mainstream mainly with the peak disco.

Which is Saturday Night Fever. The film Saturday Night Fever. Pushed disco into the mainstream. And the soundtrack by the Bee Gees. Who. Bee Gees were a bunch of lads from fucking. Born in Australia. Deported to Liverpool or something

mad like that and then all of a sudden became disco artists, now I'm not shitting on it the fucking, the album Saturday Night Fever incredible, incredible songwriting amazing songs but it's mainstream it's no longer the marginalised voice of

you know, it's no longer the punk rock voice, it's Green Day now, it's no longer the punk rock voice. It's Green Day now. It's what Green Day is to the Sex Pistols. That's what the BJs were. So by the late 70s, disco had become, to be honest, it was always seen as a novelty music. Disco was not taken seriously in the 70s at all.

It was seen as fun novelty music and was not viewed as revolutionary or important at all and peak disco started to happen around 77 78 when every fucking artist in the world had to have a disco song and it got saturated and people got pissed off with disco and peak disco was reached and disco officially ended in 1975 1979 in quite an ugly fashion

and this happened in Chicago as I believe it was a baseball night so like I said by 79 disco had become too mainstream peak mainstream it was the most uncool

fucking novelty music you can imagine and there was this thing called the disco demolition night in Chicago in Comiskey Park during what I think is a baseball fucking match or however you play baseball, I don't know.

So this shock jock on radio had organized that, first of all, there was a free beer promotion. So you had a baseball match, this mostly white male crowd. And the shock jock said to the crowd, bring your disco records with you tonight and we're gonna burn disco records in the middle of the field okay so that was the plan but there was also a free beer promotion so the crowd very angry white men uh brought their records with them and they were burnt there was about things about 20,000 this giant burning flaming pit of records in the middle of the field but here's the problem the subtext of the disco demolition night whether it was intentional or not like the

what's the opposite of the subtext the context yeah the context of the night was disco isn't cool it's not real rock music it's not real music there's no creativity it's silly music for egypt

that was the context but the underlying subtext was racism and homophobia and this is evident in when the people in the audience brought their disco records to be burnt there was a load of records in there that weren't even disco Marvin Gaye was in there people brought with them black records or records from artists that were gay and burnt those so Disco Demolition Night wasn't about

disco, it was a violent expression of homophobia and racism because the beer was involved the discs went on fire, people started getting records, fucking them all over the stands, and they stormed the field,

and there was this big flaming, aggressive riot occurred. And that's generally seen as the absolute end of disco music. After the disco demolition night. Disco artists. The. It showed America.

That disco was not going to be tolerated anymore. So the labels moved away. From disco music. Labels stopped. Signing disco artists. Labels stopped. Funding disco artists. So a lot of disco artists were dropped from their labels

but from this comes something quite fucking beautiful the second phase of disco which is known as post disco music and this happens about 1980 onwards post disco music to be honest that's my favourite genre of disco music

post disco music is one of my favorite genres of any music i fucking love it if you want to hear post disco music i have a playlist on spotify look up rubber bandits on spotify and look for my post disco roots of house music playlist so what post disco was record labels aren't funding disco anymore now as i described disco had become quite decadent it required massive orchestras you know to do the string sections big bands making disco was quite expensive but the record label said fuck that we're not funding it anymore so whatever disco artists remained they had to kind of go underground with these tiny budgets and they had to almost shamefully turn to synthesizers it's like if i

can't afford an orchestra i have to use this machine that pretends it's an orchestra if i can't afford a drummer i have to use this machine that does the job of a drummer. And that's post-disco music. It is the attempt at making disco using only electronic instruments. So this is about 1980. From this, that's the roots of house music, techno music, all of that. Disco had gone from mainstream and white by the late 70s to going back underground to the gay black and latino communities that it started with and you see house music coming out of new york and coming out of chicago

by the mid 80s and then over in the UK as well the creation of the Hacienda nightclub which was I think it was the lads in New Order New Order were a British band that were very they were keeping an eye on what was happening in New York

with Post Disco and New Order had visited I think it was Studio 54. Or Paradise Garage. And said we need one of these in Manchester. So they started the Hacienda. So that's how. We'll say house music started in the UK as well.

By the mid to late 80s. But from that. You know. The Stonewall Riots in 69. You can trace an exact musical evolution to today's fucking banging edm which has become male and white again you know the likes of avicii god rest his soul it's kind of lost its its gay black lat roots again. But, yeah, go to that playlist that I have on Spotify.

