Anybody Who’s Everybody

In "Disco as Operating System, Part One,"1 Tan Lin proposes that to consider disco would be to miss the point. "No one really listens to disco," he assures us, "not even the listener."2 In order for disco to take hold, "passively absorbed by a brain connected to a dancing body,"3 you have to let it happen to you. Lin's disco is diffuse, anti-individual, ambient, contentless, zen. It starts from emptiness and extends a general structure of love beyond you or me.

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Arthur Russell left his cello at home, went to the disco to dance, and came out gay. He had mostly dated women when a new friend brought him to see Nicky Siano, who was DJing at The Gallery, a racially, sexually, and gender-mixed club where a so-far-straightish guy, not long from the Midwest, wouldn't be out of place as he came through and figured out what he liked. Some of the disco clubs were known as "'finishing schools' — environments in which gayness was not simply expressed, but actively taught."4 Russell, who was teased for looking weird on the floor, didn't learn to dance at the Gallery, but he did learn disco.

Julius Eastman, a Black singer and pianist from Ithaca, and Russell, a white cellist from Oskaloosa, found each other in the largely straight, white New York downtown scene of the late '70s. Both dissolved conventions in their compositions. Russell made sweet and creaky folk sounds, freaky hit disco sounds, sounds we don't have a name for: a lovesick electricity echoing underwater. Hitting it off with his melancholy pop country songs, I branched from there through the miles of tape he left us in his Lower East Side apartment — as Russell's desire to dance made him gay, so his corn field cowboy hat tunes made me a disco listener.

Eastman's jubilant, demanding, flirtatious compositions put irreverence to work. My first encounter with him was a posthumous retrospective at The Kitchen in 2018. In the middle of Macle, a performer sang a snippet of Robyn from the Body Talk era. I went home and looked up the score, an irregular grid of more or less specific instructions, where one box directs you to fill in "Your favorite pop tune" after making "wavy" and "very nasty"5 sounds. Just the sounds for me.

A few decades earlier, not everyone at The Kitchen was ready for dance music. Eastman and Russell had already collaborated at the venue, where the former conducted the latter's minimalist Instrumentals.6 "Convinced that disco, like Instrumentals, could be a form of serious music that revolved around shifting, repetitive structures," Russell invited Eastman and several others back to The Kitchen to put on what he called an orchestral disco concert.7 He wanted to make disco because that's what he was out dancing to; he wanted to have fun at The Kitchen. By the time they finished performing, half the crowd had danced out of their seats, and the other half had raised at least an eyebrow. "If the beat is good enough to move people's bodies," Russell's friend and frequent collaborator Peter Zummo remembers him observing, "it won't be treated as serious music."8 For Russell, disco was heady fun. Its durational, repetitive forms built an environment for songs about never getting enough.

Lin describes the disco effect of evacuating the world of daylight before the sun gets the chance to rise:

Early disco producers realized that the nicest thing about a groove is that it doesn't have to end, and that music, like the social, is the continually regulated background. And thus, unlike various avant garde anti-groove practices that paired difficulty and impersonality with extreme length, disco aimed, via the most artificial means possible, to vapidly and ephemerally solve a kind of existential crisis via machine rhythms, repeated pleasure, mindless sex, synthetic tracks, and extreme length.9

Durational and fleeting, a meditative recurrence and muscle relaxant, disco is an "extremely porous container," and "no disco number is a complete work."10 Its unresolved permeability leaves it open for change, the way disco historian Tim Lawrence described dancers coming together and departing the dance floor in an "ecstatic community that subdivided into smaller cells during the week."11 Lin's disco retrofits the listener, who becomes its equipment. We access a feeling through repetition, turning again to a place, a person, a fantasy, a weekly night out, queuing up the same song again, asking for a dance. If you like something, you like doing it again, and the anticipation and delay of repetition are their own delights.

Describing disco as a mood-generating mechanism, Lin writes that "the 'language' of disco eats itself and the dancers are non-nostalgic."12The phrase "Disco eats itself" samples the title of his earlier two-channel video poem, where found videos (tagged "disco" on YouTube) of early webcam singalongs and party footage scored with slightly asynchronous disco, house, or post-Y2K Justin Timberlake share the screen with phrases streaming across jumpy columns, too fast to read except through repeated snatches:

there are things that can never be repe   ated / their muscles are fab / like ball gowns / 'and nothing was true' / I thought you were plastic / flippant thus / discriminating / reductive / I was buying junk somewhere / and getting laid / I had lost a few / that is why I am here / that it occurs one by one / pre-dreaming / noses / I repeat eyes / I repeat sand under ibis / I dreamed I was drowning in a candle / that it was substitution / I am alike / gown-like / and various as the seaside / like bell bottoms counterfeit / affiliative, be-spectacled / I am various and sideways / bell bottoms recur / charged with shoplifting / different according to the anemone's flowcharts13

The piece's multi-source feeds, disrupted units of thought with conspicuous pixels and time-delayed sound, yield blips of association from a field of abundant inattention (as when a young man walks into a shower and the words "Romeo walked into the ocean" streak beside him). Looping into Lin's disco operating system subsumes the viewer into a larger body, in "affiliative" contact with sensory input and social space. YouTube, rather than the direct experience of the dance floor, is the piece's scene, and its inputs come from early 2000s cultural affiliations with disco: the poem, tween webcam footage, the sexual economy of a pool party, swoopy bangs, a grocery store dance vid.

The scattering focus of "Disco Eats Itself" invites you to graze, eating whatever's in front of you second by second, or to exert a discontinuous, attentive stamina to follow a moving image glitched by strobe lights. Fun, in poetry and on the dance floor, takes some doing. In Lin's piece, one subs in for another and the night goes on. Long hours of dancing demand endurance, and coming together with whoever happens to be there draws from a deep social fount.

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After their performance at The Kitchen, Russell reconvened Eastman and several others to make an album. For both composers, music was formal, conceptual, and produced with others in a decentralized, shared consciousness. Music happened together, and repetition was personal because it added up everything everyone in the room was doing. Getting together to perform or record was another stage of composition, where they generated with their collaborators rather than teaching them to play a predetermined score. The space for a "communal working-out" in their responsive and non-hierarchical processes sometimes frustrated the musicians they worked with.14 Other times, they indulged a shared "love of unfolding exposure of process and total respect for the moment's caprice."15

Confusion and pleasure prolonged the act of being in music with each other, and satisfaction was never a product; the music kept on going. Russell didn't want to settle on a form and put out a record — he wanted to keep making music. In disco more broadly, Lin hears deferred goodbyes: a series of no-you-hang-ups at the end of a phone call keeping our ears pressed against each other. That's how Russell talked: one friend said of him, "There were thousands of sentences he wouldn't finish."16

Russell and Eastman's orchestral disco was an unending process of shapeshifting and reconfiguration, a "mutant disco."17 François Kevorkian, who described it as a "rich, luxurious, unbelievably complex and ever-evolving and changing mess . . . like being in a swamp you can't get out of," went on to remix the album's biggest hit, "#5 (Go Bang)."18 A favorite of DJ and producer Larry Levan's to play at The Garage, Kevorkian's remix finds a spaciousness in the dense sound, parting the swampy waters. It ends on the words "I want," echoing in their delays of unarriving waves.19 Russell loved the iterative form of the remix, in part because it seemed to ensure there was no definitive form of any song. I have fun with Kevorkian's — it's more danceable — but I go back and sink into the mud of the studio version, to see what gets in my mouth:

• Eastman's keyboards shimmer. They sound sci-fi. You're getting beamed up, but you never disappear. You have to go bang, over and over. On another listen, the keys are a rippling curtain, like the hyper repetitive sleigh bells in his "Femenine," a metallic surface for the rest of the sounds.

• Multiple singers go "I wanna see all my friends at once / I'd do anything to get the chance to go bang," chant-like, in unison. Their voices on the same notes make almost the same sounds. They're close enough to hear the friction, their diverging grains and timbres audibly grinding up on each other.20

• "I wanna go BAAAANG" — Eastman bursting forth from his rippling organ, building momentum to break through the atmosphere, yowling, until he's too high to hear.

