An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 19 | SOUL, FUNK, AND DISCO IN THE 1970s 479

as a backdrop for stories focused on crime and punishment with predominantly

black casts. One of the fi lms that began the trend, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss

Song (1971), featured a soundtrack by the Chicago-based funk band Earth, Wind,

and Fire. Later the same year, Shaft became the fi rst high-grossing blaxploitation

movie, its success due in part to an Academy Award–winning funk soundtrack

by Isaac Hayes, a jazz-infl uenced former song writer and session player for the

Stax studios in Memphis.

Like Shaft, the blaxploitation fi lm Super Fly (1972) is remembered today pri-

marily for its funk score, this one by the veteran soul musician Curtis Mayfi eld.

Both of the two hit singles from the movie’s soundtrack album combine the

political and the personal. “Freddie’s Dead” adds antidrug lyrics to the instru-

mental music for the opening credits, tying them to a minor character in the

fi lm. “Superfl y” (LG 19.3) describes the title character, a cocaine dealer who

follows his own ambiguous morality in an urban setting where the police are

more corrupt than the criminals. Like all 1970s funk, “Superfl y” emphasizes the

groove, the use of dance-rhythm ostinatos to establish a sustained mood. (In the

context of funk, groove is an elusive quality analogous to the term swing in jazz:

whatever it is, to paraphrase the famous Duke Ellington maxim, the music don’t

mean a thing if it ain’t got it.) In “Superfl y,” compound AABA form is extended

with repeating vamps, which could be expanded even further in live performance

so that the song fi lled many more than the four minutes of this hit single.

DISCO

The second half of the decade was the era of disco, a funk-derived dance music

associated with discotheques, night spots featuring recorded dance music pre-

sided over by disc jockeys, or DJs. Originating in New York City’s gay

scene in the early 1970s, disco emerged nationally with such hits as “Love’s

Theme” (1974), by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra, and “That’s

the Way I Like It” (1975), by KC and the Sunshine Band, songs popular with

many fans who were unaware of the music’s original milieu. Disco was

rebranded as heterosexual with the success of 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, a

fi lm starring John Travolta and featuring songs by the Bee Gees, includ-

ing the hit “Stayin’ Alive.” But the homosexual subtext never disappeared,

as evidenced by the Village People, whose outrageous exaggerations of

gay stereotypes fueled such unsubtle songs as “Macho Man” and “YMCA”

(both 1978).

Disco was a meticulously crafted studio product, using the resources

of recording technology to build up complex polyrhythmic textures,

much like funk. Often it was overlaid with sweet strings, as was con-

temporary soul music, and emphasized Latin dance rhythms and per-

cussion, which it shared with salsa, as Latin dance music generally came

to be called in the 1970s. Disco tends to be much more straightforward

rhythmically than either funk or salsa, however, with a heav y empha-

sis on all four beats per bar. A pounding bass drum on every beat—

sometimes called four on the fl oor—is a characteristic disco sound.

Although tempos in disco vary widely, the biggest hit songs tend to fall

within a narrow range of medium tempos. The success of novelty songs

like “Disco Duck” (1976) contributed to an impression of vapidity in

disco lyrics; in fact, although political topics are rare, a number of songs

LG 19.3

K In a white polyester suit,

John Travolta, the star of

Saturday Night Fever (seen

here with costar Karen Lynn

Gorney), epitomized a new

model of masculinity in

the 1970s.

172028_19_468-494_r3_sd.indd 479 23/01/13 11:05 AM