The 30 Best Disco Songs That Every Millennial Should Know
It’s been nearly 50 years since Carl Douglas kung-fu fought his way to the top of the Billboard charts, and the world is once again in the throes of disco fever — and it doesn’t exactly sound like doing the “Y.M.C.A.” at the prom. Huge pop artists like Robin Thicke (“Give It My Way”), Bruno Mars (“Treasure”), and Justin Timberlake (“Take Back the Night”) ride the velvet rope where disco met soul, while revisionists like Escort and Midnight Magic dive headfirst into luxurious pools of retro glitter.
In the electronic underground, artists like Lindstrøm, Todd Terje, and labels like Italians Do It better and 100% Silk follow sleeker, darker corridors; while post-punkers like Savages and The Rapture spotlight pointier, pokier paths. Skream, once dubstep’s most spartan producer, jumped on board the love rollercoaster with his recent foray into “neo-disco,” and Arcade Fire‘s recent “Reflektor” reflects like a mirror ball. And it goes without saying that the most anticipated record of the year, Daft Punk‘s Random Access Memories, got more than lucky thanks to an assist from Chic’s Nile Rodgers.
With all that in mind, here’s the 30 best disco songs that shaped the sound in the YouTube era. Don’t stop ’til you get enough.
Tantra, “Hills of Katmandu” (Philips, 1979)
Hear It In: Avicii, Lindstrøm
By early 1980, most U.S. record companies dropped all but disco’s biggest acts and redirected its superstars to rock, pop, and R&B. But gay dancers still wanted more of the speedy, otherworldly Eurodisco that took them to another planet, a safe one far away from Anita Bryant, Harvey Milk assassin Dan White, and all the other homophobes of the era. Tantra’s 1979 16-minute opus “Hills of Katmandu” did exactly that — especially if you were tripping your balls off. Recorded before Italian disco morphed into Italo disco, “Katmandu” placed willing dancers high, high, high atop the mountains of Nepal. Italian arranger Celso Valli packs the track with undulating bass, snake-charmer synths, bongos aplenty, hard-rock guitar power chords, and choirs evoking the Munchkins of Oz. Giorgio Moroder associate Jürgen Koppers mixed the result for maximum hallucinatory effect. BARRY WALTERS
Karen Young, “Hot Shot” (West End, 1978)
Hear It In: Escort, Midnight Magic, Hercules and Love Affair
Classic, unapologetically disco disco — as opposed to “not really actually disco, y’know” disco — has swept back into the public eye over the last decade. That’s meant a newfound fever for records like “Hot Shot,” a glaring gem, manic and frankly sex-crazed, from New York’s West End Records which, along with the Salsoul label, carried the flame for quality underground dance music right after disco’s public American “death.” But house music in the ’90s sampled the music right back to life — “Hot Shot,” in particular, gained a new audience thanks to none other than Daft Punk, who cut it up on “Indo Silver Club,” from 1997’s Homework. MICHAELANGELO MATOS
Trilogy, “Not Love” (Il Discotto, 1982)
Hear It In: Lindstrøm, Sally Shapiro, the 100% Silk label
When American disco ran aground in the late ’70s, enterprising Chicago DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy began looking to the import section to fortify their all-night sessions — in particular, they looked to “Italo disco,” earnestly sung post-“I Feel Love” synth-scapes from Giorgio Moroder’s native Italy. Trilogy, an alias of prolific producer Paolo Micioni, who usually worked with his brother Peter, produced 1982’s “Not Love,” a model of the style. It was a big favorite of Herb Kent, who’d spin the track on his influential late-night Chicago radio show “Tune In and Punk Out” — a crucial influence on the city’s early house producers. The silvery synths and deliberate pacing echoes in much of the largely Scandinavian wing of vista-ridden neo-disco as well. M.M.
Alexander Robotnick, “Problemes d’Amour” (Fuzz Dance, 1983)
Hear It In: Metro Area, Space Dimension Controller, Miss Kittin
Translated from its original French, “Problemes d’Amour” is like what Blade Runner‘s Roy Batty would cut loose to in a Rimini discotheque: “Oh! This is the cry of a robot in love, oh / Oh! Even without tears, he cries always, oh.” Alexander Robotnick was the alias of Maurizio Dami, a cabaret singer from Florence who programmed his way into dance music’s history books with this quixotic ode to robotic romance. The third release on the short-lived Fuzz Dance label, the track paired sing-songy chants and fluttery funk synthesizers with a crisp machine groove halfway between Kraftwerk and Cybotron. In both its instrumentation and its cadence, it has as much to do with electro-funk as disco, and its wriggly 303 line anticipates Chicago acid, then just around the corner. But arriving just as Italo disco was becoming a recognized thing, it also represents a crucial moment in the way disco mutated as it traveled, reaching Europe as its stateside popularity waned, and then boomeranging back to our shores in a newly streamlined, mechanized format. Fun fact: That’s “Problemes d’Amour” playing in the topless-bar scene in National Lampoon’s European Vacation. PHILLIP SHERBURNE
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