The Beginner's Guide to Disco

Everybody thinks they know what disco is, until it's time to name some disco artists. Suddenly, the genre becomes diffuse: the mirrorball shimmer becoming mirage-like, vanishing behind the toss of long blonde hair and the sashay of a wide-legged trouser. They only know how disco is supposed to make them feel.

(I like that)

Defined strictly, disco is nightclub culture music coming out of the 1970s New York underground. Defined broadly, disco is all dance music and all dance music is disco. The colloquial term a disco meaning any kind of dance event is right about its the genre's essential sonic properties: it must be fast enough to dance to, and have a compelling drum pattern and bassline that makes you want to groove. Disco is a doing as much as it is a defining: Never Can Say Goodbye by the Jackson 5 and Blue Monday by New Order are both disco at its outer limits. Disco was the crucible of clubbing, and remains on its the cutting edge - the foremother of rap, house, and EDM.

So if anything is disco, identifying a disco song should be pretty easy...? But disco's shifting ubiquity masks a list of characteristics which are actually pretty strict. Any pair of disco songs can sound wildly different from one another - sometimes, the only link is through history and tradition. Stevie Wonder's Superstition and ABBA's Waterloo are - obviously - not disco. Rock DJ by Robbie Williams, is. You've got to get your ear in. And you've got to move your feet.

In this article, we will take a whirlwind tour through the history and subgenres, and future of disco. Each section comes with a selection of recommended songs - with some essentials marked in bold. For people who learn best with their ears and hips, there are five albums spanning the history of disco and its subgenres in the Disco-graphy.

Index

  1. Proto-disco
  2. Disco Takes Form (1973-1977)
  3. Disco Mainstreams (1977-1979)
  4. Everybody Dance
  5. Meanwhile, back at the Loft

  6. After I Feel Love (1977)
  7. Hi-NRG
  8. Post-Disco (1980s)
  9. Garage & House
  10. Disco Never Dies (90s-now)

  11. The Last Dance
  12. Who was Disco?
  13. Disco at the Movies
  14. More More More

Disco-graphy

Early Disco

Peak Disco

Disco Never Dies

Future Disco

133BPM

    Classic disco

  1. Early Disco (1972-1976)
  2. Peak Disco (1977-1980)
  3. Disco Never Dies (disco in popular music post-1980)

    4. Post-1977 synth-driven disco

  4. Future Disco (cool, machine, Euro, space)
  5. 133BPM (hard, fast, gay, heavy)

Proto-disco

The first disco song is considered to be The Love I Lost by Harold Melville and the Bluenotes, on which Earl Young pioneered his four on the floor drum sound. Four on the floor just means there is equal emphasis on every beat in the bar, in contrast to the sound of a Motown back-beat; THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP, not thump - breathe - thump - breathe. Disco means a THUMP on every beat, but drummers still funk it up with fills and flourishes - if you aren't a drummer, it might not be immediately clear to you that a song is putting four on the floor, until you get to the mechanical drum lines of synth-driven disco

(Alice Echols quotes a musician of the time cheekily noting that Motown drummers SLAMMED the off-beat to make it obvious enough for white people to dance to)

However, equally important were world music exotica imports like Babatunde Olatunji's Drums Of Passion, and Latin rhythms like Joe Bataan's Salsoul. Philly soul brought in the lush orchestra and huge vocal talents, while funk contributed the bass and horns.

In the early 70s New York, David Mancuso began a free party in his house, pioneering an immersive sound system and digging records from any genre that were good to dance to. He was inspired by psychedelic culture, creating sonic journeys inspired by LSD and new age literature. Most commercial nightclubs that followed in the early years were started by people who had visited the Loft.

Some important proto-disco songs:

I'm a huge fan of funk and soul, so these early songs are some of the ones I'm most excited about - there's something raw and rough around the edges as dance tracks, as well as the joy of them being discovered and made into dance songs.

Disco Takes Form (1973-1977)

Inspired by Mancuso's free parties, people began opening up dance venues, developing the role of the nightclub DJ. They too played anything with a good beat, often funk and soul.

