I'm in Wichita today, so for those who live here and want to see me speak, please come out to College Hill United Methodist Church, where I'll be presenting with a panel about progressivism in red states. If you are or if you aren't, however, may I suggest Panda Party? And a video by one of my favorite Kansas bands:

I should be able to Panda Party today, and that means hopefully blogging!

The internet is awash in memories of "Soul Train" this week, because of the loss of Don Cornelius, the host, who died from an apparent suicide. A little-discussed fact of the internet is that watching YouTube clips of "Soul Train" is a surprisingly effective form of stress relief. 

And so is partying down at the Panda Party! So come join us and spin some tunes. Sadly, we can't create a "Soul Train"-style line with our cute avatars, but you can play at home. 

RIP, Don Cornelius. My memories of that era are really dim, since I was a little kid, but I remember that well into the 90s, every dance party occasion would burst, at some point, into a "Soul Train" line.  Now it's more like a circle thing, where people are pushed into the middle to show off their moves. I am fine with both methods, though feel the line version was less pressure-intensive. Share your memories in comments! Or come into Panda Party and share them there. 

Panda Party time!  The title, of course, refers to Rick Perry's sudden and much lamented departure. We'd all grown fond of the way he would grunt out catchphrases during debates, a nice counterpoint to Gingrich droning on and on, as if he was saying anything more meaningful than shouting out catchphrases. Part of me is beginning to feel for the also-rans in the Republican race. Each of them had a moment where the party was lavishing attention, telling them they're the one and only, and then they were suddenly dropped as everyone ran back to Old Dependable. It's like being the mistress who gets a long story about how he's going to leave his wife for you, only to have him, after he satifies himself, yank his pants up and run back to his wife. 

So here's a song for today, and the Panda Party begins now.

I have a friend from out of town staying, so I can't be online today, but that's no reason for the rest of you to deprive yourselves of a Panda Party! After a few months of doing this, choosing themes and booting trolls has become quite the democratic institution, so I think it can fly without my presence this week. But that doesn't mean I won't be sharing a video with you that's fitting for the WAM Prom that will take place mere hours after Panda Party usually peters out. 

And, as an added bonus, here are the two mash-ups Marc Faletti has created and pre-released:

Disco in the Deep (Adele feat. Sister Sledge) by @marcfaletti

Single Ladies' Thing (Lauren Hill feat. Kool & the Gang, Beyonce, and Lil Wayne) by @marcfaletti

To hear the rest of his 90 minute set, New Yorkers: come to WAM Prom. And the RSVP list is packed, so I'd advise showing up early.

This week, in anticpation of the upcoming WAM Prom on Friday, I'll be blogging some thoughts on music and culture by the way of our mash-up theme of hip-hop and disco.

As regular readers know, I firmly reject the popular history of disco, which claims that it was a value-free trend that the nation was best rid of, in favor of the increasingly popular and often better-researched history that demonstrates that it was an interesting and vital musical form that helped give birth to New Wave, post-punk, techno, and of course, hip-hop. Stating this claim publicly, I've learned, especially if you note some of the racist and homophobic underpinnings the straight white male-dominated "disco sucks" movement, gets you a lot of angry pushback. Usually people engaging in it cherrypick their evidence, citing the soulless crap side of disco, such as "The Hustle" or the Village People, as evidence for their contention that disco was simply worthless and there's no deeper story to why it got so violently rejected. The problem with that argument is that yes, 90% of disco sucked, but as Sturgeon's Law states, 90% of everything is crap. Since the vibrancy of everything from science fiction to rock music is usually judged by the 10%, I demand that disco be held to the same standard. 

With that in mind, let's talk about Chic. Chic is one of the most famous disco bands of all time, but even if you know them, you probably don't know how broad or deep their catalog really is. The band was the brainchild of Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. They formed in 1976 and disbanded in the early 80s. And it's really hard to imagine what popular music would sound like today without their influence.

Let's start with the songs they're most famous for, "Good Times" and "Le Freak". As noted on Wikipedia, their seamless blending of rock and disco on these tracks was inspirational to people from all corners of the pop music world. Blondie, Queen, and Daft Punk have all borrowed from "Good Times", but its biggest impact was felt on hip-hop. 

It's been sampled in roughly one billion rap songs, but the most famous is probably still "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang.

But while their work under the banner of Chic would have been enough to secure their place in music history forever, Chic did so much more than that. Edwards and Rogers were in it to win it when it came to writing and playing disco. They're the engine behind Sister Sledge, for instance. 

And for Diana Ross in her disco phase. Yep, you have Chic to thank for "Upside Down"

For which MC Lyte was no doubt grateful:

And also behind Diana's massive hit that has become a gay anthem "I'm Coming Out":

Which in turn worked out pretty well for Biggie Smalls:

If it were just Chic, that would be reason enough to laugh off the notion that disco sucks and offered the world nothing but soul-destroying mediocrity. But there's a lot of stories like this, if you do a little digging. For instance, there's the strange and forward-thinking "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer, which was produced by Giorgio Moroder , and so impressed Brian Eno that he said to David Bowie, "I have heard the sound of the future." Bowie went on to work with Moroder on "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", a song that was famously featured in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds". Or take the case of Sylvester, a gay icon and one of the singers who helped push disco closer towards the house sound with a mutation called Hi-NRG. And, of course, pure disco sound has a few artists who are still holding the torch, to great effect, like New York's Escort or Jhameel. 

This week, in anticpation of the upcoming WAM Prom on Friday, I'll be blogging some thoughts on music and culture by the way of our mash-up theme of hip-hop and disco.

Those of us who lived through the early 90s can attest that it was a time when there was a sudden surge of pop culture interest in HIV and getting out the message about safe sex. MTV started talking about condoms, and having special addressing condom use. Fox, believe it or not, started airing condom ads in 1991. The first major movie about AIDS, the treacly “Philadelphia”, came out in 1993, the same year that a cast member of “The Real World” came out as both gay and infected with HIV. And, the two biggest female hip-hop acts in the country made raising awareness about condoms part of their act.

First you had TLC, who tried to normalize condoms in a sly way, by having Left-Eye Lopez wear one as an eye patch.

And Salt’n’Pepa took on discussions about safe sex on in a big way, both in their hit song “Let’s Talk About Sex” and revised versions that put even more emphasis on the issue of preventing HIV transmission.

Why was there a sudden interest in having even more frank discussion about HIV and AIDS in the early 90s? I think it was a couple of things. Part of it was that it was an era of shaking off the Reagan years, and all the prudery and conservative nonsense that came with the so-called Reagan revolution. But another part of it was that AIDS really stopped being the “gay disease” in the early 90s. 

HIV incidence among women increased gradually until the late 1980s, declined during the early 1990s, and has remained relatively stable since, at approximately a quarter of new infections (23% in 2009).

The realization that women were getting HIV in the late 80s really, I think, made it clear that straight people needed to be educated on protecting themselves. It’s a shame that it took HIV growing into the straight community to get this much attention paid to it, of course, but to be expected considering how much more acceptable homophobia was back then. That women were getting it, too, is why I think it was female rappers specifically felt pressure to address the situation. I’m just speculating here, but I suspect that these women, being, you know, straight women, knew very well how hard it can be for a woman to bring up the topic of safe sex with a man she’s having sex with, and they did a really great thing in trying to make condoms and the discussion of them seem less scary.

What I want to point out is that TLC and Salt’n’Pepa framed portrayals and discussion of safe sex within a larger context of talking about pleasure. Their songs are fun and light-hearted and put a particular emphasis on women as sexual subjects, who have sex for their own reasons and not just because men expect them to. This is in contrast with far too many safe sex messages, which are medicalized and don’t talk about power or pleasure. Many safe sex messages assume that the biggest barrier to condom use is knowledge, but actually, a lot of people who don’t use condoms really know that they should, and so repeating messages about the efficacy of condoms doesn’t do much to improve usage. But if you can associate condoms with having fun, and if you can portray women taking charge of their sex lives in a positive light, you’re going to do a whole lot better.