Eastman's voice, taking on Russell's patently sexual lyrics, rises from a "subterranean register" to an "orgasmic high," "as if opera had been staged at a gay sex club."21 Eastman's "unhinged utterance" of "erotic exuberance"22 brought the drama to their sessions, and Russell's post-production methods embedded it in a sexual surface. Russell played the studio recordings on two 24-track machines at once and "found"23 the songs in what Lawrence calls a "tape-to-tape conversation."24 Russell named the album 24→24 Music for this tape-to-tape process (and his formal constraint of patterning rhythm changes every 24 bars) and released it under the name Dinosaur L in 1981. 

There are hours and hours of "Go Bang." Listening to the session tapes in the New York Public Library's Russell archive, I can hear several of Lin's signature disco traits in Russell and Eastman: total sonic surround, storage, endless iterations.

Disco is so repetitive that it would be impossible to focus on it. Song length extends the occasion of being on the dance floor, and climax doesn't signal the end of anything. Describing the 17-minute version of "Love to Love You Baby," Donna Summer's legendarily erotic performance of Giorgio Moroder's lyrics, Lin writes, "Such a song, a series of looped tracks, suggest[s] that the most beautiful orgasms are uninterrupted and subject to infinite storage, that the orgasm can no longer be regarded as an event but as a series of delays."25 Whether or not it simulates sex, disco goes so long that — if you stick around — repetition and duration get hot, not least when they never get you anywhere. If disco is an uninterrupted, endless orgasm, it's also edging forever.

It often seemed like Russell didn't want to press a record. He was always editing, to the point where he pissed off collaborators and record labels who wanted to move on already.26 He didn't want to do business, and as he grew ill (he died of complications from AIDS in 1992), he shed any inhibition he may have had about racking up the studio bills on a label's account. When his symptoms became more impactful, Russell built his apartment out into a structure of equipment and recordings to have everything in arm's reach and keep making sounds without tiring himself out. Musician Joyce Bowden said of his home studio, "I think the walls were made of tape."27 I picture Russell's living room of recordings as an external brain — what Lin calls the "empty storage medium of history"28 in disco — retaining sound and thought so that everyone could reach out, empty into it, and fill themselves again.

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"From the beginning," Lin writes, "it was always better not to think."29 I haven't managed this. 16 years after Lin's essay and even more decades after disco's heyday, I'm more apt to sidle into a DM than dance up to somebody. When I think about what the ideal of disco raises for me today, I wouldn't fend off any nostalgia allegations — my disco is historical, unless I can manage to make it also now. Disco has been done before, and I could do it again.

Lin presents disco as an occasion, rather than a program for social change. It's a chance to skip out on the "unbroken social scene" of convention, to replace "marriage, straight sex, the recession, suburbia, a drug-free world, blue jeans" with "lit-up dance floors, tight trousers, mirror balls, polyester, faded industrial infrastructure, inner-city blight, an hour hand that throbs, and amyl nitrate."30 The throbbing hour is its own reward of latent sexuality in public space, shifting into self-release.

What I ask of disco is everything the world keeps from us — pleasure, time, delectable chemicals, mass companionship outside of language — especially when it feels like everything can't be had. Disco is the feeling that we could, at any moment, be dancing. It asks the question of how to get what's stopping us out of the way.

DISCOGRAPHY

24 → 24 Music, feat. Dinosaur L et al, The Kitchen, New York, NY, April 28, 1979.

Dinosaur L, "#5 (Go Bang!)." Recorded June 9, 1979. Track 2 on 24 → 24 Music. Sleeping Bag, vinyl LP.

Dinosaur L," Go Bang! #5." Mixed by Francois K, 1982. Sleeping Bag, 12" vinyl.

Dinosaur L, 24 → 24 Music session tapes. Arthur Russell papers, JPB 16-14. Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental, feat. Ekmeles et al. The Kitchen, New York, NY, February 3, 2018.

Summer, Donna. "Love to Love You Baby." Recorded May-June, 1975. Track 1 on Love to Love You Baby. Oasis, vinyl LP.

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charles theonia (Twitter: @floweroids)is a poet from Brooklyn and a transsexual without direction. They are the author of Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax (Archway Editions) and chapbooks including If a Piece Falls off the Poem, Keep It (Belladonna*).

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