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Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia

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Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s

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Abstract

This chapter explores the nexus of space exploration, science fiction films, and the quest for a utopian world that informed and influenced the experience and practice of disco, primarily in North America and Europe, in the 1970s and early 1980s. Following a brief history of the use of space themes and sounds in popular music in general, it examines the iconography, physical spaces, and sound systems that developed in tandem with phenomena such as space disco and Afrofuturism and as manifest in works by Boney M, Giorgio Moroder, and Meco. The chapter also offers theoretical perspectives, including Bloch’s ‘principle of hope’, Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopia’, and the metamodern concept of an ‘atopic’ future, to account for the popularity of outer space as a disco trope.

The musical power of the disenfranchised—whether youth, the underclass, ethnic minorities, women or gay people—more often resides in their ability to articulate different ways of construing the body, ways that bring along in their wake the potential for different experiential worlds.

—McClary (1994, 34)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Several hip-hop artists have subsequently sampled the song, including The Notorious B. I. G. on his Life After Death (1997). In 2009, the song was transmitted into deep space, at the speed of light, as part of a celebration honouring the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.

  2. 2.

    As suggested by Vermeulen and van den Akker, atopos implies a space existing between the temporal ordering of modernism and the spatial disordering of postmodernism—with humanity dreaming and pursuing a ‘horizon that is forever receding’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 12).

  3. 3.

    ‘Nothing coarser, nastier, more stupid has ever been seen than the jazz-dances since 1930. Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie, this is imbecility gone wild, with a corresponding howling which provides the so to speak music accompaniment. American movement of this kind is rocking the Western countries, not as dance, but as vomiting’ (Bloch 1986, 394).

  4. 4.

    The video of the performance is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mfbo_FmBRU. Accessed 10 January 2021.

  5. 5.

    The vocoder didn’t start life as a musical instrument, but as a communication device. In the 1920s, Homer Dudley at Bell Labs created a device whose function was to facilitate the transmission of telephone conversations over long distances by reducing bandwidth; the technology was later employed by the military, with an enhanced version of it used to scramble transatlantic conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War (Prior 2018, 497). In the early 1970s, the technology found a home as a musical effect when Moog developed a vocoder with Wendy Carlos for the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, while the late 1970s and early 1980s represented the vocoder’s heyday, with artists such as ELO (‘Mr. Blue Sky’, 1977) and Kraftwerk (‘The Robots’, 1978) popularizing its sound.

  6. 6.

    In ‘Spacer Woman’ (1983) by Charlie, the sound is overtly mechanically synthetic and employs a signature Italo Linn Drum machine, a Roland Space Echo, a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, and densely vocoded vocals sung in heavily accented, slightly disjointed English (‘I come from Space/I want to know/If I can do/My love is true’). Critic Andy Beta describes Italo vocals as ‘operatic, halting, and cardboard-like, sexy to the point of being creepy, bizarre, robotic, histrionic, sleazy, and utterly baffling’ (Beta 2015). Though it was typically sung in English (accented or not), the genre was largely only popular in non-English-speaking parts of Europe but, according to producer Josh Cheon, ‘Chicago House music, Detroit Techno, and Miami Freestyle were all influenced by Italo’ (Beta 2015). In addition to those already mentioned in this chapter, other European-based significant contributions to the space disco genre include Cerrone’s ‘Supernature’ (1977), Koto’s ‘Visitors’ (1985), Dee D. Jackson’s ‘Automatic Lover’ (1978) and ‘Meteor Man’ (1977), and Sheila’s ‘Spacer’ (1979).

References

Discography

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Ken McLeod

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  1. Ken McLeod
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Correspondence to Ken McLeod .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Flora Pitrolo

  2. Department of Contemporary History, Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia

    Marko Zubak

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McLeod, K. (2022). Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia. In: Pitrolo, F., Zubak, M. (eds) Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91995-5_12

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91995-5

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