Francis Grasso at the Sanctuary began experimenting with looping the short instrumental sections of a song, extending them for five or ten minutes, as well as blending one song into the next to create an unending wave of sound. Simultaneously with this, early rap DJs were experimenting in similar ways in the same city, although I don't ever read much about cultural overlap here - was it just the inevitable result of technology being available, or was there cross-influence? Much of this early rap is undocumented pre-the New York Blackout of 1977, because nobody could afford recording equipment, and participants saw it as a strictly live artform.

The producer was also an important figure in turning songs into dancefloor hits. Tom Moulton made mix tapes, blurring songs into a single dance track, for a gay venue on Fire Island - replicating what DJs were doing live. This started his career as someone who would edit songs in before release to make them better dance tracks - sometimes over the complaints of the original artists (as in Love is the Message, where he made a secret recording to get the keyboard performance which he turned into the breakdown section; or telling some of his divas they would need to learn to dance for long sections where he cut out their vocals).

Moulton is also credited with participating in the invention of the 12" single along with music engineer José Rodriguez, when they ran out of 7" discs during a test pressing. Putting a single song put on a 12" disc sounds far more expansive, so it became the medium of choice for dance music to make the most of sound systems. In general, when looking for disco songs, always go for a 12" version when one is available - they will be longer & with the danceable grooves pushed to their limit.

José Rodriguez is named as the co-discoverer of the 12" in Tim Lawrence's book Love Saves the Day; most sources, however, will name Moulton, shuffling Rodriguez back outside of history.

Shimmery mid-period disco establishes the importance of the diva, as well as cementing certain drum patterns, basslines and arrangement styles as characteristically disco. Songs are getting longer, sometimes with an instrumental section especially for dancing, but the sound is overall still warm and a little raw.

Disco Mainstreams (1977-1979)

By the late 70s, disco was everywhere. Discos were found all over America and all over the world. The Saturday Night Fever album was the best-selling album of all time, until beaten by Thriller in 1982 - also, arguably, a disco record - it is a wonderful record, from a difficult & hard to love film.

Look for: big diva vocals...lush violin and brass sections...euphoria, sweetness and delight...funky basslines...uncomplicated and apolitical lyrics...a more refined overall sound (crisper, less muddy production values)...and good times.

Anything on this list is pure, classic disco! This is the era of song you are most likely to hear played as disco today.

By this point, the most raw, political, funk-rock influences on disco have taken a back seat entirely - thrilling songs played at very early proto-discos like Life & Death in G&A by Abaco Dream (1969), Law of the Land by the Temptations (1973) or Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys by the Equals (a personal fave from 1970 in the UK) just don't make it into the sound; they are unrecognisable as part of a shared lineage with the glossy, insubstantial Dancing Queen (1976)

Everybody Dance

Disco now dominated the charts, so everyone who could had a go at it:

And anything which could be released for as a dance-floor was, including:

And disco was international, creating some extremely far-out and obscure sounds. One role of the DJ is to search out undiscovered gems for the dancefloor. The label Cultures of Soul answers questions you may have about what disco sounded like in South Africa, Indonesia, Guyana, South Asia and more.

Meanwhile, back at the Loft

Mancuso himself was never about disco, however; compilation albums & discographies released showcasing his favourite songs include things like Little Fluffy Clouds by the Orb, evoking his true interest in getting lost in sound & sonic experimentation. Mancuso never mixed or beat-matched: his skill was choosing songs, and he has an ear for songs which are both driving yet mellow.

Here are some of his later faves, showcasing a more expansive disco sound:

After I Feel Love (1977)

To say this song changed music is an understatement. I've danced to it, and it really is like nothing else. It still sounds like the future.

According to the singer David Bowie, during the recording of his Berlin Trilogy, his collaborator Brian Eno "came running in" and told him he had heard "the sound of the future". According to Bowie, Eno accurately predicted that "I Feel Love" would change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.

It was co-written by Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. The driving four on the floor drum pattern underpins a juddering bassline on the Moog synthesiser which seems to strobe between your ears, with Summer's ghostly vocals emerging on top.

