LE Discotheque
Beyond the Binary
I was a child of the 80s, seared into my consciousness was that disco was lame and over. Disco was a meme of a meme, before memes were a thing. Every kid knew how to do a Travolta disco finger to the sky to get a good laugh, but it was not cool music.
At weddings we circled up to Celebration, at the skating rink we spelled out Y.M.C.A., at school dances we screamed I Will Survive, but disco was a trope. It was not an art form, and in my young mind it certainly was not revolutionary.
Into my 30s, I was like most people — clinging subconsciously to outdated, middle school-ish ways of thinking about music. I divided my musical world into cool/uncool. Good/not good. Worthy/not worthy. Music was trapped in a young-person’s binary. It was taboo to like something on the other side.
When I was in middle school and high school, the big binary was Rap or Rock — you must decide! A ridiculous proposition, but kids would argue, fight, abandon friends in the most cruel ways over the issue.
Because I grew up in the Bay Area, the other option — Country — was totally nuclear. You would have to be insane. The one thing that united both camps was our hatred of country.
I remember a girl getting ganged up on in the bathroom while applying eyeliner in the mirror, her bodysuit hem showing above her waistline — the other girls like sharks encircled her saying “What, you’re hip hop now?”
In 7th grade, I was sent to the principle’s office when a group of girls surrounded me and my friends at lunch and screamed at us that we were, among other things (racial slurs aside), rockers, punks, and slackers. Not sure why we got detention for being the victims of the attack (probably because we looked like punks), but it seemed to track to the level of justice one could expect from adults.
As an adult now it seems silly, this musical tribalism. But to a 13 year old, it meant everything. Life and death.
When we are young and forming our musical tastes, this is how our brains and social relationships function, on a binary. It is imperative to our social survival to choose, to pick a team, to identify with, to align yourself with your tastes and everything that comes with it.
Studies have shown that most people never outgrow the musical tastes they form in adolescence — people tend to prefer the music that they listened to in their teen years, a phenomenon researchers call the ‘reminiscence bump’.1 We have more autobiographical memories tied to this music and favor those sounds, often falling off a cliff for discovering new music as we age.
Much of this musical tribalism, this binary thinking was still in me, unchecked. I was deeply prejudiced about the validity of pop music, dance music, disco, EDM, and other genres that I felt lacked seriousness, rigor or virtuosity. I never picked a camp — Rap or Rock — but I did develop a musical hierarchy in my mind.
I would explain enjoying certain songs as ‘guilty pleasures’. If a pop song turned me on, it was like I was breaking the pact I had sworn with my ruthless clan of savage middle school compatriots. It was illicit to just enjoy because I enjoyed it. I had to enjoy it in a ‘bad way’ — a guilty, shameful way, in a way I would never openly tell the cool kids about.
This of course all happened subconsciously, beneath the surface of my awareness. I didn’t really think about this explicitly — I wasn’t up on a soapbox. In fact, it’s embarrassing to even consider that I was operating in such a small-minded way.
I thought my musical tastes were expansive and much more diverse than most people, but I had this subconscious filing and labeling system that was ranking worthiness by an outdated model that I came by in my youth, when my own belongingness was vitally important. It was like a software program I installed and was running diligently in the background, humming along without an update for 20 years.
This began to shift when I was listening to Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a podcast “where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.”
This is by far my favorite podcast — ever — it has completely changed the way I see songwriting because you get to clock in how people create, how they pull an idea through the ether and shape into something real. It’s emotionally trippy and never tracks where I think it will go.
Listening to the show has corrupted many of my prejudices and preconceived notions, like the one I held around pop and disco.
And Dua Lipa.
Inner Mean Girl, Reformed
I had been listening to Song Exploder for years, and honestly, skipping all the episodes with artists I didn’t already love and respect (my unconscious middle-school mean girl was still running strong).
But then I ran out of episodes.
Desperate for another Exploder hit, I decided to take a chance on a pop artist I had zero affinity for.
First Robyn, talking about 'Honey' — I was floored by her depth and artistry, the song an erotic masterclass with edgy lyrics: “At the heart of some kind of flower — Stuck in glitter, strands of saliva — Won't you get me right where the hurt is?” I realized I had been missing something major, and pushed on.
Then came Halsey, discussing writing 'You Asked For This' while pregnant — she talks about the profound threshold of motherhood, her wobbly sense of who she will become and if she is equipped to be someone’s mother. I felt like scum for ever unconsciously believing I was better than her. Clearly, I did not know what the hell I was prejudicing about.
And then Dua Lipa.
Before this episode, she was firmly in a vague category of dismissed ‘artists’ in my mind — pop girlies.
In her Song Exploder episode, Dua takes apart 'Levitating,' and listening to her recount her studio session feels like floating — I grinned so hard my cheeks hurt. Her buoyant energy captures her childhood dance favorites like Jamiroquai, Prince, and Blondie, and remakes their danceable essence into a new nostalgia.
Listening, I felt kinship with her — I loved these artists and had wonderful, free memories of dancing with my cousins, too — what would it be like to make new music that pulled from all those sounds?
Levitating is full of disco elements, the four-on-the-floor drum, and winding funk bass groove, analog synths and string arrangements, syncopated vocals, an upbeat tempo and shimmery production.
So — where was my voice, subconscious or not, who thinks tracks like this are not serious enough to be considered art or revolutionary enough to be taken seriously? Where is my inner heckling middle school mean girl ready to tear it apart?
Well, I finally told her to sit down.
By the time I heard Dua’s episode, I'd been humbled in the recording studio myself and recognized that her whimsical, sugar-charged creativity wasn't just spontaneous joy or a manufactured sound — it was deeply rooted in experience, knowledge, and talent. You don't walk into a studio and create a hit like that without serious musical chops.
