Keep your junk in the trunk

Brother brother brother…If we do in fact continue to revisit the love and peace revolutions and civil rights issues of the sixties, let us prepare now so we can scratch the disco era disk of the seventies that might once again corrupted that funk which we all need to keep the junk in the trunk and our axes in tune.

For all the people who love to disco, go on; just don’t make me watch you do it. I’ll keep my love from smacking you up side your head if you keep yours from vomiting up bad drugs and running me down in a deal that turned the wrong way. I won’t allow myself to be subject to the strobe lights, coke heads, and polyester suit wearing long beards telling me how to stay alive and use my walk to show I’m a woman’s man and no time to talk. Moreover, keep the freaks singing that they want to love me all over, and over and over, tied down before they find themselves tied up in a prison getting schooled over and over. The theme is catchy but in an STD dis-ease kind of way. Finally, I am well aware that ecstasy comes in any pill form now but the real cost is far higher than the street price of $5.

From the clothing and flashy style, everything about disco served the purpose of promoting the abuse of happy time drugs, supporting the so called “black” market and reinforcing the belief that the revolution had succeeded. For some there was success but for most we still getting tuned up for the Age of Aquarius.

I can imagine the pointed fingers and Travolta type moves can be good for the soul but all this led us in the wrong direction. Disco simply came prematurely. The soul was forgotten once the pants got tight at the top and too wide at the bottom. In the continuing changes for a brother to be unique, the style now has stretched shirts to the knees and pants to hang off the thighs. Ok, you win, “your” soul had it right all along. Now pull up your pants and stop flaunting your trunk.

From the need to celebrate and recognize the progress the sixties experiments yielded came the commercialism and Club 54 type joints that only served to further the divide and conquer the ideologies from the original intent. As Gil Scott Heron said, the revolution will not be televised. In other words, these “demands” will not be “supplied” by the “free” market. It has a price but you can’t buy me love.

The desire for the positive expressiveness of disco has a close cousin for comparison and room for further development in both techno or house music and the hip hop genre with bands like Black Eyed Peas and US3 reworking the original standards into songs like “You can’t hold me down” and “Where is the Love?”. The big screen equivalent of what hip hop is to disco is Pulp Fiction. In the post modern film about bad things happening to even badder people, Travolta places himself in a more fitting role of Vincent Vega.

Music and film can serve to unite the public that is tuned in far better than any swinger party could ever help get people over their humanness. US3 shows we are all brothers and sisters, not just the “woman’s man, with no time to talk” that the time of the Bee Gees dictated. The need to express joy and pain can surely be better articulated in these “open source” mediums than by any boom chick beat I can stand to walk to.