Soul Messengers - “Our Lord and Savior” (1976)

FULL CIRCLE AND FUTURE FORWARD!

As we embark on the last round of our game, I realize my song for the day is not as disco as it could be, but I’m using it to illustrate some important connections through time and space. It’s been a fun internet hang with y’all and we’re soon approaching full circle. But what’s next?

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I remember first listening to Fool’s Gold’s “Surprise Hotel” (listen in Latham’s post from 9/25) earlier in the (late) summer…as soon as I was able to pick out the lyrics as being sung in Hebrew, I was thrown back to the discovery of the Soul Messengers on the compilation Soul Messages from Dimona last year. While Fool’s Gold frontman Luke Top brings Hebrew lyrics into Afropop, the Soul Messengers conversely introduced African rhythms to Israel three decades earlier - both, of course, utilizing the distinctly American idiom of FUNK.

According to the Numero Group, the label responsible for re-releasing tracks from the Soul Messengers and countless other lost or little-known recordings from the 60s and 70s,

“The Soul Messengers began in Liberia when Black Hebrew emigrants from the U.S. Prince Keskiyahoo, Shavat, and Yehudah joined with local African musicians to form what was likely the continents first funk band. Reforming in the Promised Land with Elihu on bass, Shimor and Anavyah on congas, Shlomo on drums, Nathan on percussion, and Amnon, Ahman, Abshalom, and Sar Elyahkeem filling out the horn section, they became the most popular live act in Israel.”

Soul Messages from Dimona is a must-have album, both as a musical gem and cultural curiosity - the compilation centers around several bands of Black Hebrews (or African Hebrew Israelites) who made pilgrimage from their midwestern homes in Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland to settle and make music in the Negev community of Dimona. While Soul Messages samples a wide range of moods from spaced-out to uptempo, I chose “Our Lord and Savior” for 100 Days not just because of its danceable beat and horn lines, but also for its curious rehashing of the hook from the semi-fictitious one-hit wonder band Steam’s anthem, “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.”

Steam - Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye (1969)

Long after Steam came and went, “Na Na Hey Hey” permanently infiltrated the consciousness of the American sports-watching public, thanks to Chicago White Sox organist Nancy Faust, who popularized the use of the chant against opposing teams in 1977. I find it more than interesting that this string of connections leads us back to Chicago (where 100 Days was born) and Comiskey Park at the end of our “game,” for it was a strange day at Comiskey in 1979 when disgruntled radio DJ Steve Dahl staged an infamous event called “Disco Demolition.”

Frustrated with the conversion of WDAI 97.9 from rock to disco format, and the resulting loss of his job, Dahl spearheaded a promotional event in which any Sox fan bringing a disco record to the July 12th double-header could get in for 98 cents. Along with much sarcasm and buffoonery (see video below at 3:30), Dahl assembled the heap records at center field between games, and blew them up. This was enough to send the hot, bothered, beer-fueled crowd streaming on to the field, creating an all-out anti-disco riot beyond even Dahl’s wildest expectations.

In his 1998 article “The Last Days of Gay Disco,” Village Voice writer Peter Braunstien does some pretty deep cultural psychoanalysis of the situation, placing a radical queer lens on the relationships our culture has with rock and disco music. Braunstien reads the Comiskey Park fiasco as the violent culmination of a tension between the threatened heterosexual masculinity of rock music fans and the hedonistic, gender-bending, queer-utopic, mirror-ball world of disco:

“At the moment when…Studio 54 achieved zeitgeist status, rock rediscovered a rage it had been lacking since the ’60s, but this time the enemy was a culture with “plastic” and “mindless” (read effeminate) musical tastes. Examined in light of the ensuing political backlash, it’s clear that the slogan of this movement—“Disco Sucks!”—was the first cry of the angry white male….Comiskey turned into a giant coded gay bashing, a frightening harbinger of an enraged, homophobic America, given sanction in the mock-patriotic venue of a baseball stadium.

OH DANG. Regardless of one’s take on the issue (see documentary photographer Diane Alexander White’s almost offensively bland, nostalgic read here), there are many that say July 12th, 1979 marked the day that disco “died.” The turn of the decade swept the hot mess that was the 70s under the rug and ushered in a new style of political and cultural repression, and as such, disco (and, let’s not forget the other major counterculture of the late 70s, punk) went back underground to reinvent itself.

Well, as we finish up the 10th and “last” round of 100 Days of Disco, I’ll speak for all of us when I thank all of you for your readership, support and comments. There will be no disco demolition here, though. We’ll keep this thing going, and perhaps find some new directions along the way.

xx_aay