Wall of Sound

Uncontrollable laughter is not dissimilar to uncontrollable crying. The need to purge, a physical reaction to emotion that can no longer be contained in the brain.

Dancing is their younger sister, no idea what she’s doing but following the lead of her two emotional older sisters. Disco is her dance partner.

What I love about disco music resides in its loneliness, in its emptiness yet dually in its fullness and warmness. Disco understands that suffering and heartache can be almost euphoric in the fullness of its heft.

Disco is a balm for indecision. While so many of the ‘sad girl’ ballads that flood my spotify playlists encourage me to think and question, disco tells me exactly what to do. Sometimes a four-to-the-floor beat and a major key instructing you to dance is exactly what you need. 

In a sense, disco is beautifully childish in its simplicity. Perhaps that's why my grade 1 class would beg our teacher to play the ABBA CD on Friday afternoons. It was hot outside, our hands were sticky and the cooler was broken.

Put your hands up, put them down, now spin around. It is surrender and it is freeing.

However, the stark juxtaposition between disco’s sweeping synthetic major chords and the often overlooked desperation in its lyrics interests me.

Disco relies on the immersive ‘wall of sound’ technique, pushing music technology to its limits to create sound that no human could ever manufacture with the humble guitar or kick drum.

Instrumentation like the swell of an orchestra or the cry of an electric guitar are layered over and over on top of each other until they form a cacophony of emotion. So much so, that it's hard to distinguish individual sounds. 

Admittedly, it's not a very ‘cool’ genre to be into anymore. I hardly feel niche or mysterious when Irene Cara interrupts my playlist of sad girl music. And, it feels somehow perverted or dorky to listen to disco music alone, with headphones. Perhaps this is why it has lost its coolness. There is a kind of disregard for ‘crowd pleasing’ music as if its quality or depth is diminished by its mass appeal rather than the other way round.

It's easy to dismiss as shallow or disposable but I've come to realise that even shallowness is a form of depth. It's profound to realise that maybe a bit of dancing will make you feel better.

Disco is also a yearning. The lyrics in the songs often communicate a longing for freedom and ecstasy rather than experiencing it. The deified, idyllic concept of ‘disco’ is seemingly just a heavenly destination that we (and the white-flares-clad members of the Bee Gees) are trying to reach through music and a bit of awkward sprinkler dancing. 

But listening to the Bee Gees alone with headphones on the train one day, I began to pay attention to the lyrics- the lyrics I usually sing without even really noticing.

Well now, I get low and I get high

And if I can't get either, I really try

Got the wings of Heaven on my shoes

I'm a dancin' man and I just can't lose

You know it's alright, it's okay

I'll live to see another day

‘Stayin’ Alive’ feels like a grappling between surrender and defeat. Though circumstance and hardship may beat you down, dance will free you. Just as shallowness is profound, so is surrender.

Whitney sings ‘I wanna dance with somebody’. It's the same melancholy evoked by watching other people dance while you stand on the sidelines. Imagining how freeing it must feel. 

I guess we're all just trying to get to funkytown, the question of whether or not that nirvana really exists forms the base layer of desperation in these songs.

Just like swimming in a giant wave pool, we are swept along by these waves of synth, too big and too powerful to understand. They are no longer recognisably waves but rather a wall of sound. 

So we let ourselves go, our bodies to bend and be puppeteered by the strength of the boogie.

It is surrender and it is freeing.