From Walter Hughes’s “In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco,” in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose’s Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture:
As the lyrics of disco songs make clear for us in a characteristically redundant way, the beat brooks no denial, but moves us, controls us, deprives us of our will. Dancing becomes a form of submission to this overmastering beat.
The oft-noted vacuity of the lyrics of disco songs is itself a part of the medium’s message: they usually strive only to translate the rhetoric of the beat into simple imperatives… Language is subjugated to the beat, and drained of its pretensions to meaning; almost all traces of syntax or structure are abandoned, reducing language to the simplest sequential repetition, a mere verbal echo of the beat itself.
This emptying out of language parallels the refusal of narrative structure in the song overall. There is rarely an identifiable direction, progression or climax in disco music; the prolongation of its own continuity is its only end…. In the discotheque, the ‘disco-text’ strives to shake off all remnants of its own textuality, to become pure, unconstructed, undifferentiated discourse, this purity being another expression of its unmediated power to stimulate dancing.
But if these words (“Get up get up get busy,” or “I’m so horny horny horny horny”) still comprise a “text” — “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,” as Barthes put it — then what are their referents? Is there still some intertextual reference to the vast tradition of dance music, to funk and soul and blues and beyond? Or are they now truly devoid of meaning as hollowed-out signifiers, denoting only a triggered sample? The words, like the participants in the party on the dancefloor, are merely slaves to the rhythm.
My grad student Karen is writing her thesis on Filipino DJs in the Bay Area, and taking quite seriously DJ QBert‘s assertion (or maybe it was said by another member of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz) that turntablism was a language. Or like a language. In any case, I love the idea that there can be a syntax of scratches, a grammar of grooves — but none of which are simply floating signs.
The difference here — despite turntablism’s inherent subversion of notions of musical authenticity, or the aesthetics of “live” instrumentation, or (certainly for Filipinos) an interrogation of the racially dichotomous and racialized music industry — is that turntable DJs draw from a deep metatextual well of interrelated musical signifiers. A James Brown grunt here, a Winstons drum break there, a Bob James piano riff here — all are promiscuously incorporated into the turntable “text.” And while its language community — not as producers, but as hearers — could simply stand back and nod its head to the beats, there will still be a smaller coterie of insider language speakers — again, very much like a language, with its specialized jargon — who can identify, say, the guitar riff from the Chocolate Watchband’s cover of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” from Beck’s “Jackass.”
So: do disco and turntablism speak a different language, and is one necessarily linguistically richer than the other?
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