Apollo program was conceived and approved early in the year 1960 by president Eisenhower, a democrat and a freemason, like any other American politician who has thought big. Apollo missions went from 1961 to 1972, until president Nixon provoked the stop to the waste of the equivalent of 260 billion $ of today. Apart from conspiracy theories, the vast majority of Americans was, and still is, against expensive daydreams like the Apollo program. With three words, a resounding failure. However, even the biggest human failures can be important in the cultural field. In effect, the Apollo missions have been a milestone in the history of psychedelic rock. By one side, there were the enthusiast, like the British music personality Joe Meek, who, in the year 1960, welcomed the idea of president Eisenhower with the release of the song Joe Meek & the Blue Men – I hear a new world, that pioneered electronic music. Another enthusiast was Carlo Gambino, the boss of the bosses of the Italian-American mafia, like testified by the interpretation of Frank Sinatra of the song fly me to the moon, released in the year 1964. To another side, there were various musicians against the cited space missions. I can cite: David Bowie, and the album space oddity (1969); the Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the song bad moon rising (1969); Cat Stevens, and the song moonshadow (1970); the Pink Floyd, and the album the dark side of the moon (1973); Captain Beyond, and the song mesmerization eclipse (1972). Of course, there even were perplex musicians, equally influenced by the news, like: Pharoah Sanders, and the composition astral travelling (1971); Janis Joplin, and the song half moon (1971); Elton John, and the song rocket man (1972); Sun Ra, and the album space is the place (1973); the Italian band Sensations’ Fix, forgotten in Italy and very appreciated in Anglo-Saxon countries, and the song space energy age (1974). In summary, the Apollo program has inspired the birth of a branch of psychedelic rock, that I can name “space rock”. Without knowing about space rock, you can’t fully understand the long path that has led to the EDM (electronic dance music) of today.
Differently from mod music and northern soul, that were based on black music, the disco music of NYC was a descendant of psychedelic rock, a kind of music eminently white. As you can read in the home page, Carlo Gambino was a pivotal man in the development of disco music. He had a secret pact with local authorities, who asked the mobster to develop LGBT rights, a purpose that he put into practice with notable punctuality and success, in change of a sort of sanctuary at Manhattan nightclubs, for recreational drugs. Well, if you read stories and interviews coming from the pioneer disco DJs of NYC, you might notice that the term “European disco” was a synonym of “electronic disco”, and had a rather derogatory connotation. With other words, implicitly, for a long time European disco has been considered by American experts equal to “garbage”. In effect, around the year 1977, one of the historic DJs of the original Studio 54 dared to play a track of German electronic music, Kraftwerk – Trans Europe Express, and was heavily criticized, until he was fired. It didn’t matter that, in the mind of the DJ, the track would have been a sort of welcome to transexuals, especially with European ancestry. Given that the DJs of the Big Apple were associated and coalized, the reported episode provoked a sort of revenge, the promotion and diffusion of an alien kind of disco, highly politically incorrect, initially from France and Canada, and later even from Italy, with heavy synthesizers and lyrics/titles related to cosmic topics. Some examples, under the form of a brief list of artists of the 70’s who have released the described alien kind of disco, as follows: Akka B, Arpadys, Automat, Black Devil, Cerrone (Don Ray), Gino Soccio, Giorgio Moroder (Munich Machine), Rockets, Sheila B. Devotion, Space, Voyage, and so on. Well, it was the birth of a new sub-genre, the original space disco of the 70’s, possibly rooted into the space rock of the above (there’s a track by the Rockets openly titled “space rock”). The managers of Manhattan nightclubs had to digest space disco, because it was not simple electronic music.