Post Disco Roots of House Music. I guarantee you, you will hear in that some of the best songs you've ever heard in your life that you did not know existed because Post Disco was very underground, mostly, throughout the 80s. There was a couple of breakthroughs michael jackson's thriller heavily borrowed from the sounds of post disco luther vandross had a few crackers you know but mostly it was quite underground and it was

known as the black charts that's what it was referred to in the 80s of crucial importance also which I forgot to mention with the late 70s disco sound with post disco adopting electronic instrumentation it wasn't just because of economic necessity there's also a European influence there 1977 Donna Summer I Feel Love, was produced by Giorgio Moroder, an Italian, who was making a type of music called Italo Disco, which was an electronic type of disco influence.

Also, there was a genre called Space Disco, which was complete and utter novelty music. It was seen as, at the the time where daft punk traced their roots to that bands like ganymede from austria would dress up as aliens or spacemen and make this weird space disco disco that dealt with intergalactic themes and had a lot of musical instrumentation to it japanese influence and there was a show on television in america called soul train which would platform a lot of black artists but occasionally they would have international artists that were making danceable fucking music one band that got booked on soul train some people say by accident were yellow magic orchestra a japanese band electronic

music band from the mid 70s who ryuichi sakamoto would have been uh ryuichi sakamoto would have been the leader of that band he's a legend he's the japanese inyo maricone but listen to fucking yellow magic orchestra for the love of christ if you want to hear some good mad electronic music japanese electronic electronic music from the 70s um what else craftwork german influence as well craftwork as far i believe did appear on soul So there is this Italo disco, space disco, and Japanese city pop, and also German krautrock influence in post-disco also, that is worth noting. From the ashes of disco as well, worth noting, like we'll say 1979, disco demolition, the end of disco,

it kind of fork tongued it went the direction of very underground post disco with the kind of gay community but then the other place that it went is hip-hop music hip-hop in a sense Hip hop in a sense, which, and hip hop would have, you're talking 78, 79 in the Bronx, New York. Hip hop also came out of disco, but as an active rebellion against it. Hip hop kind of felt that disco is a, it's a black music, but it doesn't reflect the struggle and like disco was listened to in a very subversive fashion by a subversive community but lyrically and musically disco itself was not subversive it was not aggressively subversive it didn't deal with social ills or social injustice in its lyrical themes, disco was all about celebrating, I mean think of it, fucking celebrate good times come on,

do you know what I mean, or any of the music of Chic, you know, Nile Rodgers and Chic created fucking incredible disco music, but their lyrics were very upbeat. Hip-hop artists, emerging in 1979, 1980 in the Bronx, felt that this music didn't reflect the impoverished, struggled reality of black people in the Bronx. So hip-hop came out of that to go, well, we're going to talk about the poverty we live in. We're going to talk about police brutality.

We're going to talk about the struggles that we face so hip-hop comes out of that too as a reaction to disco and then you've got post-disco going underground fuck me lads that was a very indulgent musical rant and i hope you enjoyed it christ um having ranted for fucking 50 minutes to be honest I could have done 3 hours on that you know I'm feverishly interested in that particular genre

and that type of that thread you know I love finding threads in music and culture and seeing where they lead but thank you for listening to that because we're 50 minutes into that rant so

I think it's time for our ocarina pause is it so every week what we do is Acast insert adverts into this podcast

which you may or may not hear I'm going to play my Spanish clay whistle for a little bit and you'll either hear my Spanish clay whistle, the ocarina, or an advert for some bullshit. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe-Hirwe, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series.

This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Jimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder. April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health,

to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. dot ca that was the ocarina pause also this podcast

is supported by you the listener via the patreon page the podcast is free you're welcome to listen to it for free but a lot of listeners you know are like fuck it I liked that

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Leave a positive review. subscribe to the podcast leave a positive review and most importantly and especially if you are not irish like if you're if you're not living in ireland if you're somebody in fucking canada or australia or london or spain you know i've got listeners to this podcast all around the world if you're someone who's listening to this podcast in isolation please suggest it to your friends because i want the podcast to grow but i want it to grow internationally i don't want like this podcast is the number one podcast in ireland which is good but i'm at the same time cautious of reaching peak podcast in ireland i don't want to get it too popular in Ireland because then

that has the disco demolition effect do you know so I want to grow this in the same kind of word amount underground way but

in America in fucking London in Spain whatever so please recommend it to a friend if you're one of those cunts

yart I'll take a look at a few of your questions you absolute bastards recommend it to a friend if you're one of those cunts. Yart. I'll take a look at a few of your questions, you absolute bastards. Oh yeah, I forgot to fucking mention, quite bizarrely during the week, Hollywood actress Rosario Dawson started following me on

Instagram and then started posting photographs of herself wearing a plastic bag. Now I haven't a fucking clue how rosario dawson found the rubber bandits or myself i reckon she listens to the podcast so rosario dawson tell some hollywood friends or something about me will you please and if you're ever in limerick we'll go to the chicken hut and I'll take you to see an otter. Okay.

