– On August 20th 2015, we set to the sun-soaked streets of L.A. for a truly special evening at Moonlight Rollerway to mark the tenth edition of our collaborative project with Ray-Ban.
The evening’s musical events saw the joining of West Coast boogie, disco and G-funk goodness, manned by DJ Snoopadelic, Dam-Funk, DJ Quik and Thundercat; and a comprehensive East Coast lineup spanning the past half century of American disco culture, repped by Danny Krivit b2b Nicky Siano and Mister Saturday Night.
It made us think about where the boundaries between disco, funk and boogie truly lie – and what truly happened to dance music of the post-disco era on both sides of the Atlantic. Read on –
To collectors, enthusiasts and dancers, asking when disco ends and boogie begins will yield a fascinating and vast array of responses. Upon their shelves of twelves and sevens of original pressings and increasing reissues and edits, the change might not even seem marked, as the full scale force of disco gave way to a more intimate, sensual, but no less physical sound. Finding underground support in the 1980s nightclubs of London among mixed black and white audiences, crate digging DJs soon caught wind of the genre’s future-facing evolution in the US. After the crass musical upheaval of 1979’s iconic and disenchanting Disco Demolition (pictured above), New York DJs such as Francois ‘K’ Kevorkian and Arthur Baker continued to stretch the genre in diverse, highly iandividual new directions. Facing oppression from the radio, its vital route underground made room for new ideas, new approaches and endless, shameless funk. When disco was demolished, boogie was reborn.
Bubbling prior to the mixtape culture of the foundations of contemporary hip hop, or the stark futurism of Detroit techno and electro, both of which owe a debt of inspiration to boogie, the genre could loosely be described as a bridge between acoustic and electronic instruments. The arrangements are often loose and live, but usually doused in a gooey neon sheen. And while some of the synth work may sound primitive by contemporary standards, it has maintained an enthusiastic following swept up in its occasional weirdness as production methods grew more clinical and precise. Boogie is flamboyant party music, even when it can evoke the longing of heartbreak as easily as the promise of good times.
Personally, boogie continued to have an underground hold on my ears in a surprising context. In Manchester, where I once precociously expected only to listen to Cabaret Voltaire, The Smiths and Kompakt techno, I received my dance music education first in its larger clubs and then on its vibrant, occasionally ramshackle fringe. Here, I discovered that the genre still had a surprisingly large hold on the city. Like many unexpected musical roots in the North of England, this can likely be traced back to the city’s eighties clubbing heyday, when DJs like Mike Shaft and Greg Wilson gave valuable and exclusive airtime to early electro funk records both in clubs and on the radio, with a fresh eared Norman Jay and the likes of DJ Tee up to much the same in London. Back up North, record shops such as Fat City gave huge credence to the radical new meeting point between funk, hip hop and soul.
Today, cult labels like Red Laser keep the bumping, sticky and analogue sound alive. At their own parties, and others such as the notorious Wet Play, boogie usually soundtracks at least the early part of the evening. Averaging a breezy tempo of around 116BPM, and usually prone to sounding even stronger yet slower under soft red light, boogie set the woozy tone before the more outright bumping house, disco and warped techno variants would kick in, alongside whatever else was in the club’s collective system. In the States, imprints and organisations like PPU, also known as People’s Potential Unlimited, specialise in preserving the spirit of 1980s boogie, as well as expanding its reach and repertoire.
‘Manctalo Disco’ compilation curated by Red Laser boss, Il Bosco.
“I’ve always been into naive sounding stuff,” explains Red Laser boss Christian ‘Il Bosco’ Wood, whose Manchester-based label releases music from underground, analogue obsessed artists such as Ste Spandex, Kid Machine and Metrodome. “If somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing and they bang it together, I usually like it. It’s gotta just be one of those mistakes. You had guys still into disco, who all of a sudden could afford a new band in the form of a drum machine, a couple of cheap synths. You didn’t need an orchestra anymore.”
With a burgeoning boogie scene growing out of a mid-sized industrial city such as Manchester, rather than within the tanlines of Los Angeles or the streets of 1980s New York, what makes it such a tempting collector’s market to the likes of Il Bosco, who continues to uncover obscure gems on the regular?
“As a result of not many people collecting it, the best shit is still like, two quid. We get it all day long,” Il Bosco reveals. “I’ll wonder what the hell a certain tune is, then I’ll go online and there’s 500 for sale for 25p. All the best dubs are dead cheap. And I think people are unaware, a lot like people were once with Italo; they like it, but they don’t know the scene.”
