Disco is back! For one night or forever, who can say? The NYC-based outfit Say She She, fronted by three sashaying vocalists, made the argument Saturday at The Sinclair that the familiar four-on-the-floor beat should be a permanent fixture of our musical landscape.
Digital platforms such as Spotify have flattened the temporality of our cultural space like a coin on train tracks. The image of the present presses into the past and future in ways our older siblings, never mind our parents or grandparents, could hardly have predicted.
Say She She, whose name is a nod to guitarist Nile Rodgers and his American disco band Chic from the 1970s, represent a kind of established rupture in the fabric of cultural production. Artists are no longer satisfied with being inspired by their musical forerunners. Instead they want to kidnap their objects of fixation and inhabit their flesh like some 21st century Buffalo Bill.
The trio’s latest album makes a few recognizable breaks from the pure disco revivalism of earlier LPs “Prism” and “Silver.” Say She She performed the title track “Cut & Rewind” in front of a packed house in Harvard Square, flashing a staccato rhythm that feels closer to an early ’80s hip-hop-themed house party than the languid measures of a late ’70s Donna Summer-ruled dancehall.
Speaking of hip-hop, the early ’80s reminds us of a time when “appropriation,” as a method of art production, still felt dangerous. Albums from that era by artists such as N.W.A., Beastie Boys and Public Enemy simply can’t be made anymore on account of their prolific use of unauthorized samples and the lawsuits they’d invite.
Yet the present is cannibalizing the past more than ever. Business deals between the old guard record industry, which holds the rights, and new guard digital streaming, which controls the platforms, has put the entire history of music at everyone’s fingertips through deals that prove lucrative for everyone involved except the musicians.
Artists of the moment such as Say She She are forced to compete for listeners with this corporate behemoth. Who can blame them if they retreat into a kind of “playlist-core” quietism, mining established intellectual property to lure a few fans away from pure nostalgia and into the space of live performance?
The secret thrills of disco, as ever, are not the John Travolta-branded moves, but rather the propulsive rhythm sections that inspired the urge to dance in the first place. You’ve got to be there live, in person, face-to-face with a room full of like-minded late night warriors to discover that secret thrill.
Say She She executed on this essential task, supplying a superlative backing band to return the disco sound to its original glory. Maybe that’s “playlist-core.” But if it can pull a few more warm bodies into a few more clubs, they’re doing something right.
Los Angeles’ Katzù Oso opened with a lanky, laid-back set that fielded selections from its latest album “La Conexión,” adventures in cumbia and grito, and creative mashups of Herbie Hancock, Daft Punk and Thurston Moore’s memorable quote from the documentary “1991: The Year Punk Broke,” which deserves to be excerpted in full:
“People see rock ’n’ roll as youth culture, and when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do? I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture.”
How much truer is that today than in 1991? For reasons that our older siblings, never mind our parents or grandparents, could hardly have predicted …
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