Songs following I Feel Love sounded synthetic and futuristic and, often, notably less funky and soulful - it is skittish and moody, sometimes aggressive, intense, driving, even irritating. Often, this sound is associated with European disco, and white performers. It presages the use of artificial drums, instruments, or sound effects in modern dance music. Artificial drums make four THUMPS extremely prominent and, increasingly, incorporate an off-beat clap which you can hear hidden in I Feel Love but becomes the key sound of the 80s. Disco is uptempo, but still creates a sense of euphoria, mellow grooviness, and joy. By contrast, while these songs can use obviously disco basslines and orchestration, they leave you basically quite stressed and overloaded - a sound evoking the uncertainty of the future.

Songs like this blur in and out of subgenre labels, and especially as late disco begins to fragment and turn into new sounds. I've never been totally clear on what Italo-Disco is, and to what extent it overlaps with HiNRG, Eurodisco, and electro-disco. I'm aware that Italo Disco guys are extremely into it as a distinctive thing, and they use bomboloni-house phrases like:

Disco Italia: Essential Italo Disco Classics is one of the best compilations for Italian Disco - but it is not Italo-Disco

Another term used of this kind of music is space disco. It's a microgenre, because these songs sound far out and futuristic, incorporating sci-fi sound effects, lyrics or album art. End Title (Blade Runner) by Hipnosis (1983) is probably space disco, as is I Fell In Love With A Starship Trooper by Sarah Brightman.

I've never been drawn to these subgenres - I love the warm euphoric soul sound, and I'm not fired up by 80s music. But for some people, they are what disco was for: a start-point for boundary-pushing innovations, the precursor of all electronic dance that came after.

Hi-NRG

Hi-NRG is associated with producer Patrick Cowley, and it's disco that sounds like your 12th amphetamine-fuelled hour in a gay club. Harder, faster, heavier, at the cutting edge of synthesisers, and sounds like fucking just as early disco sounds like making love. Hi-NRG frequently rips that juddering beat directly from I Feel Love - it rarely feels funky, and it also loses that sweetness of peak disco - out with falsetto and glittery piano, and in with muscle. It too is often described as a white sound, associated with white artists and producers and losing disco's funk, soul and groove.

I'm not sure I could ever spin HiNRG at a club night. It's music for serious clubbers. You can feel that the drugs have changed, that we are no longer post-psychedelia. But it's a sound I am really into - it's synth-driven, but it isn't dispassionate or mechanical in the way of the northern European disco. Theres a moment about 8 minutes into Cowley's Hills of Katmandu remix which anticipates techno, it's like nothing else on this list. Then it brings the bongo back in case you forget what the year is. I'm a huge Cowley fan, I recommend all of it on the best soundsystem you have at your disposal: I Got the Feeling, his I Feel Love remix, the rediscovered-rarity album School Daze of his experimental work on porn films, it all sounds so good to me. But is it disco? It's definitely going off in a direction of its own!

It can be quite hard to get a handle on what Hi-NRG is outside of Cowley, especially because the genre was so niche - a lot of one-hit singles in gay dance subcultures which never made it outside, because nobody else dances like that. Most of it, I would argue, does not sound like disco to the uninitiated - it becomes the sound of 80s dance. But the influence on gay music going forward is everything - Pet Shop Boys, Bronski Beat, Divine, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Dead or Alive, New Order etc. Man I remember when I got my Frankie 12"s and I just lay with my head right next to the record player, overwhelmed by the sound.

Post-disco

In 1979, a rock DJ hosted Disco Demolition Night - where people were invited to a football stadium to burn disco records. The event had homophobic and racist overtones, with many people just bringing albums with a black person on the cover (although as we have explored - a lot of disco was any funk and soul music you could dance to). Over the next six months, disco records evaporated from the charts.

While it was an iconic and shocking moment in music history, I feel like in some ways its importance as the end of disco is completely overstated. For one thing, you can only listen to so much damn disco. It's an annoying sound, and it's nightclub music - it doesn't integrate well into your daily life, an issue thats even more pronounced with House. If you didn't like disco, by 1979 you would be going completely nuts. Wikipedia notes: Disco was criticized as mindless, consumerist, overproduced and escapist - and while I am a poptimist, all of this is fair.

