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I attended back-to-back Bar Mitzvahs on Saturday. Both events were beautiful, fun times with friends. At both Bar Mitzvah receptions, however, I had to hear Kool & the Gang‘s “Celebration” cranked up to get the party started. Despite the sentiments it’s meant to inspire, that song has bummed me out since it was first released. As a kid, I loved Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie.” To me that was a super-cool, funky song worth resetting the needle every time I spun my 45 of it. A couple of years later this “Celebration” song becomes a smash and I was beginning to feel for sure like the times-they-were-a-changin’, like the final strains of good music that had lasted through most of the ’70s were running their course – for the worse. The rock ‘n roll that had developed since the early ’70s was already shot to hell (thank god for punk rock), and now dance music was getting too clean and buttoned up for my tastes.
I was wondering last night if “Celebration” was the first song that signaled the point when ’70s music no longer sounded like ’70s music to me, but I looked it up and saw that the song was released in 1980. So for me the point of no return may be Donna Summer‘s 1979 hits, “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls.” I was never one of those guys who hated disco, but “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls” pushed the butch, mechanistic aspects of late-70s dance music beyond a point that resonated with me. To my ears, those songs and the early ’80s dance music that would follow just sounds like Pat Benetar with an insistent kick drum on every beat. The nooks and crannies of a song like “Jungle Boogie” are long gone. Donna Summer’s move into rock music – and most of what would follow in dance music, coalescing with Michael Jackson‘s “Beat It,” strikes me as the musical equivalent of some high-tech dildo.
So maybe you’ve never thought about it this way, but is there a point at which ’70s music no longer sounds like ’70s music to you?