Around the year 1978, in Italy there was a true explosion of disco music, especially in the north of the country. I think that the initiators of the phenomenon were Michele Giuliano, known as “DJ Miki del Ciak di Bologna”, and his American alter-ego, the superstar DJ and producer Mr. Tom Savarese. In the same year 1978, Mr. Tom Savarese has been the puppeteer behind the new disco label Goody Music in Bologna, later responsible for the release of hundreds of disco dance records, in the pure style of NYC disco, and successful even all over the USA. Thanks to the influences of DJ Miki and DJ Tom Savarese, a movement of local DJs was formed, known as “Afro-cosmic”. Initially, those DJs played at nightclubs the disco charts of Vince Aletti, for instance at the “Baia degli Angeli”. Starting from the 80’s, some of the DJs of the “Afro-cosmic” movement developed a personal style, rather eclectic. They decided to employ rare European releases, belonging to synth-pop and new wave rock. The unifying factors were: a vague African inspiration, that was extended to world music; main rhythms from 80 to 110 BPM, sometimes obtained by playing the records at the wrong RPM speed (33 instead of 45, and 45 instead of 33); a dark mood, percussive and synthetic, due to a predominance of electronic sounds; a maniacal attention to the spectacularity of the mixes on the beat, that provoked a total absence of cares about the content and the lyrics of the songs, sometimes with involuntarily comic results, especially into English language. In brief, Afro-cosmic DJs became, and still are, the exact opposite of the pioneer disco DJs of the Big Apple. The same Italian DJs are stubbornly declaring to public their distrust towards Italo-disco, because “too much commercial and mainstream”. So, maybe, they aren’t aware that their own spirit is the same of Italo-disco, the deletion of the very soul of the original disco music of NYC, made of messages in the music and adoration of certain symbolic songs. In effect, house music was born in Chicago around the year 1985, when DJ Ron Hardy decided to follow the spirit of Italo-disco, and of Afro-cosmic DJs, which is to create something different from David Mancuso’s parties at the Loft. That way, the DJs have freed themselves from musicians, and have started to create personal tracks, often based on the elaboration of samples, and sometimes utilizing synthesizers and drum machines.
For what I think, house music is still alive, and the acronym “EDM” only describes a sub-genre of it. More, nowadays the word “electronic” doesn’t imply the presence of electronic musical instruments, because a lot of DJs are utilizing virtual instruments, corresponding to PC software, and/or plug-ins for PC software. At this point, I can come to conclusions: the original space disco of the 70’s was a descendant of space rock, and has nothing to do with electronic music, like the one of Kraftwerk; consequently, the cited space disco is the precursor of EDM, and electronic music is not that; Italo-disco, and the spirit of the Afro-cosmic DJs from Italy have represented the missing link between disco and house music; house music can be defined as “escape from NYC disco nights, and from true musicians”; electronic dance music (EDM) doesn’t require electronic musical instruments, and chiefly comes from the work of one or more DJs. The mix of the page is something new, a selection of tracks suitable to the Afro-cosmic movement, but utilized according to the style of some pioneer disco DJs of the Big Apple. So, no excess, no maniacal attention to the spectacularity of the mixes on the beat, everything at the right speed, and respect for tracks and musicians. In my opinion, by listen to it, the aficionados of Afro-cosmic music might understand that, often, musicians are artists, and not idiots to be exploited.
File name is “against disco, a rebellion without rebels, by Max Look DJ (Aug 2024)”, 1 hour and 21’ of something unheard before, a clean and polite mix of Afro-cosmic music.
No revolutions, the playlist of subtle changes:
African Head Charge – elastic dance (1981)
Logic System – person to person (1981)
El Mori – Vetettem Violat (1988)
Mathematiques Modernes – jungle hurt (1981)
Westside – jungle love instrumental (1984)
Material – don’t lose control (1982)
La Batterie – let there be drums (1983)
Solaris – space invaders (1981)
Juju & the Space Rangers – plastic (1978)
Charanga 76 – music trance (1979)
Skyline – dead on case (1978)
Liquid Liquid – new walk (1981)
Anthony Phillips & Andrew Skeet – prelude ’84 (1981)
Liaisons Dangereuses – avant-aprés mars (1981)
Eurythmics – invisible hands (1982)
Oxygen – party let’s party part 1 (1981)
Modern Romance – tear the roof off the moose dub (1981)
D.A.F. – Co Co Pino (1980)
X-Ray Vision – video control (1984)
