Do The Hustle!

Sitting in Starbucks at on a sunny Monday morning, early June 2010, 7:18 a.m., and the disco anthem Don’t Leave Me This Way is playing. Thoughts of twirling Disco dancers from the mid-and-late 1970s come to mind. People out dancing and having fun, twirling gracefully under the Disco ball in their best Disco attire--bulge-boasting polyester and whatever other “sexy” attire was donned to make the Disco night out a truly memorable occasion. Sex and drugs (and alcohol) and Disco, forget that punk song with rock n roll at the end. Same idea: night out, dancing, alcohol, drugs, sex. There’s probably no data on the number of people doing drugs during the Disco era—which ran, for our purposes here, we are still researching this, from circa 1975 until crotch-grab pop queen Madonna arrived, circa 1983. There’s been movies done on Disco and books written, so we’ll review them, for starters.

Our purpose here is to assess the influence of Disco on the musical segment of today’s Sleaze Nation—notably, the rise of hyper-promiscuous and lustfully materialistic pop divas promoting this “lifestyle” to the nation’s youth, at least some of them, and the nightclub culture of orgies and free-for-all sex and drugs and, well, everything that was going on a long time ago, more than a generation ago during the Disco frenzy of the 1970s, a time that may seem fairly contemporary as the 1970s have been romanticized and mythologized in the media just as the 1960s were. (We’re not holding our breath that the 1980s will receive the same treatment, although from a pop entertainment point of view, you could argue it was the decade of crotch grabbers and slasher films coming into their own, an intensification and broadening of the sex and violence sectors of 1970s Sleaze.)

Disco may have sucked but Disco mattered as it ushered in a new sleaze mindset that remains in place today. At least that’s the way we see it. So in keeping with our goal of getting people to give us their take on how we our entertainment got so sleazy (and what this says about the millions of people who consume it and produce it) we’re on the lookout for folks who were discophiles, or maybe wore Disco Sucks T-shirts, or who have strong opinions about the Disco phenomenon and its influence on our culture. Stay tuned as we gear up for a summer of interviews in Los Angeles, with some final interviews in New York (outside the former location of Studio 54, the Disco den of iniquity) and our last Saw Multiplex on-site interviews in October. We see Sleaze Nation finished and ready for distribution by early 2011. Please support us by commenting on the blogs and the Web site in general.

Meanwhile…This is a very long version of Don’t Leave Me This Way, six minutes later they are vamping over and over, “Set me Free…come on baby…Set Me Free.” It may be a live version. Given the idea for the song, I may be wrong here, but the idea for the song at this stage was to help whip the twirling dancers into a packed-dance-floor Disco frenzy (need archival shots here, Tobias) so let's keep the chorus going…there we go, it’s over.

Why did so many rockers think Disco sucked? Many of us remember the T-shirts. Even younger people may remember the shirts, the anti-disco crowd. Was it the polyester, was it the crotch-grinding, was it simply the music was bad, the Hustle? There are millions of people who embraced the Disco phenomenon, and as mentioned we’re out to interview a cross-section, from hardcore all-nighter partiers, to those who simply liked to get dressed up and do the Hustle, maybe after a few lessons at the local Fred Astaire dance studio? I assume Fred Astaire gave Hustle lessons? Still does? With the obsession on 1970s nostalgia, I’d think there’d still be a thriving business in teaching the Hustle. (You Tube Hustle videos at first hit.) The song, Do the Hustle…(just found out the title is actual just, The Hustle)--can we all admit it’s one of the worst pop songs in history? Of course not, there are probably millions of people who love this song. Who am I to say it’s a sappy song?

Can we agree then that lyrically, anyhow, it’s a bit authoritarian—“Do the Hustle!”--I’ll do the Hustle if and when I’m good and ready, thank you, I’m talking to this lovely young lady at the bar right now. I think that’s the song's only lyric—“Do the Hustle!” and that’s all that’s needed. Come y’all, Do the Hustle, the DJ’s playing your song. All you had to do was Do the Hustle, follow the foot work, or for the more fleet-footed, learn on-the-dance floor with an accomplished Hustle expert. It’s maybe less authoritarian than a nudging—don’t be shy, you know you can do the hustle like all those other people twirling under the glimmering Disco ball (assuming all Discos had glimmering, spinning balls over the dance floor. (Surely there were Discos without balls. But could a Disco without a Disco ball really be called a Disco?)

Wrapping up today’s blog, we ask: When did Disco end? When did Disco dissolve into Whatever-Came-Next, in the 1980s. Was it killed off by the AIDS epidemic and other sexually-transmitted-diseases? Yeah this is fun, but it’s getting dangerous. Did people finally tire of the music? Did KC and the Sunshine band retire? Did crotch-grabbers Madonna and Michael Jackson establish a new era of musical pop megastardom, trumping all other pop music? We’re still trying to determine, as part of our History of American Sleaze, who was the first to grab their crotch, in concert or maybe for an MTV video? Who'd be surprised if MTV was the first to broadcast an unapologetic crotch grab in a music video?