But the main thing is that disco didn't go anywhere. It continued on the processes of evolution already underway, particularly influenced by developments in technology. They just stopped calling it disco.

As we leave the 1970s, the disco sound becomes much cooler. It's more spacious, less Love Unlimited Orchestra, smoother - with synthetic elements, and a clean production style. Many songs in this era remain popular, relevant, and contemporary-sounding, where 70s disco sounds dated and uncool.

Wikipedia draws some comparisons between early and post disco songs by the same artists to illustrate how the sound changed:

The 1980: Garage & House

One big issue with thinking of disco as a black genre is black people were totally blocked from DJ jobs throughout the 70s, shutting them out from that curatorial role in determining the direction of the sound. Iconic DJs like Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles spent the early 70s carrying boxes for other DJs, and listening closely - getting their first jobs in the middle of the decade. Ultimately playing at the Paradise Garage (NYC) and Warehouse (Chicago) respectively, they are associated with the 1980s evolution of disco into new forms - in other words, they become significant as they gained agency as curators and remixers, as auteurs of the genre. Garage and House can legitimately be called a black queer sound, in origin, development and consumption, in a way I can't quite co-sign for disco.

Knuckles' Chicago House sound began from playing disco songs while, simultaneously, adding a live drum machine - I think Mysteries of Love by Fingers Inc is the sound. Levan's style was known as Garage, also named after his venue; to me it can be quite hard to hear a sound that's distinctive as garage as opposed to some kind of 80s house.

Some early post-disco examples:

House became the defining genre of 80s and 90s dance, and is ongoing. It's everywhere, and someone makes up a new subgenre every four weeks. When they describe Beyonce's Renaissance as a disco album, what they really mean is House, disco's respectable cousin. House has disco elements - Knuckles described house as disco's revenge - but to me they sound very distinct. In particular, I think a lot of house basically does not sound very good unless you are at a nightclub - hearing it in its intended place. House reverses disco's trajectory - disco took singles and albums and made them into dance music; whereas House is for the dancefloor, but occasionally lands a mainstream radio hit.

Disco Never Dies

A lot of contemporary dance music is still disco - stripped of the thick arrangements, glossy production, and huge vocals, or with layers of contemporary instruments. Disco's reputation is partially restored, with recent endorsements by Beyonce and the Barbie movie, but the whole package is still percieved as tacky unless you're at a wedding - and so the trick becomes to hide the disco formula within contemporary styling.

Hearing the disco often means listening closely to the drum pattern...imagining Earl Young sat there, relaxed as if he could do this all day...and then to what the bassline is doing, seeing him in silver leggings and some kind of sparkly net hat...and then trying to imagine Loleatta Holloway or Teddy Pendergrass letting rip on the vocals - and it's there, and you're moving both forwards and backwards in time on the sonic superhightway.

Wherever there is dance, there will be disco!

Here's a quick romp through notable disco from the 90s onwards:

The Last Dance

The disco sleaze subgenre sounds more racy than it is. In the period, it was the down-tempo disco for early morning slow-dancing.

And peak among them all was the traditional song for rounding out your disco night before the lights came on and you wend your way slowly home, and that is where we will bring our boogie to a close:

Who Was Disco?

Gay dancers were key to the development of disco. In 1971, New York City legalised gay dancing in public, supercharging the subculture. The role of pre-disco DJs was to rotate people on and off the dancefloor to buy drinks, so breaks and varying the tempo was essential. But emerging gay urban cultures would dance all night, with disposable income and no families to go home to, and so the songs got longer and longer. Cruising helped: a population of horny bachelors in a tight-knit community with reason to keep going out every weekend. Drugs also helped, changing the way people danced. Distinctive disco cultures emerged on Fire Island, and in San Francisco. As disco dropped out of the mainstream, gay parties kept going well into the 1980s - supporting both throwback sounds, and evolutions such as House and Hi-NRG.

