The American college party has been defined by the relentless, groovy-less, eternally annoying nss nss nss of house music.
Let me take you to a nondescript Friday night at a nondescript house in Eagle Rock. As the clock hits midnight, something beautiful starts to happen between two strangers — a friendship begins to blossom. Suddenly, Mr. Shades-inside-on-the-DJ-board has decided it’s his moment to pump the party up. The incessant nss nss nss becomes louder, and the polite conversation becomes a screaming match chalked with confusion. The conversation itself becomes painful, and you move outside. Tonight, with no new friends and your ears practically bleeding, you choose no music and hike up the mountainous path to Upper Campus.
What if I said it didn’t have to be this way? What if the music we listened to was good? That sure would be something. Fortunately, there exists a solution, and it lies in the electric bass lines, catchy guitar riffs and beautiful vocals of disco. Lee Alfred’s Rockin-Poppin Full Tilting reminds the listener of the purpose of disco music — it conscripts everyone, via magically powerful grooviness, to rock it, pop it and tilt it on the dance floor.
Archaeological evidence shows humans have been grooving on the dance floor since prehistoric times. I like to picture fictional cavemen and women banging sticks on rocks, drinking fermented berries and inviting all of their neighbors to let loose after a long week of hunting and gathering. They were doing the same thing we are still doing 10,000 years later.
After working all week, the human soul desires a place to let loose, to converse and dance, but above all, we want to freely forget about our problems and be ourselves.
As a white dude from New Hampshire, I grew up with jazz, rap and Yacht Rock and was exposed to music via my friends at school, the internet and my dad. Recently, I algorithmically discovered deep disco tracks.
History, like anything involving humans, is pretty complicated. The history of the disco genre is no exception. According to James Ford III, Associate Professor of English and Black Studies here at Occidental, there were two types of disco: the deep tracks coming from guys like disco DJ Frankie Knuckles for marginalized working class, queer and black people and the mainstream disco for the lawyers and doctors to listen to on the weekends — cool and corporate disco.
The Chicago History Museum echoed a similar sentiment: “Disco was originally connected to Black, Latine and queer spaces before it saturated the mainstream market.” No hate to anyone getting their groove on, but in my opinion, the first disco sub-genre produces a better sound for a variety of reasons.
Disco is cool because it is inherently diverse. The person DJing can interweave music from around the world; it doesn’t matter what language the lyrics are in, as long as the groove is tight and it gets bodies moving on the dance floor.
17 percent of Occidental’s student population is international or is a dual citizen. This is much larger than the 5.5 percent we see across the nation. Tracks like Milton’s Mizik Nou and Alfredo De La Fé’s Somos los Reyes del Mundo get the job of a party song done — they speak the literal language of certain students, and they speak the universal language of groove.
The tremendous power of music lies in its ability to transcend the individual above the temporal realm. In other words, music can shift our focus away from the immediate conditions of our lives. We can temporarily forget about any struggles or difficulties we might be facing and get lost in the groove.
The Occidental party scene is cool because it is very welcoming: the doors are open to everyone. Most Oxy parties aren’t about bolstering social standing. We deliberately reject the Greek hierarchy of other colleges, and the one frat on campus is very welcoming. I argue that we shouldn’t have parties so people can focus their attention on the person standing behind the DJ deck. To quote the late great Whitney Houston, I wanna dance with somebody.
And I hope you do, too.
Contact Bennett Michaels at bmichaels@oxy.edu
