Well, I’m more interested in disco these days.  If you hadn’t noticed, it made something of a comeback this year.  Artists from Kanye West, M.I.A., and Hard Fi to newer indie acts like Justice have all dabbled with the spirit of the strobe light to begrudgingly strong results.  Daft Punk, purveryors of disco’s electronification in the 90s, made a massive live comeback this year that brought with it wave upon mounting wave of dance-hall nostalgia.  Question is, why would anyone want to re-resurrect disco?

Disco, after all, met one of the most violent deaths in all of music history on July 12, 1979 at Comiskey Park in between a White Sox/Tigers double-header.  Records thrown like frizbees, smashed, burned, and blown-up by a mob of 50,000 embodied the mounting hatred for an increasingly generic musical trend pushing rock DJs out of radio booths.  The community to whom disco was pitched wanted their classic rock music back, and the black community from whom disco stole wanted it erased from the books.  It became the anti-thesis of authentic music, even though the movie that arguably catapulted it into the stratosphere represented it as a perfectly authentic form, a kind of “drug” by which disparate youths could check-out of the stinking rot of the 70s.

People still watch Saturday Night Fever, but I don’t know if they do so because it continues to speak to contemporary concerns or if it’s just a nifty time capsule.  Plus, it doesn’t matter who you are, John Travolta’s historical hoe-down is endlessly watchable.  Try not to grin like an idiot the next time you see it.

So what’s changed between 1979 and now?  Why is disco allowed to flourish at all?  Part of the answer is that, really, every genre is allowed to flourish in some corner of the web community.  Music fans have endless choices, and they often dable in a little bit of everything.  Disco no longer represents an in escapable lack of choice.

Another possibility, which is much harder to believe but infinitely more intriguing, is what disco has to say to the post-modernism of the 70s and the post-post-modernism of today.  As Raoul Eshelman most eloquently puts it, post-modernism represented a kind of a trap for the theoretical “subject.”  It eponymously defines itself in relation to something else - modernism, which means that the subject’s search for its own meaning always leads back to other subjects or “contexts.” 

Out of this reflexive search arises a nasty pessimism, brilliantly and sprawlingly documented in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, an encyclopedia of western history, philosophy, theory, language, art, and science.  The numbing effect produced in the reader by the novel’s manic exploration of these contexts is largely what Gravity’s Rainbow intends as its own reaction to the moment it explores.  In the face of the juggernaut that produced the endless Vietnam War, countless assassinations, each accompanied with their very own elaborate conspiracy theory, and Watergate, it must have been hard not to feel helpless, like History was just moving on by without your individual participation in it, that the usual rules of cause and effect didn’t apply anymore because nothing existed outside of the horizontal context of information invisible to your eyes. 

Pynchon mocked modernism’s unflagging belief in human agency, as the book’s anti-hero Slothrop appears to  subconsciously select targets of the WWII German V-2 rocket through his own deliquency, but the two events are in no way related .  Similarly, in describing V-2 detonation, Pynchon suggested against that the sound of the rocket’s descent occurs only after the explosion. 

Supposedly, we are in a post-post-modernist moment, sometimes called “performatism.”  In the performatist moment, the subject revolts against the pessimism of post-modernism and strives to define itself free of any context, which may mean that it has to transcend its contexts in order to do so.  It wants to liberate itself and appear as a simple, simplistic whole that chooses its own representation instead of having its representation influenced by other pieces of information (this is an embarrasingly crude summary of Eshelman, but I’m doing my best here).  

Disco, as it’s used now, may be popular music’s post-post-modern tendency.  To take a decidedly dead musical moment and place it in a contemporary field of music seems a way for artists like Kanye or M.I.A. or Hard Fi to set themselves apart from any “scene” or “genre” that they might be associated with.  For Hard Fi, theirs is the Britpop guitar band tradition that includes acts like Oasis to their contemporaries like Arctic Monkeys or Kaiser Chiefs.  Clearly, Kanye doesn’t want to be identified as a contemporary hip-hop artist, so he goes out and makes a Daft Punk/Akira-referencing record.  And M.I.A. doesn’t want to be placed in any context, so she hops from country to country, genre.

Of course, disco isn’t the only dead trend that contains such transformative powers for the artist, but it’s disco’s particular stigma that has resonance for the performatist artist.  Not since early rock n’ roll had a genre tempted so many different kinds of artists to co-opt it and reap all the cash.  Every popular musical movement attracts new artists who “cheapen” it and attempt to make it accessible to a broader audience, but disco was attracting artists firmly rooted in music scenes of their own making.  By the time, say, the Grateful Dead got around to cutting disco tracks, disco was already the sound of inauthenticity; Grateful Dead didn’t make it any more so.  They simply embarrassed themselves and their fans by trying to get on board with it.

So contemporary artists adopting a dead musical trend as possible representations for themselves that, in its day, was reviled as a nothing more than a hollow hip-shaking enterprise without a place in “authentic” culture, seem to be making a performatist gesture.  They are disassociating themselves from any particular contemporary scene with retroactive, simplistic forms that signal an attempt at transcendence of context.  And they are doing it rather defiantly by selecting such an obviously cheap medium. 

But perhaps most tellingly, they are representing themselves, making introspection their politik rather than the pall of contemporary events (if you don’t believe me, I urge you to go back and listen to the records they released this year).  Had any of these artists wanted to reflect the world at large in 2007, their records would have sound much more like Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, which aims to hold a mirror up to contemporary events, good modernists that they are.  Neither modernists or post-modernists, perhaps the aformentioned artists are just performatists by default.