Dua Lipa’s and Lady Gaga’s decidedly retro dance albums, Future Nostalgia and Chromatica, garnered tons of praise. Take a look at music critics’ year-end album lists, and you see the trend everywhere. Later, that spot was taken by BTS’s “Dynamite,” which featured funky horns and a music video prominently featuring the word disco. Yet as dance clubs locked their doors and Americans spent their Saturday nights fevered with thoughts of Tiger King, the new-new-disco sound stuck around. COVID-19 thrives when crowds press together and freak out. But if 2020 was shaping up to be a year in which this often-mocked genre’s influence was honored, the pandemic seemed sure to stop the party. Warehouse raves, bottle-service clubs, and Jazzercise classes all embody the disco sensibility. Probably its biggest legacy was to turn ecstatic public dancing to prerecorded music into a worldwide pastime and megabusiness. (Remember the summer of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”?) More important, disco’s DNA is essential to all sorts of thriving modern scenes: hip-hop, house, EDM, even country. Its musical tropes-the rhythmic heartbeat, the octave-jumping bass, the swooping violins-continually suffuse pop, though they do tend to make themselves more overt every few years. (Gareth Cattermole / Getty)ĭisco, of course, had never fully died. “It's Studio 54 all over again,” a radio programmer marveled to Billboard in early March.ĭua Lipa performs at the 2020 American Music Awards. The strobing synths of Lady Gaga’s “Stupid Love” recalled Giorgio Moroder’s pioneering production on Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” as did Sam Smith’s late-2019 cover of that very song. Justin Timberlake and SZA were dancing inside of a mirror ball in the video for the thump-thumping single “The Other Side.” The Chic-style guitars of Doja Cat’s “Say So” were inspiring groovy moves on TikTok. Last winter, Dua Lipa’s hit “ Don’t Start Now” brought the Anita Ward-style laser zap to the Billboard Hot 100. That revival had been brewing in popular music pre-pandemic. It was actually the year of a desperate, passionate, and at times unsettling disco revival. You can, in fact, tell its significance because 2020 was not the year that dancing died. On the long list of things thwarted by the pandemic, the freedom to move our bodies together has not been an insignificant one.
The notion of such a sound system-and the concerts, clubs, and parties it could power-has come to feel almost mythological this year. “The music, the sound system, was so calibrated that it would just blow through your body,” the veteran party photographer Rose Hartman reminisces in a clip promoting the exhibit.
Cooped up over the past nine months, the closest I’ve gotten to the Studio 54 experience has been watching videos about it online. I stayed home, and both museums and dance floors soon shut down citywide. got worse over the course of the day, as did the feelings of physical ickiness that I now know was the onset of a mild case of the virus. But headlines about the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. On March 11, the Brooklyn Museum held an opening party for an exhibit on Studio 54, the iconic ’70s nightclub where Bianca Jagger once rode around on a horse led by a naked model. My aches and chills started on the same day that I’d planned on mingling with strangers to the music of Donna Summer.
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