How Gang of Four Made Me Like Disco

I know that you're about to say: Disco? Huh? But bear with me.

Not having cool older siblings to hip me to those albums considered crucial for any young rock fan who just discovered there's music beyond what's playing on the radio or MTV, I turned to Rhino's compilation CDs. Actually, those things were my cool older siblings. And long before you could sample any song online, or download only the ones you loved, Rhino's comps served as a combo platter of some of the greatest unheard music.

In hindsight, it was pretty 101 stuff. Most of the big names in punk or alternative of the 70s and 80s were there: The Jam, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Buzzcocks; and some unexpected nuggets, like the Vibrators or the Damned -- something I could never image being played on my local rock radio station sandwiched between Warrant and The Allman Brothers. (Though REM and the Replacements did manage to finagle their way onto the airwaves, if not during most people's waking hours.)

I was well-versed enough in punk rock, in that I thought of it as a somewhat antiquated style of basic three-chord rock, and as a sartorial statement marked by safety pins in the face. Current punk, as defined by my late-80s/early 90s youth, was loud, raw, inherently masculine, and mostly played by the kind of skater boys I wasn't supposed to hang around. No dancing involved unless it required bone-crushing body slams. I liked that -- the anger, the unbridled energy of it all, but I liked to dance, too. I mean, actually move in time to the music, not just pitch myself into a crowd of sweaty bodies. (Hell, I still had a poster of Whitney Houston on my wall for crissakes!)



So I was quite surprised when I first heard Gang of Four's "To Hell With Poverty" smack in the middle of my latest cut-out bin find. (The cut-outs were lousy with Rhino comps.) It was definitely punk in all its nihilistic glory, but it had a beat and well, I could dance to it. It was also smart, little snotty, and weirdly elegant in a way. The synths were pure disco. It wasn't gritty mosh pit rock, but eons away from the brainless pap playing on the radio, which I secretly still secretly loved but rarely admitted, even to myself.

I know this plays into some pretty old tropes about women as music fans: they don't care about artistry, they only want to dance. (A recent book, which I won't name, exploited the hell out of this stereotype.) And I believed it, even while trying to wedge myself into a punk scene that was, and still is, largely inhospitable to women. Right, Gang of Four is hardly the Bee Gees, but they allowed me to embrace music that isn't sweaty and hard, and that danceable beats can be arty, too.