When the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 with the gold- plated copper disc, The Sounds of Earth, on board, America was hedging its bets. Any extraterrestrial life that Voyager runs across while cruising through the universe is free to check out some of the garden-variety world music Carl Sagan put together for them. But I doubt that's what they're really looking for. If NASA had been checking the charts, it'd be Chic and Donna Summer flying through space at forty thousand miles an hour right now. By the time Saturday Night Fever was released at the end of the year, America's fascination with disco had reached fever pitch. But just two years later, embittered Chicago rock DJ Steve Dahl preyed on America's fears of a gay Black planet and capped off his "Disco Sucks" campaign with "Disco Demolition Night," dynamiting thousands of disco records into oblivion. Lots of drunk White boys showed up and showed out, rushing the field after the explosion, and having to be cleared out by cops in riot gear. By the end of the next year, both Studio 54 stalwart Nile Rodgers and disco auteur Gino Soccio couldn't sell a record. Soccio peeped game, labels had flooded the market and were ready to cash in their chips. While Nile would go on to reinvent his sound for the '80s, Soccio decided to drop out. The social movement he had witnessed was gone, and with it his career. But while disco may have been declared dead, it only went underground. Just five years later, Dahl's beloved Chitown would record the first house record, beginning a new era in dance music. Techno would take root in Detroit, hip-hop in New York. Out of that hip-hop stew would come Teddy Riley, who got dance floors popping in the '90s with his genre-straddling New Jack Swing.
But what if we knew then what we know now? What if Chic and Donna Summer were on that Voyager record? And what if two robots brought it back to Earth with their ideas of disco and everything that's happened since? What would that record sound like? Our guess is something like the new album by Daft Punk, Random Access Memories. A Back to the Future- styled journey into the history of dance music, the album unites generations of collaborators under the common goal of creating a modern dance classic the way they used to. All analog, live musicians, no computers a risky move considering their status as godfathers of the new EDM movement. Just as English rockers brought the blues back as classic rock, the French have played a big part in bringing back disco, and its consequential underground mutants house and techno, as EDM.
Like disco back then, for better or worse, EDM is our new social movement. As Gino Soccio referred to disco back in '79, "It fills a demand for people who want to blow their minds dancing." Turns out they still do. So let's hope RAM inspires some of them to pick up an instrument and make music we can feel again. Even the robots want that.
Messing with the robots got us thinking, so we started with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which led to NASA, the universe, God, and eventually aliens. But other than a few cats like Lando Calrissian, you don't see many brothas in science fiction's future. So we're writing our own future, a world filled with the Mothership, Sun Ra, and homeboys in outer space. In full astronaut gear on the
cover of 2001's Bionix, De La Soul made the jump into the next millennium. No strangers to a good disco loop, De La are hands down hip-hop's greatest and most consistently creative group. Now over a quarter century in the game with their eighth album on the way and still riding as a crew, they have found reinvention through maturation. "Stakes Is High" producer J Dilla makes an appearance in this issue as we also get to hear the story of Detroit squad Slum Village (whose "Raise It Up" samples one half of Daft Punk Thomas Bangalter's "Extra Dry"). Though two of the original members have passed, survivor T3 is still keeping the legacy alive. As is original SV family member Waajeed, as his return to Detroit, subsequent spiritual awakening, and creative rebirth finds him still carrying the torch for the D, pushing the city's music into the future.
Partnerships run deep this issue. From De La, Daft, SV, and Chic, to Teddy Riley's Guy and Blackstreet projects, Lady, Ava Luna, Jack Bruce's Lifetime project, and BLKKTHY. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. It should be our first lesson if we're trying to get off this planet. Or better yet, going to try to make a go with this one. Because Voyager's last photo of the galaxy as it was leaving our solar system shows Earth as a tiny blue speck in a dark expanse of nothingness. It looks like we're going to be here a while, so let's figure it out while we still can.