Although disco benefited from ongoing civil rights struggles, Black people were more often heard than seen. Tumblr has been miseducating people that disco was an underground Black sound which was appropriated and destroyed by white culture. This feels like it could be true; but it is a kind of erasure of a complicated history. This is a theme I will return to throughout this page, and I would be far less strident around it were Tumblr not so confidently wrong - see this as a re-swinging of a pendulum.

Certainly, early discos were sites of white fandom for Black artists & sounds - to some extent, a powerful statement of solidarity in a country with segregation in recent living memory. But fandom becomes hollow, or even a catalyst for harm, when actual power is not dismantled and redistrubuted. Writing from 2025, the vision of a white party getting down to Babatunde Olatunji's Yoruba drumming is an awkward one.

White oral histories often recall dance venues as diverse & utopian spaces that suggested new possibilities through the equality of the dance floor. Predictably, however, interviewees of colour recall a more complicated situation - they did not always feel welcome or experience inclusion. Most influential clubs of the period had racist door policies, and white gay subcultures were fetishistic and racist. If there were predominatly Black disco spaces, they've been under-documented by historians to date.

It's important to emphasise Black exclusion from the three novel and significant ways of creating and consuming music in disco. They provided the raw materials - vocal performances, drum lines - and were visible as disco performers. However, Black Americans in the 1970s were routinely shut out of the co-curation role of dancers at the disco, rarely held DJ jobs, and were not employed as remixers or producers. These were the exciting parts of disco culture - the feedback loop within the disco itself - the innovative new technology making the genre both possible and historically significant. For most performers, disco was a continuation of working & artistic conditions from the 50s and 60s. It is not until the 80s - rap, chicago house, garage, detroit techno - where these kinds of power are held by Black creators and communities.

This situation haunts how we think about disco now. People who know their disco are more likely to speak in terms of the role of (white) DJs and (white) producers as the key auteurs - the process of exclusion is ongoing. In key partnerships between white male producers and black female singers (Moroder/Summer, Crowley/Sylvester, Moulton/Gaynor), the auteurship of the performer is rarely considered, even when they are co-writers of their songs. This dynamic persisted through the 80s and 90s, where the disembodied big soul wail of the Black diva was core to the House sound, but few if any Black women are considered key DJs or producers. In some godawful cases, vocal performances by Martha Walsh and Loleatta Holloway were used on hit singles without credit or payment, on the assumption they were dead; to add insult to injury, their vocals were lipsynched on stage and in music videos by thin women (do those lungs sound skinny to you?). Ride on Time is named for Holloway's lyric cus you're right on time - but understanding her as she communicates was of no value, she is reduced to syllables. On Lady Marmalade, Patti Labelle did not speak French - she was the face and the voice, but not the lyricist or even permitted to know what the lyrics were about (in translation, she coos would you like to sleep with me tonight?). I'm Coming Out (1980) was written for Diana Ross when producers realised how many Diana Ross impersonators were on the drag scene, but they swore blind it was about something else as Ross feared a gay record would harm her career. And Summer expressed discomfort with doing sexy moans on Love to Love You Baby. To what extent does the powerful Black woman of dance music reflect actual power held by actual women in a production context?

(Elsewhere, traditional singing by Difang and Igay Duana from the Amis were used as undifferentiated raw mass of universal world feelgood sound in New Age smash hit Return to Innocence and Gregory Coleman died in poverty without knowing 7 seconds of his drumming spawned entire new genres. Dance music has a problem, and there's lots to say here about value exploited from unrecompensated Black female labour in particular.)

I'd like to see a re-evaluation in the discourse, perhaps reframing a simple statement as a question: to what extent is disco a Black sound? How do you quantify ownership or authorship of a genre or movement? It's a glass-half-full kind of a question - most artists recommended on this page are Black or Latin, and those who are not are often still playing styles with Black & Latin roots - so in some senses, the answer is a simple and obvious one. But I want to keep it complicated, because the kinds of exclusion at play here are fundamental and huge.

More, More, More

Most people's most important source on disco is Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day, rehabilitating disco's reputation from wedding cheese to the crucible of the modern nightclub. Readable, well-researched, and filled with discographies for key DJs. I've not read Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, but it's also well regarded. I loved Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture by Alice Echols, approaching disco through topics such as gender, race and sexuality, as well as a fantastic close-reading of Saturday Night Fever.

I couldn't have written this introduction without Lawrence's book, or without assistance from Rate Your Music's curation communities - helping me to get a handle on disco's subgenres and cul-de-sacs - and users from Discogs - filling in details about release years, key personnel, and more leads.

If you've got the disco bug, some collections to get include:

See also: for my previous project on cult Les Miserables disco musical, Boys from the Backroom, I put together a bibliography of books, collector album sets, and disco films.

Disco-graphy

For your listening pleasure, I have assembled five discs of disco delight - taking us from 1972-2004.

Early Disco and Peak Disco establish the core sound from 1972-1979 - warm, uplifting and funky.

The final three albums take I Feel Love (1977) as a splitting point into three separate sequels. Disco Never Dies rounds off the trilogy of popular dance music that is funky, cheesy, euphoric, and huge on the radio.

The other two dive into distinctive subgenres growing out of disco. Future Disco is inspired by technology, experimental music, and has a mechanical sound which is robotic, spacey, cool, detached and futuristic - predominantly European. 133BPM also takes I Feel Love as its starting point, producing a harder, faster and more intense sound, popular in gay dance.

#1 - Early Disco

Listen
  1. Soul Makossa - Manu Dibango (1972)
  2. La Botella - Joe Bataan (1974)
  3. Love is the Message 12" - MSFB (1973)
  4. Never Can Say Goodbye - Gloria Gaynor (1975)
  5. Don't Leave Me This Way - Harold Melvin & the Bluenotes (1976)
  6. (Shake Shake Shake) Shake Your Booty - KC & The Sunshine Band (1976)
  7. Love Hangover - Diana Ross (1976)

The raw materials of disco are Philly Soul (Love is the Message), latin drums (La Botella), funk and world import drum music (Soul Makossa). Soul Makossa is named by some as the original disco song, while Love is the Message is a key early example of a song with an instrumental section added for dancing. All were played at early nightclubs establishing the disco sound

The other songs are great mid-period disco - with immense diva vocals from Gaynor, Ross and Teddy Pendergrass; songs that would have been 3 minutes in the 60s expanding in length to create dance tracks; and the ongoing influence of funk bands like KC & the Sunshine Band.

#2 - Peak Disco

Listen
  1. A Fifth of Beethoven - Walter Murphy (1977)
  2. Do Ya Think I'm Sexy - Rod Stewart (1978)
  3. Stayin' Alive - Bee Gees (1977)
  4. He's the Greatest Dancer - Sister Sledge (1979)
  5. Le Freak - Chic (1978)
  6. Love Sensation 12" - Loleatta Holloway (1980)
  7. Love is the Message 12" - Larry Levan (1979)

Our overture, A Fifth of Beethoven, represents the fad slapping a disco beat on just about anything that would sell. It became famous on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack alongside Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees - the best-selling album of all time until Thriller - and the moment disco became a phenomena. Along with Le Freak and He's The Greatest Dancer, both by Rogers and Edwards, they represent the essential disco sound. They are also all about disco.

Do Ya Think I'm Sexy by Rod Stewart is one of many disco songs by non-disco artists released at this period - it's pretty funky!

The final two songs take us out of disco into Garage & House. Loleatta Holloway was one of the most brilliant disco performers, and had a long afterlife as the most sampled vocalist of all time - we will return to Love Sensation on Disk 3. This song seems to anticipate House in the prominent piano line and massive soul diva sound.

Larry Levan's remix of Love is the Message (from Disc 1) finishes what Tom Moulton began, dropping the vocals entirely and extending the break for a sublime 11 minutes. It sounds far cooler, both more contemporary and timeless, than the cheery original.

3# - Disco Never Dies

Listen
  1. Rapper's Delight - Sugarhill Gang (1979)
  2. Celebration - Kool & the Gang (1980)
  3. Forget Me Nots - Patrice Rushen (1982)
  4. Ride on Time - Black Box ft Loleatta Holloway (1989)
  5. Relight My Fire - Take That (1993)
  6. Murder on the Dancefloor - Sophie Ellis Bextor (2001)
  7. Last Dance - Donna Summer (1978)

The most significant afterlife of disco's groovy basslines and tight drumming is as samples for rap & hip hop. Rapper's Delight - available in lengths up to 16 minutes - broke rap on mainstream radio from the New York Underground; it is the first of many songs to interpolate or sample Good Times by Chic (from Disc 2).

