Shake Your Groove Thing

I was at a party last night and some disco came on.  My wife and I started to dance, just like we did all those years ago in college, back in the seventies when disco was ubiquitous.

It made me think about disco as an art form.  At first, I hated it.  This was 1975 when it was just coming out in a big way.  I thought then that it was too simplistic, just percussion, most notably the high-hat cymbal, and bass and whatever lyrics that could be scrambled together.  But as it caught on I found it infectious.  Disco was taken seriously at my college, Purchase College.  The dancers liked it because it was, after all, all about dancing.   Purchase was very gay, and, as this analysis suggests, disco had a distinctively gay aspect to it:

...Gays took the same idea of the black dance parties and used the same music for their parties that shared the same private clubs, soon to be known as "discos". Discos became so successful that they transformed rapidly from marginalized, discriminated and underground phenomenon to a chic craze for the yuppies. Far from being agents of the Establishment, gays adopted several trademarks of the hippy culture (free-form dancing, psychedelic lights, colorful costumes, hallucinogens). New York's gay community rediscovered a new facet of human psychology that had been well known to ancient cultures: "depersonalization" due to collective ecstasy enabled and fostered freedom of expression. The cathartic and regenerative function of disco-music accounted for the lightning speed with which it spread around the world

This was before it became mainstreamed, as all popular cultural products are destined to be, when it was still somewhat transgressive.  At base, it was just fun.  There were songs that integrated love themes (I always liked Sending you forget me nots - which I take as a late disco (1982) love song) but most did away with any pretension of lyrical significance.  They reveled in silly lines that were simply accompaniment for the main purpose, which was dancing.  How else can one explain titles such as, Shake Your Booty, Boogie, Oogie, Oogie, Get Down Tonight, and Shake Your Groove Thing.  All that mattered was giving yourself over to the sound and moving to the music.    We all got out on the dance floor and boogied: gay, straight, black, white, Latino, together, dancing, forgetting the rest, just letting go and flying, collective ecstasy....

But it is that last line of above quote I want to focus on: the freedom of expression, the cathartic and regenerative function.  Makes me think of Zhuangzi....

Zhuangzi would, I think, be repelled by what disco became: a conspicuous fashion, the movement from a freely expressed human quality, if that is what dancing with abandon is, to an institutionalized and routinized commodity.   As in this passage, from chapter 4:

...Drinking at ceremonies begins orderly enough, but it always ends up wild and chaotic.  And if things go far enough, it's nothing but debauchery.  All our human affairs seem to work like this.  However sincerely they begin, they end in vile deceit.  And however simply they begin, they grow enormously complex before they're. (55)

This would suggest that Zhuangzi would frown upon the whole ethos of disco.  Debauchery, after all, was not unknown in and around the dance floor at Purchase in the 1970s....  Zhuangzi was not a party guy.  But I do not take this as a blanket rejection of the early core of disco, the freedom, the abandon, the letting go.  Think of this passage, from chapter 2, when he is discussing the music the natural world creates:

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone - who could make such music? (18)

Each becoming itself, according to itself alone: that is the spirit of early disco.  That was its motivation among gays; they could find on the dance floor a space for their personal expression.  And their joy and abandon radiated out to us all.  And all of us jumped into it and found something of ourselves there, something essential and vital, something we might not have connected to had we not followed the advice of Peaches and Herb: Shake Your Groove Thing...

So, I think there is something compatible between disco and Daoism.  They each embrace an ethic of letting go.  Confucians...not so much (though I think a case could be made for the Confucian themes of We Are Family...).  We'll end with Zhuangzi:

Just let your mind wander along the drift of things.  Trust yourself to what is beyond you - let it be the nurturing center.  Then you've made it.  It the midst of all this, is there really any response?  Nothing can compare to simply living out your inevitable nature.  And there's nothing more difficult (56)

In other words, Get Up and Do Your Thing...

Comments

[gmoke]

I always thought of disco as marching music, that incessant 4/4 beat. Some of it is fun but the repetition always eventually gets to me. It is the farthest thing from "the drift of things" that I can imagine. Disco killed something in popular music even if it brought joy to the gay culture and was the engine that built clubs like Studio 54, something that Zhuangzi would certain not approve.

Does it have Tao? To me, not much but I'm happy that you can enjoy it. Just don't ask me to dance to it, unless it's "Le Freak" (whose original lyrics were a scatological imprecation after being refused entry to Studio 54 or so I've been told).

[Lisa]

To me disco was my escape from the world. A time for me to shake my grove thang. It was my time to let loose while shedding a couple of pounds. I just try not to look to hard into things and enjoy life.

[Philip]

Disco was the perhaps inevitable reaction to all that "serious" and "trippy", very undanceable music (perfectly epitomized by "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zepplin and "Darkside of the Moon" by Pink Floyd) that preceded it. It was time once more to "shake your booties" and have fun again! The most important movie of, and the one that defined, that era was "Saturday Night Fever". It was what "Easy Rider" was to the late Sixties and "Rebel Without a Cause" was to the Fifties.