30 January 2023, 09:45
New York is a rat hole. The city is near bankruptcy, the police are corrupt, houses are empty, teachers are on strike, sewer workers are on strike and the subways are sprayed with water. Almost a million people have left Manhattan in regarding fifty years. This urban jungle—Harlem, the Bronx, Greenwich, and the East Village—provides the putrid hummus for a pop music big bang. It is reinvented in its most colorful communities. For example in the apartment of David Mancuso – soon known as The Loft – where parties are celebrated with his extraordinary discography. Disco will soon be the sound of the hour. A few blocks away, CBGB’s opens up the nucleus of US punk. Further north, teenagers celebrate the first hip-hop party. And last but not least, Latin American dances get a distinctly local touch with the term “Salsa”.
“Paaar-ty! Paar-ty!” is how Vince Aletti introduced his seminal article for Rolling Stone in September 1973, in which he first described the disco movement. Discotheques would be back with a vengeance, he writes – and leads the readers into a hidden world in which a predominantly black, latin and gay audience celebrates all night long to a wide variety of music styles – funk, European imports, West African and Afro-Caribbean vinyls. Radios and labels are jumping up quickly. Two years later, around 200,000 people spend a weekend in the city’s 300 or so discos. They dance in ruins.
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