Disco continued to be made into the early 80s - under different genre labels. Celebration fits easily into a disco night, but sounds distinctive from earlier disco songs: a cooler and more sophisticated sound, with crisper production values and disposing of disco's more saccharine, overproduced elements - songs which continue to feel universal and contemporary, where classic disco feels dated and specific. Forget Me Nots is another example, also illustrating how experimental synth-driven disco influenced mainstream production; note the intricate disco boogie bassline. If you are a certain age, you know it as the sample for Will Smith's Men In Black

House was another outgrowth of disco, pioneered by former-disco-DJs such as Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles. Samples of soul divas was an essential ingredient to the house music formula - often without credit or agency. Ride on Time is one of the most infamous examples, sampling Loleatta Holloway's Love Sensation (from disc 2). Reportedly the most sampled singer in history, she was eventually recognised and received a career resurgance in the 90s (You can find a version of the song where Black Box hastily removed Holloway's sample and got a new vocalist in, but squeamishness aside, you really do want the Holloway version)

90s dance music relied heavily on disco covers or disco-style songs, evoking the good times of disco as an ancestor dance movement; 90s production style is so different - airy and tinny - this can be hard to intuit. One of the better songs is Take That's Relight My Fire, featuring Lulu covering Holloway in the breakdown. The 00s also had a disco moment - I've chosen Murder on the Dancefloor because it just came back into the charts in the 2020s following the film Saltburn; songs by Kylie and Madonna are perhaps more significant, but would be a better fit for the synth-disco compilations.

Finally, bringing the classic disco journey to a close, Last Dance is disco sleaze - music for holding your lover tight before the house lights come up, the sun rises, and you begin the long walk home in the day.

#4 - Future Disco

Listen
  1. I Feel Love - Donna Summer (1977)
  2. Supernature - Cerrone (1977)
  3. Fear - Easy Going (1979)
  4. Robot is Systematic - 'Lectric Workers (1982)
  5. Blue Monday - New Order (1982)

The final two discs are dedicated to disco descending from I Feel Love. They span Electro-Disco, Eurodisco, Italo-Disco, Space Disco and HiNRG - somewhat interchangeable and overlapping trends taking us into the 1980s, all defined by use of synthetic sound. Recognisably disco, they nevertheless disrupt the mood when filed in year order among other post-disco songs. These subgenres are divisive, specific, and attract devoted collectors; you cannot play them at a wedding; you will either judge them to be the world's worst noise or go COMPLETELY NUTS FOR IT.

The first album is about cool, detached, futuristic and mechanical sounds.

There is music before I Feel Love, and there is music after. Performed by Donna Summer, it barely registers as disco aside from its production context. Instead, it is a genre unto itself, with most songs on these discs imitating the choppering octave-jump bassline, synth swoops, or the offbeat clap - which will become the defining drumbeat of 80s dance.

This new turn in disco explored new emotional and sonic terrains. Supernature (France) closely follows the I Feel Love formula, creating a futuristic, somewhat detached space-age sound. It represents the unfunky, mechanical trend in Euro-disco. Fear (Italy), by the team behind prog soundtrack maestros Goblin, is anything but easy going. Complete with sound clips of screaming, its unsettling bassline creates paranoia and anxiety.

The final three songs take us into the 80s. I've chosen Robot is Systematic (Italy) to represent space-disco - songs which drew attention to the futuristic qualities of the sound - with a robot voice, sound effects, and themed lyrics. The jumping bass recalls I Feel Love, occupying every beat with a pure funk turnaround - but clock the on-and-off clap drum, muddying the strict four-on-the-floor pulse. Yet despite its futuristic qualities, the samba breakdown is pure classic disco.