I began to wonder, if Dua loves disco so much — if she is the princess of Nu-Disco — what is the deal with disco? Did I miss something?
Dancing Against the Reich
During WWII in Paris, there was a vibrant jazz and swing scene happening, but during Nazi occupation they banned live music (because fascists hate everything that is life-affirming). Discotheques, clubs that played records instead of live music, began as anti-fascist dens of resistance to Nazis, a place records were played, and people could still gather to dance and resist in community.
In the 60s in the US, this style of club was popular and the name got shortened to Disco, and in the 70s it developed into the musical genre that I, as a kid, found to be a joke.
But it wasn’t a joke then, far from it.
“Disco was an innovation that encouraged people to enjoy the world and each other instead of focusing on fear. Just as importantly, it was a social, political and cultural movement uniting communities too often barred from mainstream artistic expression.” 2
I was told by the rock-n-rollers in my life growing up that Disco was a vapid response to the intense, real problems of the times — Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, the Stonewall Riots, Watergate — it was all too much. Disco was a collective ‘checking out’ of a group of people who decided to live in a fantasy world, a reaction to a decade of war, assassinations and social upheaval.
Today, we’re living through a new wave of unbearable world events, a confluence of impossible pressures supercharging the atmosphere with a palpable fear — and I am seeing Disco with whole new eyes and ears.
What if Disco is about affirming life?
What if Disco is about love and liberation in the face of unrelenting oppression?
Let’s look backwards. The original Disco clubs were underground, mostly originating in New York, and brought together people who fell outside the mainstream. Early Disco clubs were a safe place to find likeminded people — clubs were often full of young Black, Latino, and Queer people who found a haven to express themselves.
“This was especially liberating for the LGBTQ+ community. Oppression came from the legal system and friends, neighbors, colleagues and police; it was illegal for two people of the same sex to dance together, let alone have public relationships.” 3
Dancing was a primary driver, bringing people to connect and groove on the dance floor. But it was also an art form that musicians who were outcasts from other genres were finding themselves at home within.
In the 70s, the Top 40 Charts were wildly segregated — if you were a Black performer, the only way to get to the top was to ‘stay in your lane’ and pump out a tight R&B hit, there was little chance of knocking out the top white male rock performers.
Disco became a refuge for artists like Donna Summers and Gloria Gaynor, frustrated by a system built for straight white male performers. They couldn't beat The Beatles at their own game, but in disco they could blend soul, funk, and rock while singing about whatever they wanted — often on themes of sexuality, escaping abuse, liberation, love, and joy.
Before disco was co-opted by record companies and film executives who jumped on the bandwagon to get a little slice of the profits, the scene was full of innovators who were making music that centered on love, liberation, and living fearlessly — blending fun, joy, sexuality, expression, and transcendence.
From the outside, this might look vapid — the whole world is burning and here are people centering their own pleasure, focused on joy, connection, love, refusing to live in fear.
But consider what this actually represents: people who refuse to be diminished by oppression. When systems try to crush your spirit, when laws criminalize your love, when charts exclude your art — choosing joy becomes an act of defiance. Dancing together becomes a declaration that you will not be erased.
Those people seem indomitable, impossible to control. How do you get a grip on someone who can laugh, dance, shake it off, hold hands with the person next to them? How do you suppress a community that turns pain into celebration?
When the fear is thick like jelly in the air, when the times are ragged and wrung out with grief — what else should a sane person do but dance? Not as escapism, but as an assertion of their right to exist, to feel pleasure, to be fully human despite every force trying to deny them that humanity.
Pleasure Is The Point
All this to say, the original technologies we were each born with — to sing, laugh, and dance — are still intact within our bodies. Whatever gets those in motion for you is revolutionary, is resistance. They want you stuck in fear, immobilized and too afraid, too hopeless, too nihilistic to engage with life in the simple ways that defeat the death march they are conjuring.
Learning to trust my own delight instead of inherited prejudices changed how I move through the world. If I like it, I like it — no apologies! When we choose what genuinely moves us — not what we think we should like — we start building the reality we actually want to live in. This is vital work because when more of us start doing this, we begin cohering into a new reality. A reality that is life affirming, grounding into what connects us rather than what divides.
And I suspect we're going to need this reality soon.
We're living through apex crisis — COVID, genocide, climate collapse, the rise of authoritarianism — and I predict there's a musical movement coming that will be a direct response to all this accumulated trauma and fear. It might sound frivolous to the adults in the room. It might get dismissed as escapist or shallow or not serious enough for serious times.
But before you write it off, remember:
Disco.
Remember that what looks like people just wanting to have fun might actually be people refusing to be crushed. That the music that makes you want to move your body might be the exact rhythm we need, as author Adrienne Maree Brown writes in Pleasure Activism:
“Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom."
Abandoning yourself to joy — especially when joy feels forbidden — is how we remember what we're fighting to protect.
The truth is, it’s scary times. We don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I do know that I don’t want to live my life running unconscious programs that were instilled in me when I was just a kid, programs that had me writing off my joy as a dismissive reflex.
That joy is mine. That delight is mine.
I want it.
I refuse to feel shame for liking what I like, for the mere act of enjoying being alive.
🪩 BONUS PORTAL PLAYLIST 🪩
I've curated a mix of pioneer disco tracks and modern nu-disco gems — from Grace Jones to Dua Lipa, Sylvester to today's dance floor revolutionaries. It's the sound of liberation music across the decades, perfect for when you need to remember that dancing is always an act of resistance.