What’s disappointing is that this trend of women putting out songs portraying women as fun-loving, empowered, sexy women who take care of their own health seems to have been just a blip on the radar. Good luck finding that many women doing anything like TLC or Salt’n’Pepa were doing in the early 90s in hip-hop, dance, or rock music, at least anything that’s topping the charts like these groups were easy to do. Why it went away so fast is something of a mystery to me, even still.

By the way, Marc has released another mash-up from the set he'll be playing on Friday night at WAM Prom. It's two female acts from completely different eras from the one described above, but both with their own strengths. 

Disco in the Deep (Adele feat. Sister Sledge) by @marcfaletti

This week, in anticpation of the upcoming WAM Prom on Friday, I'll be blogging some thoughts on music and culture by the way of our mash-up theme of hip-hop and disco.

One of the myths about disco, one that I think that contributes to a lot of misunderstandings about it, is that it was a brief trend that collapsed as quickly as it rose up in the 70s. In reality, disco was just another step in a long 20th century evolution of dance music, and it ended for the same reason a lot of musical trends do: it morphed into other forms. If anything, disco had a larger impact than most music trends do, as elements of it came out in techno and all other electronic dance music, post-punk, New Wave, and most importantly, hip-hop (which is why we're doing a dual theme for this year's WAM Prom.) But one reason I think there's a sense that disco was its own thing in a way that other trends aren't is that the kind of dancing people think of when they think of disco is this elaborate, ballroom-style dancing that has no relationship to the bouncing and writhing that is most dancing people do in America, whether at a rock show, hip-hop club, or rave. You know what I mean. People think "disco" and they think of John Travolta playing Tony Manero.

Or Travolta's solo style dancing in the same movie:

Nothing against Travolta's unbelievable dancing skills, but this wasn't actually how people (at least prior to this movie) danced to disco, which was, from what I understand, much like they've danced to everything since, which is mostly formless bouncing and writhing. Now, all sorts of music trends have movies that exploited them to make semi-musicals with elaborate dancing, but Saturday Night Fever became synonymous in the public imagination with disco in a way that hasn't happened before or since to a musical form. Why? 

There's a lot of reasons: the dancing is really that good, the music is that much better, a zeitgeists was hit. But I think one reason is that Saturday Night Fever purported to be based on a true story, giving the audience the feeling that they really were taking a peek into the Brooklyn disco scene by watching this fictional film, in much the same way that 8 Mile got a little extra boost because it's so well-known that Eminem did in fact scrape his way up through rap battles like the one portrayed in the movie. But while I think Eminem's life is pretty well-documented, the "true story" of Saturday Night Fever is actually, well, a hoax. 

The whole thing started with a New York Magazine story by Nik Cohn in 1976 called "Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a story about the elaborate disco lifestyle of the Italian-American regulars at a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn disco. The story was a hit; it seems it must have gone into development as a movie in record time. The only problem wiht it is that Cohn made the whole thing up. 

He finally admitted the hoax 20 years later, in 1997.

For an article in the December 8 issue celebrating the 20th anniversary of the movie, Cohn tells of a disco deception born of frustration. The British writer describes how he went to Brooklyn's now legendary 2001 Odyssey searching in vain for a flamboyantly dressed fellow he had spotted in the club's entrance a week earlier. "I didn't learn much...I made a lousy interviewer: I knew nothing about this world, and it showed. Quite literally, I didn't speak the language.

"So I faked it. I conjured up the story of the figure in the doorway, and named him Vincent...I wrote it all up. And presented it as fact," Cohn confesses. "There was no excuse for it...I knew the rules of magazine reporting, and I knew that I was breaking them. Bluntly put, I cheated."

The culture and specifically the emphasis on dancing skills was a mish-mash of Cohn's own imagination and what he observed in the Northern soul clubs in Great Britain in the 60s. It's one of those stories that has drifted under the waves, because most people don't really think it's that important (though why not in our James Frey-bashing era, I don't know). But while it's far from the most important story of journalistic misinformation, I still think it's not something that should be waved off. After all, Cohn's imaginings supplanted the more reality-based portrayals of disco, most of which I think are far more interesting than the image that Cohn painted. To make it all worse, if people had a better idea of how disco actually was in the 70s, I think it would be easier to see it as part of the larger quilt of American pop music, which is always mutating as different genres swap and steal and morph into something new, yet still familiar. 

