Recently in Disco Category

Toward the end of 1978, these D.C. journeymen got lucky and hit the discos with the title track, which was very funk-soul for that disco moment. The album that resulted is almost like a field recording -- a completely unpretentious document of what sort of originals a modestly gifted funk-soul dance band might be doing in 1978. There's even a salsa. Very likable. (Grade: B+) [Robert Christgau] Hear It Now!

Though they had already released several successful albums, Kool & the Gang's 1979 gem Ladies Night earned the group their biggest hits yet: the absolutely classic title track as well as the mellower "Too Hot." Produced by Brazilian funk/disco master Deodato, this record remains a fan favorite and serves as a fitting precursor to their mega-hit Celebrate. —Brolin Winning Hear It Now!

It's a bit late to celebrate Juneteenth. After all, the annual holiday commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States doesn't take place in the middle of September, but at the beginning of summer, on June 19. Perhaps it's the onset of fall, though, that makes our thoughts turn to warmer months and memories of park jams, barbecue and family reunions.

If you've ever been to a Juneteenth festival, then you know it's the kind of neighborhood gathering where hundreds of kids run wild in a park, half-crazed on sugar and sensory overload, while parents gossip, dance to the music, and hopefully get some much-needed alone time. Onstage there's usually an earnest activist or two, a few city councilpersons reaching out to the constituents, and a lineup of local singers and bands using the day as a stepping stone to wider fame. Back in 1979, that means you would have gotten a lot of funk and disco with your chicken and ribs. While we can only guess what the actual soundtrack would be, we know it would undoubtedly include the latest hits from Chic, P-Funk and The O'Jays — perhaps not in the flesh, but definitely via a party-rocking DJ's selections.

So why focus on 1979? Why not? The end of the '70s was a fantastic time for black music, and although the omnipresent disco beat could get a little annoying (see the Village People and Amii Stewart's "Knock on Wood"), it also led to incredible singles like Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" and McFadden & Whitehead's "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now." It's easy to imagine how these songs evoked feelings of pride and accomplishment because, decades later, they remain a part of any community celebration. Rest in peace, Minnie Riperton, whose "Memory Lane" is included in this playlist; she died shortly after the song's release on July 12, 1979.

Click here to listen to my playlist: Senior Year, 1979: Juneteenth Festival.

Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers proved on Sister Sledge's "Lost in Music" that hedonism and its discontents, the inevitable focus of disco's meaningfulness moves, is a subject worth opening up. Here, "Good Times" and "My Feet Keep Dancing" surround the sweetly romantic "Warm Summer Night" in a rueful celebration of escape that's all the more suggestive for its unquenchable good cheer. Side two's exploration of romance and its agonies also has a fatalistic tint, but in the end the asides and rhythmic shifts (as well as the lyrics themselves) give rue the edge over celebration. Subtle, intricate, kinetic, light but not mindless -- in short, good to dance to. (Grade: A-) —Robert Christgau Hear It Now!

According to mainstream pop-music history, hard rock and disco were mortal enemies in the late 1970s. The former perceived the latter as overly effeminate and in many cases explicitly gay; the latter dismissed the former as macho and homophobic. It's a relationship best exemplified by the infamous Chicago disco riots. In the summer of 1979, disco haters — most of them lunkheads who had little understanding of rock 'n' roll's tangled history beyond stereotype and myth — gathered at Comiskey Park during a White Sox game and voiced their displeasure with the trend by participating in a record-burning bonfire, one that quickly devolved into a spat of random violence and vandalism.

However, if we rewind a few years more, back to the first half of the decade, the relationship between the two subcultures was significantly different. In its earliest stages, beyond a few main characteristics (howling diva vocals + saccharine strings + incessantly pounding beat), disco wasn't a genre of music per se; it was more of a philosophy of how to make urban club-goers shake their asses all night long. Profoundly inspired by the concert-as-epic-dance-party concept that acid-rockers and hippie groups such The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers Band had innovated on the ballroom circuit, a string of DJs in New York (among them Francis Grasso, David Mancuso, Nicky Siano and Walter Gibbons) devised methods of mixing and blending music that allowed these disco pioneers to craft long, uninterrupted flows of sound rather than a collection of discrete tracks.

The 1995 film Party Girl stars Parker Posey as Mary, a club-hopping, party-throwing firestarter with plenty of street smarts, but not enough common sense.

A downtown New Yorker through and through, she lives the nightlife to the hilt; when she discovers a love for library sciences, she throws herself into the subject with the same gusto, going so far as to re-organize her roommate's records according to the Dewey Decimal System. Her system is so inspired, it bears reproducing in detail: