What happens when the undisclosed past gets overwhelmed by the open-source present? Should we cheer or mourn? Is there a word, maybe in German, that accounts for both? When it came out in 2000, the first Disco Not Disco compilation begged no such questions. Other surveys had already started to recognize an alternative history of disco, but Disco Not Disco was the collection that made the pursuit into a movement. Part of that owed to timing:
However much talk of old weird disco affected the weather in 2000, it would be another year or two before young upstarts turned that weather into a certifiable front. And it’s worth remembering, now well into an age when fixation on genre plays as a vestige of an unenlightened past, just how new the notion of historical “disco” that was also “not disco” proved just a few years ago.
The original impulse behind Disco Not Disco was monumental, so much so that the formulation “X not X” has become part of music’s critical vocabulary. But that same monumentality eats away at the new third volume of the series, which arrives on the other side of a revolution whose most important battles have already been fought and won.
Tangling with obsolescence is a great problem to have for an enterprise charged with rescuing the obscure, but still: James White’s “Contort Yourself”? Delta 5′s “Mind Your Own Business”? These are not songs that lack for anthology affirmation at this point, and their inclusion here marks a conspicuous absence of energy and purpose for a series that made its name on both.
That’s not to argue against their greatness. Both songs are quite good, as are many of the other Post Punk, Electro & Leftfield Disco Classics included here. Vivien Goldman’s “Launderette” leads off with the kind of walloping dub bass that played an integral role in post-punk’s warming up to rhythm as a top-of-mind priority.
Using that as a metric, Disco Not Disco 3 skews more directly toward post-punk than either of the previous two volumes; it’s given more to bottom-up wanderings toward discretionary disco than to top-down digressions of disco itself.
Shriekback charts the journey in a skulking track called “My Spine Is the Bassline”, which would have made a good survey title if Disco Not Disco had not been in play. The ghostly horns intimated by Shriekback go on to tip the scales in Konk’s “Your Life”, which mixes tendrils of rocky rhythm guitar with flares of dancey brass.
The tenor changes with Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Seoul Music”, a magisterial mood-piece in which the seeds of LCD Soundsystem can be heard rustling in the dirt of a planet starting to grow more futuristic in the early 80s. From there, more overtly electronic sounds figure into tracks by Kazino, Liasons Dangereuses, and A Number of Names. T
he last one comes with a caveat, though: Hats off to any compilation that makes room for A Number of Names’ “Sharevari”, but still: an “instrumental” version? The song in its full form figured into the story of disco turning into techno in Detroit, but the voided version here– like Disco Not Disco 3 itself– plays a bit too much like a hedged bet.
— Andy Battaglia, January 17, 2008
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