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Overview

This lesson focuses on African American dance music styles following the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many of these music styles had signature dances as well. These styles include but are not limited to funk, go-go, and disco, while popular dances were the funky chicken, mashed potato, camel walk, hustle, James Brown, and others. We will look at all of them in this lesson. On the social front, during the 1970s, more tangible steps towards proper racial integration and gender equality were happening than before. Besides the style of music itself, because of these steps toward equality, this lesson categorizes this music as contemporary. However, we will also see that the music industry often coopted popular Black dance music and dances to varying degrees of economic success during this era.

Be ready to:

Discuss the significance of rhythm and terms such as riff, groove, syncopation, and four-on-the-floor.

Identify dances that occurred during the late 1960s through the 1970s and venues that aided in disseminating them to the general American population.

Identify instruments such as synthesizer, slap bass, and scratch guitar and their use within funk, go-go, and disco.

Explain the role of music in raising people's level of social consciousness.

Discuss how the demographics among Black Washingtonians influenced the development of go-go.

Articulate the role of the DJ in the development and dissemination of disco music.

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References

Development of the Disco Sound (Continued)

Giorgio Moroder at First Avenue, Minneapolis, in 2018

We can try to explain the startling transience of these and many other disco artists by the fact that the rock-leaning record executives of the majors were notably reluctant to set up disco departments to help provide the genre's artists with a more consistent national profile.

Instrumentalists and vocalists remained integral to the disco sound, yet as the 1970s unfolded, a group of engineers, producers, and remixers began to play a dominant role. Among this group, Giorgio Moroder and Alec Costandinos enjoyed reasonably successful artist careers, but the influential engineer Bob Blank and groundbreaking remixers such as Walter Gibbons, François Kevorkian, Tom Moulton, and Larry Levan remained notably anonymous. Moulton spearheaded the art of remixing by reconstructing and extending records by artists such as BT Express, Don Downing, Gloria Gaynor, Patti Jo, and South Shore Commission to make them more dance-floor friendly (often to the dismay of the recording artist). He also inadvertently recorded the first twelve-inch single SIDE NOTEThe twelve-inch LP (Long Playing), also referred to as 12", is equivalent to one side of an LP or about 23 minutes. when he placed a mix of the Al Downing song " I'll Be Holding On♫ " (1974) on a twelve-inch blank and was struck by the resulting increase in volume and sound quality. The twelve-inch single became one of the critical innovations of disco designed to facilitate the circulation of extended records that could satisfy the needs of DJs and dancers. Salsoul Records commodified the iconic format for the first time when it released a commercially available twelve-inch remix of " Ten Percent♫" (1976) by Double Exposure.

George Clinton

Funk is fun. And it's also a state of mind,(...) But it's all the ramifications of that state of mind. Once you've done the best you can, funk it!

Don Cornelius

As always in parting, we wish you love, peace and soul!