Blue Monday (UK) is dance music's next great leap forward, the new template; it is also considered an important moment in HiNRG. That on-off clap now dominates - in my opinion, not a disco drumline; it takes the juddering Moroder bassline in anxious new directions. Unlike I Feel Love (which had a real drummer!), drums are fully synthesised, an extremely mechanical and inhuman sound. It once again sounds like the future, but stripped of any euphoric and psychedelic quality, it sounds like a future glimpsed from 1982.

#5 - 133 BPM

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  1. You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) - Sylvester (1978)
  2. The Break - Kat Mandu (1979)
  3. Filthy/Gorgeous - Scissor Sisters (2004)
  4. Hills of Katmandu - Tantra (1979)
  5. She Has a Way - Bobby O
  6. You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) - Dead or Alive (1984)
  7. Never Can Say Goodbye - the Communards (1987)

The final two discs are dedicated to disco desceding from I Feel Love. They span Electro-Disco, Eurodisco, Italo-Disco, Space Disco and HiNRG - somewhat interchangeable and overlapping trends taking us into the 1980s, all defined by use of synthetic sound. Recognisably disco, they nevertheless disrupt the mood when filed in year order among other post-disco songs. These subgenres are divisive, specific, and attract devoted collectors; you cannot play them at a wedding; you will either judge them to be the world's worst noise or go COMPLETELY NUTS FOR IT.

At the end of the decade, disco becomes FAST - with a hard edge anticipating trance and techno. The beats-per-minute of these songs is around 120-140 - other discs average 112BM. This album is about the thrilling pace and harder-edge that involves into the HiNRG sound, and the classic 80s gay dancefloor. Synthetic, but to me, a far more emotive sound - it's not as mellow and euphoric as classic disco, but neither is it as clinical and cerebral as the direction on Disc 4.

Our startpoint is once again I Feel Love from Disk 4, the direct and clear ancestor of most of these songs. Mighty Real is definitely disco, but also definitely HiNRG - thrilling samba drumming, a funky yet synthesised bassline in juddering Moroder style, sweet euphoric lyrics and diva vocals, and futuristic swooshing noises.

The instrumental break of a disco song was of most interest to DJs, and the absolutely relentless The Break doesn't bother to give them verses and chorus to cut out - stripping back the template of disco to its most essential dancefloor qualities, an example of experimentation with the form. Despite the incredible sense of intensity, it is still essentially disco: Guyanese drums, funky bass, and an orchestra section.

00s electroclash blended with disco to create a distinctively 00s disco revival, with artists like Kylie, Madonna and Lady Gaga creating electronic dance music which is metallic, somewhat stressful in too-large-a-dose with none of disco's mellow funkiness as a relief. Filthy/Gorgeous is a classic funk bassline smothered in robotic voices and a relentless pace, with campy and unabashedly gay lyrics.

(Because of this genre's abrasive and exhausting qualities, it was the hardest to winnow down and arrange in a way that felt cohesive. I've taken the greatest liberties of arranging them not by year, but in an order that feels pleasurable to listen to.)

How's your heartbeat? Up next is some Italo-Disco, also considered HiNRG. Hills of Katmandu (Italy) anticpates the dance music of the future with a THUDDING 4/4 drum, but it's still got a whimsy and a sweetness with Summer-like celestial vocals and that choppering I Feel Love bassline; the Cowley even-more-hiNRG remix cuts these for a harder sound. As my favourite song of all time, I have self-indulgently given you the extremely collectable full 16 minute version which DJs of 1979 would have done anything to get their hands on.

I don't love Bobby O's sound - one of the few songs on the collection I wouldn't personally die besides - but he is the other co-father of the HiNRG sound, and you'll hear close affinities to Blue Monday (from Disc 4). She Has A Way is a song which sounds both extremely disco and extremely 80s - including his trademark cowbell. You Spin Me Round is an example of the Bobby O style becoming the sound of 80s dance (and gay dance) as a whole.

Coming to the end of the collection as a whole, we never can say goodbye to disco. Covering Gloria Gaynor's song (from Disc 1), this is one of many disco covers from 80s synth pop bands such as Bronski Beat/Communards and Erasure bridging straight into the 90s pop disco revival (on Disc 3).

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