A Timeless Wavelength

Gossip – Love Long Distance

The most recognizable thing about the band Gossip is its lead singer Beth Ditto, one of many musicians more famous for the controversy surrounding her than for her actual music.  In Ditto’s case, the controversy involves her habit of appearing onstage partially nude.  Hardly shocking in this day and age, except for the fact that Ditto is unapologetically fat and unshaven.  Onstage nudity may be passé, but proudly displaying a body that doesn’t conform to the norm is still troubling to some people.  The fact that Ditto is a lesbian of the non-lipstick variety doesn’t help her mainstream acceptance either.

I had heard about Ditto through various media reports, either praising her for her promotion of positive body image or making fun of her for being a fat hairy dyke.  But it seems like every article I read referred to her as a “punk rock singer.”  Eventually I wanted to hear something of the music behind the controversy, so I listened to some tracks by her band Gossip.  Imagine my surprise when I found that Gossip is not a punk band at all.  Gossip is disco.

All the elements are there:  the four-on-the-floor drumbeat, the alternating-octaves basslines, the scratchy guitar.  Even Ditto’s vocal stylings recall the dance hits of the 1970s.  Yet it seems one thing people have a harder time accepting than Ditto’s body image is the fact that they like a disco group.

Few genres have had worse image problems than disco.  Rock musicians couldn’t like it because it was too danceable; funk musicians had to hate it because its mechanical drumbeat wasn’t danceable enough.  Straight people were told it was too gay; white people were told it was too black.  It was hated in the late ’70s for being too popular, hated in the ’80s for not being popular anymore, and ridiculed in the ’90s for supposedly “making a comeback” that never really happened.  And of course there was that famous incident where an idiot rock DJ started a riot by dynamiting a pile of disco records.

But for all the hatred, is there anything really wrong with disco? It certainly had a lot more character than any of the dozens of variants of techno or electronica that replaced it in the dance clubs.  It had better musicians and more impressive vocalists than most of the rock and pop genres of the past thirty years or so.  Even mainstream rock bands had disco hits, though they couldn’t call them by name:  Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” and Kiss’s Dynasty album were disco through and through, even if they mostly stuck to rock instrumentation.  There’s no real reason why disco shouldn’t be taken as seriously as glam, punk, or hip hop, all genres which had their moments of ridiculousness, yet which are still considered legitimate musical influences.

Yet for some reason, people keep right on hating disco.  And disco refuses to go away.

If musical genres were people, disco would be a fat, hairy lesbian who didn’t care if people made fun of her.