#post disco

Barbra Sreisand and Donna Summer

R i c k J a m e s

📷 John Barrett

M i c h a e l J a c k s o n // W h i t n e y H o u s t o n

Grace Jones, 1981.

One key thing that people miss in this discussion that comes from genuinely alternative people is that Goth is the love child of Punk AND Disco. Disco as a genre was incredibly subversive, its music and culture allowed for things that were simply unallowed. Dancing among people of the same sex/gender? Dancing between people of different races? The culture allowed for queer people to dance together as lovers without getting thrown into jail for "public indecency", remember back in the seventies it was illegal for two men or two women to walk together hand in hand. Remember that there were anti-miscegenation laws were still in place in many states in the 1970s despite the law against interracial marriage was struck down as unconstitutional in 1967. Many states refused to follow this lead, and the last state to get rid of such a law was Alabama in 2000. There's a lot of cultural narratives about Disco, including one that involved punks hating Disco, which is a flat out lie because post-punk, dance punk and new wave simply would not have existed as genres if that were the case. (Some punks hated Disco, not all punks, and John Lydon was a poseur and doesn't get to say what punks liked or disliked back in his "heyday") There's also a narrative that Disco died in 1978 at the Disco Demolition Derby which is just fucking untrue. The demolition derby was just a reactionary tantrum by a bunch of boomers, by that point Disco was already waning in popularity. A lot of men back then hated disco because of its popularity among queers, people of colour but especially because of its popularity with cishet women. Because the hatred of disco is often a hatred of women, queer people and people of colour and especially Black people. And you cannot understand Goth music and its culture without understanding the influence on post-punk from Disco. Not in just its musical composition (four by the floor as an example) but also the culture of the people who enjoyed this music. There is an inherent queerness in goth culture that completely flaunts gender roles which is why there are so many queer people in the Goth community. Conservatives do not understand culture which is why they're so adamant that one can be conservative and goth. To them these are just brands and labels, in the same way that their 'religion' and 'politics' are. Just dime a dozen positions and slogans. But that doesn't mean they're right. Goth isn't a style. It's a culture. And it's inherently incompatible to the conformism of the far right.