“The staff in New York record shops didn’t even know what boogie was… They thought it might be records about ghosts, you know, the boogie man?”
Electro-funk pioneer, dancefloor expert and British DJ and writer, Greg Wilson explains, “Sean P, whose knowledge of black music is perhaps second to none in Britain, once told me that the staff in New York record shops didn’t even know what boogie was. They thought it might be records about ghosts, you know, the boogie man?”
The word boogie itself has undoubtedly dipped in and out of fashion, but for such a good times term, it has a surprisingly dark genesis. As Wilson himself explains in a fascinating introduction to the genre’s transatlantic pollination around the nineteenth century, the term ‘Bogy’ (or ‘Bogie’) was attributed to a form of the devil, giving way to the idea of ‘The Bogeyman’. Unfortunately, this was soon adapted as a slang term to mean ‘Negro’ and used to slander Black American communities. Around the 1920s, ‘Boogie Woogie’ music was born.
“Disco at the time also encompassed soul and funk. In the mid-seventies, it was a catch all for anything being played in clubs,” explains Wilson. “And what boogie most definitely was, and what we understood, is that disco didn’t die. The crappier side of disco stopped when people stopped cashing in, but all the black kids carried on making it.”
“If you hear that record now and it doesn’t sound revolutionary, it’s because so many people had adapted it.”
Released in 1977, Saturday Night Fever, quite possibly your Dad’s favourite musical starring John Travolta in an iconic satin suit that Wilson accurately observes became “disco’s great white hope,” represented the scene’s commercial zenith as well as signalling it’s creative nadir. By the summer of 1979, US radio DJ Steve Dahl arranged Disco Demolition Night at Chicago’s Comiskey Park baseball field. Between games played by the city’s own White Sox and their rivals the Detroit Tigers, 50,000 unruly rock fans threw, smashed or detonated the disco records they had come to perceive as shameful. 39 people were arrested for disorder. Dahl, stung when his former off-air bosses at Chicago’s WDAI made a late pass to disco, resulting in his dismissal, assisted through this stunt in contributing to a deeply ingrained and troubling social narrative of homophobia and misogyny. One that disco had otherwise helped to divert.
The productions that continued to find underground acclaim in the years following, came packaged with a new perspective and aesthetic outside of the commercially ailing genre, soon rediscovered on the London scene at specialist nights within clubs such as Crackers and The Electric Ballroom where, unbeknownst to their stateside creators, they were given the umbrella term boogie. But what was the moment or movement in which it truly arrived?
“In terms of tracks that were influential, you have to look at labels like West End and Prelude, which had Francois K on A&R. They were underground, but had huge street credibility,” recalls Wilson. “And they were throwing out the odd hit too, like “You’re The One For Me” by D Train. And that was kind of the electronic side coming into disco. If you hear that record now and it doesn’t sound revolutionary, it’s because so many people had adapted it.”
Since Daft Punk engineered a perfect, contemporary sound of the summer with “Get Lucky”, producers and the music press alike have exhumed, rebirthed and perhaps misinterpreted disco in its more grandiose state. However, beyond the cocaine-dusted sheen and the far from inclusive appeal of clubs such as Studio 54, the genre as a whole had become rather conservative. George Clinton even talked about disco having “put a bowtie on funk,” and Wilson, himself a masterful and much respected re-editor, talks of how disco really “straightened things up. A comparison might be EDM now,” he cautions. “Watered down, simplified. As in, it was rhythmically complicated previously, and now it’s straightened out for white sensibilities.”
Even before eager record importers in the UK had caught up with the burgeoning trend for boogie and slapped a name on it, the sound was subtly changing within the world of American disco. The well established Fatback Band had already had a crossover hit with the almost psychedelic funk of “Backstrokin'”, while other precursors to boogie’s then alien modulations were arriving from unusual sources. A cult favourite among contemporary fans came courtesy of Leon Haywood, a Texan R&B singer whose eventual disco efforts traversing both the close of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, were more out there than you suspect his label bosses had planned for. On “You Bring Out The Freak In Me” from the 1979 Double Your Pleasure LP, Haywood soulfully croons over the sound of half-speed disco – slow and somewhat trippy – with liberal use of a chugging, acidic bassline, far ahead of its time.