So I'll take a few of your questions, lads. Jimmy asks, Blind buy. Actually, do you know what? I think I'll get the Trout of No Crack. I'll see if the Trout of No Crack is around. I'll get him to read out the questions. Are you around? I am, yeah. Will you read out some of these questions?

What a good answer. Blind boy. I'm dealing with a tough situation at the minute. Where I have been financially exploited. To the tune of what to me is a significant sum of money. Actually stop reading that one. because that's too serious. So I'm going to read that one myself. Alright?

Okay. Blind boy, I'm dealing with a tough situation at the minute where I have been financially exploited to the tune of what to me is a significant sum of money. After looking into it, it seems there's little I can do. It has caused a fair bit of stress and all I can think of is how much misery i wish upon those who did it to me it's all very fresh and still raw but i need to try and put this behind me and move on i'm struggling though any advice fucking hell jimmy that's a tough one well obviously very sorry to hear that. That's a shit situation. Aside from the obvious questions of is there anything you can do to either get the money back

or bring those people to justice, those are the first avenues you look down, right? The actual rational, logical approach to retrieving what was taken from you financially okay number one number two if the situation is is literally outside of your control okay if this money is gone from you and retrieving it is is beyond your control if it's if it's something you cannot control well echoing last week's podcast the one thing you can control is your attitude towards it i appreciate that you mentioned there that you want to bring misery upon the people who did it to you but like that's not going to bring your money back and that will make you more unhappy i promise you fixating on revenge and

retribution like it's that's that's only gonna it'll make you more angry it'll make you more upset it will make you attach yourself more to the finances that you lost you know so that's not the most there's better ways to look at it i would say right like you have control over how you look at this situation that's what's now in your control even though you've lost this money here's a good way to look at it consider this as a very very expensive lesson that you learned okay you pretend you just went to cunt college you just went to college and learned some very expensive lessons on around exploitative pricks and i guarantee you this is the last time that you will be financially exploited by pricks because you've just paid for this very very expensive lesson now

you've gone to college you've gone to prick college okay and those are your fees for prick college but now you've got a degree in dickheads do you get me so walk away from that fee and go i'm never getting fucked over again because i can spot the signs i can spot the signals and that's not going to bring your money back but it's it's a healthier approach to something that is currently outside of your control you know pain and suffering and disappointment and getting fucked over are inevitable um consequences of of being alive these are part of the tapestry of human existence. I've been fucked over financially before, you know. I refuse to give my power over

further to somebody who does that to me by being angry with them or wishing punishment and retribution. Now there's nothing wrong with wishing justice. Right, that's different. Punishment, that's an internal anger that's that benefits nobody justice is different that's if someone committed a crime then justice different story but retribution anger you'll find that it just attaches you more to the loss and it attaches you more it'll cause an internal cycle of

negativity which will ultimately negatively impact your mental health and why would you want to you know if you've already given them a few hundred quid or a couple of grand or whatever it is why do you want to continue to give them your very being you know so pricks are gonna prick you know that's it pricks are gonna prick and you're gonna now can spot a prick

what can I say quite facetious could be perceived as facetious too but you could have been hit by a car man you know

people people fucking get on their bicycle in the morning and lose their legs do you know do you have your health that's what i'd be asking do you have your health and again not being facetious because i'm not aware how big of a financial impact this has had on your quality of life but do you have your health are you able to live as an able-bodied person and have all the privileges of health and legs and hands and mental health and all of that if you've got that you know that's that's wonderful isn't it what's a couple of quid when you have that you learned a very expensive and important lesson you went to prick college that's how i would look at it if i was in your situation and it was outside of my control

but i certainly wouldn't be ruminating on revenge because that just hurts you emily asks hey blind by any tips for starting out in live performance or comedy especially for an act that doesn't fit into traditional stand-up or theatre. The one thing I'd say to anybody starting off in something creative is that the risk of failure is fucking huge. So embrace the potential for that failure because that will naturally make you more creative. And never ever put your eggs in one fucking basket. Don't do that. Because once you do that. It becomes more difficult to take risks.

