Lord Larehip

The Staple Singers were quite popular in the 70s. There was no need to tout them as disco to sell them. It doesn't do any good to argue that this wasn't disco when it was being touted AS a form of disco during the disco era. It proves that a rigid definition of disco is untenable and unsupportable. ANY black American dance music of this time period was disco.

Whites of the rock scene in that era fell victim to the media depiction of disco because few of them had any direct contact with that scene. I was one of them. We tended to like Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players because they were played on rock FM stations so, of course, they couldn't be disco. When I stopped listening to rock around '79 and listened only to the funk stations and went to the discos with my black shipmates in the early 80s I heard all the stuff whites insist is funk played side by side with the stuff they contemptuously wrote off as disco. I realized there was no real difference. It was the same stuff. ALL black American dance music of that era was disco. That is the ONLY definition of disco--black American dance music that proliferated during the most of the 70s and early 80s. In the discos, I never once heard the BeeGees, for example. But I heard Cameo, Midnight Star and James Brown endlessly.

If someone was to write a song that alternated between being "funk" and "disco" not one of you who insist there is a difference would be able to agree on where in the song that the transitions take place. It's a silly, pretentious argument.

If disco and funk differ fundamentally then tell me what the very first disco recording was. Should be a piece of cake.

PANICGAL

Disco is fun stuff.

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Plus Motown got into the act with packaging their classic older Soul songs under the Disc-O-Tech banner. Not to be confused with the legendary Early 70's UK-released Motown Disco Classics series, the US division had a couple of these collections right around the same time as the Stax collection.


http://www.discogs.com/Various-Disc-...elease/1413725

For Stax, sadly they lost one of the masters of Disco in Isaac Hayes, who was headed that way by the Mid 70's but went to ABC for some credible dance records peppered with his trademark ballads. "Chocolate Chip" was a major hit.

To my ears, the Warp Nine version of Star Trek was more in line with Eletropop as if someone just got a Kraftwrek record and thought that it would be easy to get a hit out of something like that following up on the US success of Autobahn, and leave it to the legendary Terry Manning to do it, but I can see where the Disco connection is. It was released on Privilege in 1975, one of the many Stax Distributed labels and fully connected to the label's dying days as you can tell in the article linked (it also had a re-issue of Big Star's "September Gurls" as a promo copy after the band folded).

A history of that label here...

Untitled Document



Now you want a Disco Star Trek, although a very low budget one, I found one for you!



...sadly, I don't see Grace Lee Whitney's Disco Treckin' anywhere, yet.

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Not to get too edit crazy in the last post, here's Rufus Thomas' re-vision of his classic "Jump Back" as "Jump Back '75" which kind of had a slight Disco flavor to it. Although they lost one of their kings to another label, Stax still had the legendary Clown Prince of Funk who could adapt, although sadly with diminishing returns.



On Polydor, James Brown sadly decided that he wanted to create an album that tried to keep up with the trends with some re-visions of his classics, including "Sex Machine '75". Still, what sounded flat on vinyl sounded cool live in ugly 70's clothes and telling the audience to "get on up!" as he knew he was the man with the plan.





I have nothing wrong with good Disco, it was only the 78-80 era that seen many artists try to ride on the train. Soul legends climbing aboard was alright as they already had built the base, but when you see someone like Ethel Merman, however, that was the time to say stop. Casablanca Records had a lot of good dance music, especially that of Giorgio Moroder's productions, but by '79 (and Kiss' "I Was Made for Loving You"), it got to a point when the label was releasing singles like diarrhea because they were cheap to produce with not a lot of focus on the quality - too many awards at Studio 54 warped them I guess.

TK Records in Florida, home of KC and the Sunshine Band, thankfully knew when to slow down. I have a double platter released through one of their sub-labels that actually gets me on my feet simply called Disco Party.

Still, as for trendy followers, I have a guilty pleasure for the MCA released Ann Marget Disco album produced by Paul Sabu!