In the view of archivists such as Il Bosco, if a single synth were to define boogie’s core aesthetic, it would likely be the Yamaha DX-7. Mass produced until 1989, it was always designed and marketed to be affordable, and as more units hit the marketplace, the price tumbled, making it accessible to amateur producers and city kids far removed from the industry. Although other options were available, such as Oberheim’s much pricier OB-X series (favoured by Queen, Prince and Jean Michel Jarre for the sheer pomp it was capable of delivering), the DX-7 had the hold on the market, and particularly inadvertent boogie pioneers, such as Latin dancefloor favourites Montana, and the soul artist Frankie Beverley.
While with hindsight, some regard the neon-hue of boogie as somewhat gauche or crass, to completists like Il Bosco, its underlying primitiveness gives the sound its charm. “Boogie’s produced really well,” he’s keen to assert. “It was being made at a time where you could get affordable synths and drum machines, but you couldn’t just finish it in your bedroom. So these analogue machines went through these amazing studio desks. The synthesisers are cheap, but the mix in them sounds better than any club tunes now.”
“The sound’s based in soul, so it’s timeless.”
“The sound’s based in soul, so it’s timeless,” adds Il Bosco, happily acknowledging the occasionally negative critical stance towards his musical corner. “Some of it is a bit cheesy, a bit saccharine, but what was great, is everyone was making dubs of their tunes. So even if the lyrics are terrible, you’re guaranteed a great dub on the other side.”
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, scene legend and rightly celebrated producer and DJ, Dam-Funk (Damon Garrett Riddick) continues to rep the legacy of boogie through regular sets at his eternally popular and intimate Funkmosphere parties. Despite being far removed from the darkness and drizzle of Wigan, where Greg Wilson pioneered boogie’s offbeat rhythms in the UK, both fall back on the aforementioned, anthemic “You’re The One For Me” by D-Train as boogie’s arguable official entry point.
“I respect Greg Wilson, I love the way he promotes his whole experience, keeps people’s minds on the style,” exclaims Riddick. “I guess I feel good that he can say that as well, that I’m not off the mark.”
Indeed, if the origins and development of boogie feel relatively undocumented or poorly defined compared to that of other shifts in club culture, it transpires that oddly, even Riddick himself, a well known expert on this mostly American music, owes a debt of gratitude to the UK at least in terms of his exposure to the sound.
“There was this website called Soul247.com in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That had DJs like The Jester and older cats on the scene, based in the UK,” Riddick recalls fondly. “And I became friends with a lot of these guys, back when it was dial up. This station taught me a lot, and that’s where I took the term boogie from, and started sharing it with other people in the UK. After that, I attached just Boogie Funk on it, because you know culturally, here in the United States, boogie is too affiliated with disco. So when you add the funk onto it, people get more receptive.”
A hangover from the negative and judgemental values so prominently displayed at Disco Demolition, then?
“It’s so unfair, it’s ridiculous. The United States can be such closed minded people sometimes,” Riddick feels. “And they affiliate disco with certain lifestyles, if you know what I mean? That word, boogie, always associated with disco – Boogie Fever, Boogie Funk – it’s ridiculous. But I’m glad that people are listening to it again, getting a little more musical, getting into chords and real basslines, and not just equipment fuckery that I hear in some joints now… Boogie is funky enough that it gives people the chance to dance a speed and a tempo that’s relatable universally, and not so slow as P-Funk, but when you pick it up a notch, that’s where the boogie happens. But even groups like Freeze and a lot of the stuff that was coming out on the Elite label, that was boogie! But with a lot of great playing on it, which I try and incorporate that in my sets as well.”
On his upcoming second LP, Invite The Light, his first full solo album in six years, the focus is more on what Riddick describes as a “modern funk sound;” collaborators include Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel as well as close associates such as Snoop Dogg. However, he’s still keen to fly the flag for boogie at his Funkmosphere parties, where Riddick admits he’ll “play those joints forever.”
“You can’t forget Francois Kerrovian, who mixed one of favourites, Starshine’s “All I Need Is You“,” adds Riddick. “And Francois K was close to mixing my follow-up album at one point, but he’s just so busy. But we had a conversation, and he was telling me some of the techniques he used, but that he recorded so much around that time, that it was just a blur. Some of those remixes he did, I can hardly believe it.
I think a lot of the credit should go to a lot of the engineers and remixers around that time, who really brought those records out. They deserve props when it comes to the birth of boogie.”
– Keep eyes peeled for the boogie-heavy archived recordings of RBxBR010 dropping very soon. –
