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“Artists from all over the world recorded ‘Onda Nueva’ music. It didn’t catch on because it didn’t have a dance,” Tito Puente, the legendary Puerto Rican musician, claims. “Shame on you if you can’t dance to it,” Shirley, the disco singer, scolds. The country has been infected with dansomania on a scale unparalleled in nearly twenty years. A song’s popularity is determined by its disco usage even before it hits the radio charts; there is a strong social imperative, as Shirley suggested in the early days of disco, to get on that floor and dance. Discos are opening on every corner—in former square dance barns, former bars, formerly sedate restaurants, former any-kindof -space that can house a sound system, flashy lights, and a few square feet of dance floor. The current choreomania has been dismissed as a faddish nostalgia for the 1930s, or even the 1950s. But though the style of dancing may share certain traits with the dancing popular in either of those decades, 23 k Disco Dance Boogie Down the Blues : Moving On, May 1977 the resemblance is more than superficial. Disco dancing of the 1970s is a cultural response to very real and current conditions, some of which recall the past. Like 1930s dancing, disco dancing features close body contact, partnering , an emphasis on fancy technical feats performed with grace and style. The disco beat, like the Big Band jazz beat, is regularized and repetitive . The disco clubs are swank and often exclusive, providing the clientele with the setting for a variety of fantasies: here upwardly mobile aspirations can be played out, a temporary compensation for the drudgeries of everyday life created. In the 1930s people flocked to see Busby Berkeley’s marathon dances, each a fantasy of instantaneous money and fame. In the 1970s we create our own, and live out the fantasy—even if only for an evening. Like 1950s dancing, disco dancing is highly choreographed—the couple or crowd dances are designed to the point of monotony, repressive of individual expression. No one can get the steps exactly right, but at least there is a model of perfection to aim for. Despite occasional touches of Latin syncopation, the dancing is regimented and controlled. Remember what dancing was like in the 1960s? For black kids, the Mashed Potato, the Philly Dog, the Funky Chicken, and Funky Broadway were just a few examples of structured, stylized dances that nevertheless provided room for self-exposition. White kids, with occasional forays into black forms, evolved an improvisatory style over the course of the decade which grew more and more individualized and anarchic as the drug culture, aspects of political liberation movements, and other factors created an atmosphere which valued “doing your own thing” and “letting it all hang out.” You didn’t touch your partner. You shook and stepped, twisted and jumped, waved your hair and flailed your arms, and sometimes stood still, in a stream-of-consciousness, egodissolving ecstasy. It had to change, and dancing in the post-Vietnam United States reflects a subdued concern with order and structure. The new style coopted elements of 1960s black dancing (the stylized movements and strict design) and of the gay bar culture (suppressed but clear sexual expression and the need for anonymity and exclusivity). Disco dancing transmuted these phenomena, originating in repressive social conditions , into an ideal: the dancing—disciplined, suave, stylish yet anonymous and uniform—demanded a certain kind of music, a certain kind of technology, and a specific social setting. 24    No more the unpredictable rock concerts and festivals of the 1960s, where you paid exorbitant prices and then the speakers broke down and the bands didn’t show and the police used tear gas on the crowds of stoned kids to deter them from expressing any anger at the rip-off. At latter-day discotheques, the sound equipment is peerlessly crafted to play records that have been flawlessly engineered. The only disco employee resembling a musician is the DJ, who is not a musician but another engineer. No risks. Even with steep disco admission prices, it’s still cheaper to go out dancing than to a live concert. The music is polished , repetitive, with an insistent bass line. As one disco fan points out: “It removes any element of choice. You’re forced, when the music comes on, to get up and pump your pelvis.” The music is so loud that you can’t talk or listen; dancing, touching, and...

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