And only in an environment where you can take creative risk. Can you be truly creative. I mentioned this before with the bag that's on my head. This bag on my head. Means that at all times I can fail. You, I can make a bollocks of something, ruin my career as a podcaster or as a musician or whatever, or isolate my audience, and worst comes to worst, I can just go back to college or get a job doing something different, you know, because I've got this bag protecting me, so that's my not having eggs in one basket type of thing but that's what i'd say to you if you want to become

a performer or whatever do it on a very much a past part-time basis in your free time and understand that the likelihood is that and this sounds fucking harsh but the likelihood statistically is that, and this sounds fucking harsh, but the likelihood statistically is that you will fail, that doesn't mean that you're going to, but embrace that, embrace the inevitability of potential failure, and from that there's a better chance of succeeding,

you know, and, just have crack with it, have fun, if you're doing this stand-up first off i'd recommend the internet you know whatever about going to stand-up gigs that's great but try and put out video content or whatever but make sure that it's fun make sure that whatever act of creativity you embark upon that if you weren't you would you like it if you try and create for an audience then you're fucked because you're not in creative flow

you're creating with your brain you need to create with your heart so have fun with it what would you do if you were four years of age and you were playing with Lego? You know, think back to that contemplative meditative type of creativity where you don't care what the end result is because you're simply doing. There's no purpose to it. You're exploring your own aesthetic sensibilities and pleasing yourself. That's the advice that I'd give anybody. Who wants to have a crack at something creative. When you take this shit too seriously. And you say.

I'm going to be a successful comedian. I'm going to be. That's. The internal psychology of that. That is almost. Self sabotage. Because. Your identity. That is almost self-sabotage. Because your identity and your sense of self and your self-esteem. Gets attached to something that you're doing.

And that means when you fail at it. You're not just failing at that thing. You're failing as a person. So have crack with it. Have no expectations. And create for you and fuck other people because if you try and create for them

it's just going to be a failure anyway do you know create for you and you might be grand last question from Eamon hi blind boy I run and also use the headspace app

you recommended you said that you practice mindfulness whilst running have you any tips on how to do that I find my mind wandering an awful lot while running run and also use the headspace app you recommended you said that you practice mindfulness whilst running have you any tips on how to do that i find my mind wandering an awful lot while running thank you um well your mind wandering while you're running isn't necessarily a bad thing if the running is making you feel great and energizing you and giving you the necessary chemicals that your brain kind of needs to stimulate itself so don't be concerned about it there's running can make your mind very active like i don't meditate

all the time when i'm running sometimes i go out running and i might listen to bill burr's podcast or i listen to a lot of tunes sometimes when i'm running i will do it in a meditative fashion what i would say is that meditating while running is incredibly advanced meditation and i'm only able to do it after years of traditional sitting down meditation okay it took a long time for me to master meditation to be able to go i can do this relaxing technique while i'm fucking baiting it down the road it's i i focus on my body i focus on the steps and when you're running i i regulate my breathing the breathing is naturally a hell of a lot faster obviously because i need more oxygen than it would be if i was sitting down but i'm mindful of my feet touching the ground i'm mindful of the rhythm of my feet as they run

i'm mindful of i i visualize my breath uh sometimes i visualize it as kind of like a a light or an energy going in and out and i breathe through i in through my nose and out through my mouth and i just keep all my attention and focus on that or my focus on my legs and really to enter a meditative state it's having giving your full attention to any aspect of your behavior that is repetitive and rhythmic no matter what the tempo do that long enough with enough skill and you'll enter a meditative state in your head, you know. But don't be worrying.

Don't be worrying if your head is flying around the place. The fact that you're out there running is brilliant. You're getting a lot of endorphins, do you know? Maybe running for you is where your head does wander. It depends now on the wandering. You don't want to be running and if your head is wandering to an anxious place or an angry place or if your head is wandering to a place where you're i don't know reliving arguments with somebody where you wish you said this or wish you said

that or worrying about next week or worrying about something you said last week you know that's it's a shame to allow that type of irrationality and negativity to infiltrate your running experience but if your head's just wandering regular thoughts and you're enjoying the run fuck it keep doing that and the meditation is an is an advanced thing okay goodbye you lavish bastards have a great have a lovely week enjoy yourself I'm still trying to figure out

when I should I have a backlog of about 10 live podcasts and I'm still trying to figure out when I should kind of put them out I'm thinking of the odd

I asked Twitter last week and I think the odd Saturday. I don't want to replace the Wednesday podcast. With a live podcast. Because the energy is different. But. Yeah. I might start doing that soon.

The odd Saturday. Or the odd Friday. You know. Just put out a live podcast. Because I've loads of them. Backed up. And. Fair play to you

you're coming to the gigs and it's great crack I did a lovely gig there in Kilkenny with the writer Louise O'Neill which was tremendous crack

and Louise is unbelievably sound and unbelievably interesting and she just has that great energy about her do you know I can see it

looking into her eyes she's got that that that magic magic behind the eyes where you can tell like this person's an artist you just know do you know what I mean

that's what I got off her so that was class and I can't wait to put that one out alright go in peace go in peace and have a lovely week and throw a few stones rub a few

dogs Thank you. I love you. behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Gimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder. April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit TSO.ca.