Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco Read Online Free Page A

negative space: Listen carefully to his rhythms—the funk and swing reside in the area between the drum hit and the bass line. Forsey’s “I shall not be moved” style was probably developed as a reaction to his first notable gig—percussionist for commune Krautrock noodling freaks Amon Düül II. With less regard for structure than a toddler banging a piano, Amon Düül II jammed for hours on end, changing styles and time signatures at the drop of a hat and with no regard for logic or flow. It was enough to make anyone a stickler for order, and Forsey quickly became a 4/4 obsessive-compulsive. Giorgio Moroder, Michael Kunze, and Silvester Levay may have been Eurodisco’s architects, but Forsey was its foundation. Aside from Silver Convention, Forsey anchored records by almost everyone in the Euro pantheon: Donna Summer, Boney M, Giorgio Moroder, Munich Machine, Roberta Kelly, Trax, Suzi Lane, Sparks, Claudja Barry, Dee D Jackson, Madleen Kane, Patrick Juvet, and Gaz.
    While the British-born Forsey was the piston for the Munich Machine, the other major Eurodisco center, London’s Trident Studios, was dependent on a combustion engine from France. Parisians Jean-Marc Cerrone and Alec R. Costandinos first attracted attention when three hundred copies of Cerrone’s “Love in ‘C’ Minor” (which they cowrote), a brazen, sixteen-minute rip-off of “Love to Love You Baby,” were mistakenly sent to New York as record store returns and found their way into the hands of local DJs. While it featured some very familiar saccharine strings, cheesy synth motifs, wah-wah riffs, and choruses of G-spot vocals, “Love in ‘C’ Minor” did make some important adjustments to the “Love to Love You Baby” template. Where “Love to Love You Baby” was about Donna Summer’s pleasure, “Love in ‘C’ Minor” was Cerrone’s own adolescent fantasy in which some guy called “Cerrone” with the world’s largest trouser bulge (“I tell you money ain’t all he’s got a lot of. He just turned around, look at the front of him … That ain’t no banana”) picks up three women at a singles bar and proceeds to satisfy them all … at once. And, as if to drive the point home, Cerrone reinforced that pounding kick drum sound pioneered by Forsey, moved it way up in the mix, and sped it up about 30 bpm. Aside from being faster, Cerrone and Costandinos’s productions (with help from arranger Don Ray) were richer in texture than the Munich sound, heaping on the strings and FX with abandon.
    Cerrone and Costandinos first worked together in 1972 as part of a band called Kongas, which supplied party music for the jet set in St. Tropez. Working on the template first developed by Barrabas and Titanic, on records like “Anikana-O” and “Africanism/Gimme Some Lovin’,” Kongas fused pan-Latin percussion, Santana-style screaming keyboards, chunky bass lines, and frankly ridiculous he-man vocals in a language faintly resembling English. This faux Latin/Afro-rock sound was the more percussive but no less sterile flip side of the more charcteristic Eurodisco sound. Largely thanks to producers Ralph Benatar and Jean Kruger (who later went to Paris to work with the Gibson Brothers, Ottawan, and Italian-Egyptian diva Dalida), Belgium was the true home of this style, with records by the Chakachas (“Stories” and “Jungle Fever”), Black Blood (“AIE [A’Mwana],” “Chicano [When Philly Goes to Barcelona],” and “Wela Wela”), Nico Gomez (“Baila Chibiquiban”), Chocolat’s (“King of Clubs,” “El Caravanero”), and Two Man Sound (“Qué Tal America”).
    Despite this flirtation with syncopation, Cerrone, a former musician with Club Med (probably where he got his taste for concupiscence), spent most of his career exploring the relationship between technology and lust and trying to convince himself that he could answer yes to Philip K. Dick’s eternal sci-fi question, “Have you ever made love to an android?” He