Let's get this Panda Party started! Only two days left in the year, so you best be partying. I know most of us have to work today, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't Panda Party.

With that in mind, here's another one of my favorite records of the year:

This was definitely the year for women in music, as far as I'm concerned: Wild Flag, Shilpa Ray, Dum Dum Girls, CSS, Le Butcherettes, Vivian Girls, and probably a bunch more that I'll remember after my coffee is consumed. All put out great albums this year, all worth checking out. But I have a special place in my heart for Shilpa Ray, who is intense in a way that pretty much no one else can do effectively right now.

So, Panda Party! Drop in.

Merry Christmas! Let's kick this thing off right, with a Panda Party! I'm a fan of much of Christmas: presents, food, enforced cheer, eggnog. But I'm just not that into Christmas music, so while we will have holiday-related themes today, we won't be playing any Christmas tunes. Unless Joey Ramone sings them.

So come into the Panda Party and let's enjoy some holiday cheer.

What are your plans for the holidays?

Happy Friday! Come on down to the Panda Party and help us get through another Friday during this holiday season with some tunes. 'tis the season for coworkers to show up hungover more regularly and end of the year best-of lists. I'm always tempted to make my own, but the guys at Sound Opinions had a pretty damn solid one, so I'm linking theirs instead. Both had #1 bands that I saw at SXSW and was duly impressed by and do, in fact, think had records that qualify as #1. So here's a sample, but come in to Panda Party, and share your own. 

What's your best record of the year?

It's Friday, and it's been a crazy week for feminists especially, so we really need a Panda Party. Show up! Play tunes! Make the work day more pleasant going into the weekend! Bitch about politics in chat! Do your thing! At the Panda Party! Here is a post-punk girl band I like, because they really like the bass guitar!

How is your holiday season going?

I didn't put up a Panda Party last week because of the holiday, but we're back!

Come by and shoot the shit, listen to some tunes and even play some. Good times on a Friday.

I'm leaving for Missouri late this afternoon for Skepticon, but until then, I'm totally down to Panda Party. For a lot of us, it's been an emotionally wrenching week as things escalate with Occupy Wall St., so we need to listen to some tunes and have a little Friday fun to get ready for the weekend more than ever. So hop on in to Panda Party. In honor of my trip to Missouri, a song by St. Louis native Ann Peebles:

I really appreciated the humor and insight of this piece from Cord Jefferson on how he got it into his head that Community is a popular show, and so, even though he had never seen it, was as surprised as anyone at its sudden hiatus and no doubt cancellation. He points out that his online networks were positively obsessive about Community, giving him the impression that it's a big hit show, when it was turning over bad ratings for a network sitcom. He proposes a couple of reasons this might be that don't make sense at all---floating improbable reasons such as torrenting and there being some people who don't use the internet much but who watch TV---before settling on what I think is the sole reason that this happened to him:

While technology allows us to access news and opinions from hundreds of millions of diverse people around the world, the reality is that we cull our Twitter and Tumblr groups to match our sensibilities, just as we do with our offline friends. Many of the people I intentionally follow online like Community, and I made the mistake of assuming that my Twitter and Tumblr associates were a cross-section of America. Offline I'd never dare think that what my friends and I like is representative of everyone else's preferences. But on the internet, we've convinced ourselves we're seeing the world, while actually seeing tiny subcultures we've created around the same biases and preferences we have offline.

That last bit caused a small butthurt reaction in me---who are you calling "we", dude?---but I squelched because my life resolution is not to imitate the tedious culture of butthurtness of the internet that makes it hard to sift out legitimate criticism. It's clear that "we" is a rhetorical device, and a useful one at that, because he's probably right that this wasn't a minor brainfart of his, but a human tendency. I'd also point out that Cord may not make this assumption based off his real life friends, but that's more common than you'd think, as well. It's the "everyone else is just like me (and my friends)" phenomenon. I see it a lot when I'm blogging. I could write something like, "Women are generally socialized to be excessively apologetic", and I'm going to get a bunch of comments from women protesting, saying, "But I'm not!", not considering the possibility slightly that they could be an outlier. I can't really account for how hard it is for people in general to gauge where their tendencies or opinions fit on a spectrum, but it is a real phenomenon, and I can see how the internet makes it worse. 

So I'm pretty sure I'm somewhat unusual in that I didn't really relate to this piece, not because it isn't true---it is!---but because I'm probably a weirdo. I not only don't think my tastes are an indicator of broader American tastes, I'm fairly convinced that if I like something, the majority of Americans don't. I call it the "mediocrity rules" phenomenon, after the kickass Le Tigre song that perfectly describes it, right down to the incuriosity and outright fear of difference that keeps most people preferring the safe and uninteresting to the daring and truly creative. There are exceptions to every rule, but in general, being truly interesting requires taking risks, and most people are risk-averse, especially when it comes to entertainment, which they look to as a way to soothe instead of challenge themselves. I mean, I look to it to be soothing, too, but since I have a weird personality, pablum gives me gas, so it's not soothing at all. I'm not alone in this, but those of us who enjoy a little riskiness in our entertainment are simply less common than those who don't.

This is how it just is, and until a few years ago, this was never presented to me as a problem, not really. I mean, I had a kid snarl at me in high school that I was a "New Waver", which didn't hurt my feelings so much as make me wonder how someone who was probably born in '79 or '80 and found anything that had even a whiff of hipness to it alienating learned that term and used it in 1994.  But in recent years, I've felt a shift in the zeitgeist. It's just a hunch, but it feels like the belief that mediocrity, by dint of being "populist", is somehow more pure and honorable for it. Terms like "elitist", "snob", and the dreaded "hipster" are flung around with zeal. I suppose that was always true, but now people who do that aren't just implying that you're a weirdo for having certain tastes, but that you're somehow morally inferior because you aren't one with the people or some such crap like that. It seems that mediocrity is literally beginning to rule. This Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal piece on excreable Lana Del Rey is a good example; it's all sneer at "hipsters" for disliking Del Ray for being "inauthentic", as if there's a monolithic hipster view of authenticity and monolithic hipster hatred of pop music, both of which are easily disproved by a trot through the various rock clubs of Williamsburg that feature more than their fair share of gleeful love of pop-ness as a concept. Could it just be that Del Rey sucks? Not all pop music sucks; I hardly imagine you'll meet many hipsters who denounce Prince simply because he's pop. It is true that there's a streak in indie rock of mistaking quiet for quality and earthy for deep, but it's a little more complex of a problem than simple rejection of anything "pop", nor is it a monolithic tendency. Some music snobs (*cough*) dislike that trend strongly, but we're not going to conflate it with old-fashioned elitism, which still has value. If anything, a lot of it is less elitist, more like making indie music for people who stopped caring when they had kids. Elevating something as better for garnering mass appeal by being mediocre pablum isn't any better than disliking something just because it's popular, and it may be worse in a way because you have to endure a lot of stuff that just sucks. 

Or maybe I'm overreacting to a tendency that's simply common on the internet, where a few loudmouths who have a vendetta against the risky, the cool, and the bohemian have had an outsized effect on the conversation and caused everyone to tiptoe around the commonly accepted idea that white bread is an insult for a reason. 

Anywhere, here's hoping that "Community", a show that has really been fun to watch take a number of risks without a net, at least gets to finish out this season in style instead of simply being yanked without any kind of closure, as Britta might say. 

Whatever intrepid Tumblr maven is behind The Kitten Covers is now my new hero. They should come party with us in the Panda Party. For those who haven't come yet, Panda Party is our once-a-week jam where we let the steam out at Turntable by playing songs, usually adhering to an hourly theme. It's a great way to welcome the weekend. 

As is this Tumblr. Just for doing shit like this:

I'm going to have to make up a theme to celebrate the awesomeness of this. 

This kitten really has a great Joan Jett impression: