Copacabana

• Copacabana - long version (audio): link

• Copacabana - "music video" from a 70s variety show: link

Disco music achieved its greatest crossover and mainstream popularity in the mid to late 70s, as a genre it sprung out of the music of the funk, R&B and soul music that preceded it, but often with synthsizers and other electronic forms that were just being incorporated into music then. It got so big, so fast and was seemingly everywhere for a while, that it didn't take too long for a pretty powerful counterforce to develop in music circles, designed to push back against disco and all of its fans and try to reassert the dominance that rock music fans felt slipping away. This groundswell reached a peak in the summer of 1979, with the Disco Demolition Night held at Chicago's Comiskey Park baseball field, where the White Sox played at the time. As mean-spirited as the event was, and potentially dangerous too, I think it did succeed in making a lot of casual music fans assume that disco was dead, just a quick fad that we all supposedly outgrew by the time Reagan moved into the White House. Of course disco never truly went away, it morphed into countless other genres like freestyle, Hi-NRG and even synthpop in the 80s, and still influences music that has come out in the years since all across the musical spectrum. OK, so that's the general paragraph.

So here's my personal memories of disco, as a little kid during the 70s ... it was the fucking greatest music ever! It sounded so good way up loud, either through the speakers or (even better) those big can headphones that were really heavy and had the curly cord similar to the one attached to the phone, and they would get tangled up especially if you were shaking what little bit of booty you had at that age and dancing and kicking up a storm in your bedroom. I was so bored with rock music that (to me) all sounded the same, for the most part, whereas almost every disco song I remember hearing was what made me want to sing or dance, even if the beats may have been repetitive. Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Bee Gees, Chic, LaBelle, the Village People (as ridiculous as they were), KC and the Sunshine Band, Cheryl Lynn, loads of them. It seems a long time ago because in a way it was, but it's different when you can simultaneously draw upon your own memories and not just read about what it may have been like, because that's what makes it all more real.

Barry's foray into disco is a bit of an outlier for his career, as he was always best known as either Bette Midler's piano player from her Bathhouse Bette days, or as the singer of shmaltzy soft rock hits like Mandy or I Write The Songs. But I think Copacabana may be among the pinnacles of how great disco was in its heyday. It's meant to be a tad ridiculous from the start, so anybody deriding it for the verses or the dance moves Barry is working in the video I linked above, is missing the point. He wasn't taking it completely seriously yet that didn't prevent it from being a memorable and notable hit - it spent two weeks at #8 on the Hot 100 in August 1978. It's also an immensely fun song to sing along to, I find the notes are pretty easy to hit even for someone like me who isn't the greatest singer.