>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC.
[ Applause ]
>> Carla Hayden: Welcome.
[ Applause ]
Welcome to the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress is
the world's largest library,
162 million items,
836 miles of shelving.
And it's also the home to
historic recordings and movies.
And the Library of Congress
for the first time is celebrating
a very interesting era in music.
I happen to live through it.
[ Laughter ]
And we had a presentation
on fashion in the '70s.
And I kept saying that
is an oxymoron.
[ Laughter ]
One of the best things though
about living through it
and reviewing the fashion
and the recordings though is
we could have crazy fashion
because we had such great music.
We were all thinner
because we danced all night.
And we really have contributed I
think in our generation and some
of my colleagues are here
that lived through it too,
to showcasing the range and
diversity of recorded sound.
I'd like to greet live stream
viewers on Facebook and YouTube.
Thank you all for joining us.
And today's symposium explores
the cultural significance
and the legacy of the disco culture.
You'll hear from a range
of distinguished speakers
from the music world, academia
and broadcast journalism.
We're so thankful to be hosting
this wonderful celebration
with cultural institutions and
other organizations including The
Recording Academy, brightest
young things we were back then.
Capital Pride, the DC
Library Association
and the Silent Dance Society.
This program is made possible by
the support of private donations.
And we invite, and this
is a shameless plug,
we invite you to join us
at loc.gov/disco to
make a contribution.
We also are asking you to live
tweet during the events using the
hashtag LCDisco.
And now, for the first session, we
are truly honored to have a woman
who helped symbolize
and create something
that we all know just captures
visually what disco was about.
You've seen Ms. Yolanda Baker on
various news programs recently
because she is quite a legend.
She is the only remaining maker of
disco balls in the United States
through the Louisville based
Omega National Products.
She has hand crafted mirror
disco balls for almost 50 years.
I think that deserves a hand.
[ Applause ]
Have you seen my earrings?
[ Applause ]
Yolanda's disco balls have been
all over the world including
at the legendary Club 54 and onset
of the film "Saturday Night Fever"
which celebrates its 40th
anniversary these years,
and happens to be in the Library of
Congress's National Film Registry.
We are especially appreciative of
her participating in this symposium
on a day that probably is
very important in the world
of Louisville, Kentucky
native, the Kentucky Derby.
We are also pleased to have
joining us Toni Lehring
with the Omega National Products
where she is the mirror
sales and service manager.
She has worked with
the company since 1994,
and will share some tidbits
with us about the history
of the mirror disco ball.
And then, Rhona Wolfe Friedman
will moderate our first session.
She is a commissioner on the
District of Columbia Arts--
Commission on Arts and
Humanities, as well as attorney
and realtor in Washington DC.
And in addition to holding
degrees in law and philosophy,
she holds a degree in the
history of decorative arts
from Smithsonian Parsons
School of Design.
So let's give them a big Library
of Congress disco welcome.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you so much.
>> Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Thank you.
Thank you all for being here.
I'm going to introduce
our illustrious speakers
and Toni is the mirror
and sales service manager
in the mirror division of
Omega National Products,
based in Louisville, Kentucky.
She's been deployed there for
23 years, starting in 1994.
Omega is the premier manufacture
of wood cabinet accessories,
as well as architectural
mirrored products.
These include disco balls
and antique mirrors.
Ms. Lehring is a family
person who loves cooking,
hiking, camping, and reading.
She's an avid fan of the
University of Louisville sports.
She has two daughters and
one delightful grandson.
Yolanda Baker is a
production employee
in the mirror division of Omega.
Ms. Baker has worked in Omega
for 49 years since 1968.
[ Applause ]
She's an expert in the manufacturing
of mirrored disco balls.
She also does quality control
for handcrafted mirrors.
She's been married 51 years to
her husband Tom and has one--
[ Applause ]
One married son and two
wonderful grandchildren.
She enjoys family dinners,
camping, and vacationing.
Thank you again for
being here on derby day.
So we're going to start with a
question for either one of you.
Omega National Products make some
of the best mirrors in the world.
Can you please give us a little bit
of an explanation about its origins?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: I
can help you with that one.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Thank you.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: We've
been making mirror since 1946
when the company was founded.
And it was made by
hand, handcrafted.
And at that time, most mirrors were.
We no longer can use mercury,
but we still have artisans
who can make the handcrafted mirrors
on antique mirror, regular mirror,
the gold vein mirror, all from like
the art deco histories of furniture
and furnishings and wall coverings.
And I think the best thing to say is
that because we make it in America,
because our company is so family
oriented, we just take great pride
in our work and our craftsmanship.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Thank you.
Thank you.
Can you explain the tie-in in the
1950s in America to deco furniture
and mirror and the
desire for everyone
to have their furnitures mirrored?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: Well, as
we talked about this before but,
you know, a lot of the
very wealthy wanted all
of these replica furniture pieces.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
That's right.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: And then
it was just a lot more affordable
to have it mirrored, rather
than have the solid woods
and the exotic woods that
came from other countries.
And then of course, we've had some
mirrored furniture, the table tops
and the art deco tables,
occasional tables, I've really--
I'm trying to think,
oh, I'm so sorry.
But, you know, but I think everybody
loves to go into their room
where it looks expanded and
I think that's what always
when you have a mirrored room.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
That's right.
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
And it just sort of--
the antique mirror sort
of takes away from some
of that mirrored image and
makes a softer look for people
and it's just kind of elegant.
And I think it shows a richness.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Thank you.
Now, let's get a little bit
into disco balls-- can--
who wants to explain to us
the origin of the disco ball?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: No, no.
She knows, believe me.
It didn't start in Louisville,
Kentucky, I could tell you all that.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Right.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: And I
really wish it did, but it didn't.
And we weren't involved
when it started.
So it started over in Europe.
And, you know, and then it
kind of like, in the '20s,
you can see disco balls in
old photographs of, you know,
[inaudible] and ballrooms and,
you know, kind of incorporating
with the chandeliers and all these
grand ballrooms in Great Britain.
And then of course it came over
into America in the early '20s.
But we didn't start actually
manufacturing those until the '60s.
We were making a flexible
wall covering
and then a flexible mirror covering.
And that's what Yolanda does.
And so then a company
approached us and asked us
if we would cover various sizes and
shapes of spheres or unique shapes,
different kinds of substrates.
And that's when we started
making those around 1960.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
What was the largest size
of a disco ball you've ever made?
It's also, what is the
oddest one you've ever made?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
Well, I did a 10 foot.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: I'm sorry.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: I did
a 10-foot ball for Coca-Cola.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: OK.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
And the oddest thing I
covered would be a saddle.
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
Four foot shoe.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: And
a four foot shoe, high heel.
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
A four foot pump.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: High heel.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
How did you cover a saddle,
did someone actually sit on that?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
I think it was
for a display, you know, in a bar.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Wow.
Can you talk a little bit about
the origins of the disco ball
in your company, how you
started getting into making them?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: Well, again,
the company that approached us,
and unfortunately I don't have that
information, but they approached us
because we were making-- taking
two foot by two foot glass sheets.
We would silver them.
We would put a cloth back
and the glass is scored.
And so when we started doing that
for wall coverings like cylinders
and different curved walls, that's
when the company was approached.
We were making waste baskets,
like we do all accessories,
bathroom accessories, and then
that's when the company came by
and said, we'd like for
you all to mass produce.
And at that time, there were
three people in the department,
one person covering balls,
one person making the shells,
one person scoring the glass.
And those three people
grew into 28 people
within about five years
making an average
of 25 balls per person per day.
So at that time, we really became
the most revered in America
as far as making disco balls.
And they went global, I
mean, no pun intended.
And if you'll notice,
we make mirrored globes
because disco balls were
called disco balls until disco.
So, yeah, and we still call
them mirrored globes today.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Do you
still make furniture well now
and antique mirrors and disco balls?
What are you doing currently?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: Yeah.
We don't make the mirrored
furniture.
We actually make the glass
and mirror and then sell it
through distribution, sell
it through cabinet companies.
I actually have a disco
ball desk and credenza,
and occasional table in my office.
So I love it so, you know, I said
you all can't throw that away.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Can you
describe how you make a disco ball?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
Well, you have a sphere.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
Of what, made of?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
It's aluminum.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: OK.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
Aluminum shell.
It's hollow on the inside.
It has a hook on one end
to-- for the hanging.
You take a belly band
is what I call it.
So, a strip of glass and you
put it around the middle.
It's glued on there and you put
glue on the rest of the ball
and you proceed to go up the bulb.
And it's that simple.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
Simple she says.
And how long does it take you
to make one of these balls?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: Let's
see, a 12-inch would probably take
about 15 minutes, that's
a 12-inch in diameter.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Wow.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: Yeah.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: How--
what was the longest time it
took you to make one these balls?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
The 10 footer was
like two or three days, yeah.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Wow.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: Yeah.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Wow.
Can you talk a little bit about
the trends in the decorative arts
in the '70s and '80s and how the
balls were involved in culture?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: I think a lot
of people here could
probably tell us the same,
if you can remember
like, I can remember
in the '70s, like you can remember--
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Yeah.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: --
we've had customers come
in even before my time
there at the company.
They have covered shoes
with disco ball material.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Wow.
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
We've had a bikini.
We've had just all kinds
of different shapes.
Like, she said, a lot of companies
who wanted to brand their product,
promote their product
and really catch the eye
of the public to cover it.
And I think after a while, everyone
just thought it was so much fun.
Every time you walk into a ballroom
or, you know, a high school prom,
anything that's from that day when
you were having just the best time
with family, friends, everybody
is getting together, dancing,
who doesn't love to
dance, you know, seriously?
Who doesn't feel happy
when they dance?
And I think that really made a
difference and disco balls kind
of brought that, that really
wild person out of them and said,
"I'm going to be in hippie right
now and have fun and enjoy myself."
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
[Inaudible] your skating rinks.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: And we're
skating rinks, that's right.
Amusement park rides.
I think it's just all a lot of fun
when you think about disco ball.
And every time there's one
hanging, somebody wants
to get underneath in
there and dance.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Was there
one specific movie or a catalyst
that brought our little
disco ball to stardom?
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
John Travolta.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Yes.
Yeah.
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
Staying alive.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
How did that happen?
Did you know how that happened?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
I do not know.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: We actually
have a New York representative.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: OK.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: And
he promoted our products
like for Studio 54 and for
"Saturday Night Fever".
We know that "Soul Train",
the disco ball that they had
at "Soul Train" was shared
with Johnny Carson's studio.
I think that's [inaudible].
Although I never saw it on
Johnny Carson's show but-- yeah.
So I think that that movie, and
then also we have other Vegas,
the show that was a TV show,
we've had a lot of movie
and TV production companies use
disco balls and disco ball material.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: And
you're the only company now
that makes disco balls
in the United States?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: As far we
know, we've been the only company
where we're still trying
to find a documentation,
but we know of no other retro
disco ball manufacturer.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: And
where do companies get disco balls
if they don't go to your company?
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
Through distributors.
There's some in Texas
and in New York.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: I mean
they would go overseas as well?
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
Oh, I'm sorry, yes.
The overseas market is that
changed our company a bit.
You know, once the overseas
companies learned how
to make a disco ball and learned
how to make it more economically
but not efficiently and they
just sort of swapped quantity
for quality which is a shame.
It helps us in a way because people
keep coming back although I did have
customer recently that
call in and said,
"I need a new disco ball motor.
I've had my 36-inch
disco ball since 1968."
He truly said that.
So you know when it's made
by us, it's going to last.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: You know,
you mentioned disco balls
are hollow, but are there--
so I think of those big disco balls
with these stars coming out of them.
How does that work, you know, when
you have some famous movie stars
with balls that open up, do you
make them, that open up as well?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: No.
No, ma'am.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
You don't, OK.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
The only thing I remember
about a star is Madonna.
[ Laughter ]
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
Riding down on it.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: Yeah.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: Riding
on that big disco ball that--
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: It goes
right down on that disco ball.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Right,
that's what I was thinking of.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: Yeah, yeah.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: And
it didn't break and it just--
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: No.
I make them good.
[ Laughter ]
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Wow.
And what makes your balls so unique?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: I think it's
because it is the retro disco ball.
It is that traditional disco ball.
You have production companies
for movies and Vegas.
They have their own production
companies that have made disco balls
with video screens now and
light shooting out of it.
We don't make that
kind of disco ball.
We make the traditional,
original retro disco ball.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: And
who is ordering disco balls now?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: Well,
we have, believe it or not,
restaurants, Kane's
Restaurant is one of those.
Again, we sell through distribution
so we don't always know exactly
where our disco balls go.
We did open up some sales when
NBC had, you know, came in
and interviewed us just because
there was such a strong interest
and Yolanda has really
gained global attention
because everyone just loves her
story that she's for longevity,
the fact that she just
loves what she's doing.
And believe me, you cannot
imagine how fast she works.
You can't imagine how
tedious they can be.
She cuts each-- because we make
those cloth sheets and she kind
of cuts all those little
facets and she puts them
on the globe and they're beautiful.
We have colored globes,
we have custom made globes
that have sandblasted
company names on them.
It's really tremendous
what she does.
And then hang on big hooks and
she has to get underneath of them.
She's really quite the
[inaudible] person.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: Thank you.
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
You're welcome.
[ Applause ]
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: When
you travel around the country
or go to other seminars or on TV,
do you run into other disco balls
that you've made years ago?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: Oh
yes, yes, several times.
I can always recognize them
because of that belly band.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Oh, OK.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker: It's unique.
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
It's all inline, yeah.
And then the end cap too.
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
Yeah, the end cap.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: Yeah.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
Interesting.
What is your impression of how disco
cultures influenced American pop
culture over the years?
Does it go back to a
simpler time for you or?
>> Yolanda Ayers Baker:
Oh, I think so.
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
I think so too.
I think what happened--
I know I [inaudible]
of how you remember this too.
But, you know, for there
for a while in the '60s,
people weren't dancing together.
They were all doing
their own little thing.
Let's do the monkey,
let's do the pony.
You could do-- You could
dance all by yourself.
And then when disco came back in
and when dancing with partners
and ballroom dancing, you know,
the elegance of that and then all
of a sudden it's got really, you
know, you got gymnastics in there.
I mean, you really had some talented
people coming out and dancing
and I just think of such
a wonderful art to watch.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
Well, thank you.
And now it's time for a surprise
that Yolanda and Toni have
for the Library of Congress.
And Dr. Hayden.
>> Carla Hayden: My
partner in crime.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: Oh, please.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: And your
partner in crime most definitely.
>> Carla Hayden: [Inaudible] and
Robert Newlen, the one I mentioned.
We didn't coordinate this.
[ Laughter ]
But we both knew what to wear.
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
Great minds think alike.
[ Applause ]
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
Can you give it to them?
Just give it.
Can you give it to them?
>> Oh, I'm sorry.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Can
you present it to [inaudible].
>> Carla Hayden: OK.
So whose office is this
going to go in, Robert?
>> Robert Newlen: Well, yours.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: I got it.
That's what I asked.
I asked if we had a [inaudible].
You got it?
OK.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
Let's see how heavy.
>> Carla Hayden: A real
Yolanda Baker disco ball
with the Library of Congress on it.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: Yeah.
And it's actually sandblasted so
it-- that paint will stay on there.
>> Carla Hayden: And you know,
I'll never forget the belly band.
Well, I need one.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: And
you can see the belly band,
it's right there [inaudible].
>> Carla Hayden: Where is it?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: Right here.
Right here, the four--
it's four pieces together
that has the cloth back and we
are sharing this, it's sort of,
you know, something that we don't
already share because people want
to come in and see how
we used to make those.
Can you hold it or you got it?
>> Carla Hayden: Oh, look at it.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
They're just trying
to give you a little disco feel.
>> Carla Hayden: And don't
forget, we're live streaming.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
Maybe not, maybe not.
OK.
>> Carla Hayden: Oh,
thank you so much.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: You have it?
Well, thank you for having us.
>> Carla Hayden: Be careful.
Thank you so much.
It means a lot.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
This is wonderful.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman:
Do you have it?
>> Robert Newlen: I've got it, yeah.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: OK.
Thank you.
>> He's got it, he's got it.
>> That's amazing.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: And it--
For those of you who can't see,
it says Library of
Congress with a beautiful--
>> Carla Hayden: Little logo.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: --
in the front here with a
little insignia on the side.
>> Is it heavy?
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: I'm sorry?
>> Carla Hayden: It's
not that heavy.
I mean, it's heavy but--
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
It's not that heavy.
It only weighs about 18 pounds.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carla Hayden: And
Robert is holding it.
>> Robert Newlen: And I'd say
a hundred pound [inaudible].
>> Carla Hayden: And you'll
be giving demonstrations?
>> Please.
>> Carla Hayden: You'll
be giving demonstrations?
>> Toni Grady Lehring: On
how to cover a disco ball?
Oh, well, we don't have any
material with us, I'm sorry.
>> Carla Hayden: Oh, OK.
>> Toni Grady Lehring: I'm sorry.
>> Carla Hayden: You don't want
to give away your trade secret.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: No.
They can't do that.
>> Carla Hayden: That's OK.
That's a good one.
Well, thank you so much.
>> Rhona Wolfe Friedman: Well, I
just want to thank Yolanda and Toni
for coming here, especially once
again on their favorite day,
Louisville, Kentucky,
the Kentucky Derby.
So let's give them all [inaudible].
[ Applause ]
>> Toni Grady Lehring:
Thank you [inaudible].
[ Applause ]
>> Carla Hayden: Be careful.
[ Applause ]
Thank all of you.
As you know, this is just the
beginning of disco at the Library
of Congress so we hope
you'll participate in some
of the other programs
today and I have
to just give you a sneak preview.
I'll be changing into
different outfits.
[ Applause ]
So, stay tuned.
Thank you so much.
>> Martin Scherzinger:
Hello everyone.
It is such an honor to be here today
in the presence of the disco ball,
that iconic centerpiece for
us or for generations of us
who were reveling and dancing to it.
What I wanted to express
particular pleasure
in is the perhaps kaleidoscopic
colors that shine
through in its fragmented
mirror glass.
And what I want to do is to take
up that theme and reflect some
of the way in which the world's
diversity in all its fragments is
in some ways reflected in it.
But first, I just want to take
a quick moment to thank some
of the people that I
couldn't be up here without,
particularly Wills Glasspiegel
who's at Yale University
and former colleague of mine, who
does a lot of interesting film work,
filming dances around the world
and who was a very much part
of this project, as well as all the
people working in the background,
John doing the audio-vision.
Everybody here at Library of
Congress who are so professional,
they've been so wonderful.
But above all, David Plylar and
Susan Vita for their invitation.
It is an honor and I am humbled by
the opportunity to speak here today.
OK. About a third of the way
through her track "Hold Up"
on her fascinating visual album
Lemonade released about a year ago,
Beyonce emerges from a scene in
which she appears to be floating
or suffocating perhaps under water,
under the claustrophobic weight
of a kind of betrayal
and hopelessness.
She intones with a stark voiceover.
"I tried to change,
close my mouth more."
We hear the weird sounds
of audio reverse
and reverb accompanying this
kind of confessional manifesto.
Is it a baptism, is it a
drowning, death, rebirth?
Perhaps it's death because she
proclaims I swallowed a sword.
But then also immediately she
says, "I confessed my sins
and was baptized in a river."
As the story of the song shifts
from narration into music,
two golden doors open,
perhaps a modern temple
or even a state institution
like this one.
And she enters the music video
as a singer, not as a narrator.
Water no longer drowning her breaks
through the door, released
like a rebirth.
[ Water Flowing ]
Getting to the many levels
of what Beyonce is doing is an
extremely difficult thing to do,
who works on increasingly
sophisticated
with endless numbers of references.
According to the official
title release,
this was about a woman's journey
to self-knowledge and healing.
But at the same time, the references
are so proliferate to Christian
and Afro-Caribbean based
spiritual practices,
references to Black Lives Matter,
motherhood, betrayal, love,
high art works, films, literature
such as Julie Dash's cult classic
"Daughters of the Dust" in 1992.
It indexes so much
of a bigger world.
Even that Roberto Cavalli
dress tells a story
because it is not just a dress,
it is a reference to the figure
of Oshun, the Yoruba
goddess of female sensuality,
love and fertility,
known as the mother
of the sweet waters in Nigeria.
Not only do we find that
reference in the dress but also
in her recent appearance as a
pregnant woman at the Grammies.
What the dress signifies is the
flowing water following the great
goddess of Oshun.
Of course Oshun marks a
real place in the world.
And here I want to show you just the
Shrine of Oshun in Southwest Nigeria
in the Osogbo region in the
Osun State that's on the left
where she's depicted as a mermaid.
On the right, we have Cuban
believers who participated
in the procession of
Our Lady of Charity,
depicted here as the Oshun goddess
in the Yoruba religion in Havana.
This was to celebrate her 400th
anniversary of her apparition.
The Yoruba deity of course is known
to heal the sick, to cheer the sad,
to bring music and song and dance,
as well as bring fertility
and prosperity.
She is the protector of the
poor, the mother of all orphans.
But why is Beyonce conjuring
the deity so vividly?
It is clear that Beyonce brings
aspects of Oshun's legacy right
down to her own living legacy.
I mean just in 19-- in 2015,
she donated seven million
for the Knowles-Temenos
Place Apartments,
a kind of homeless shelter in
Houston, which provides meals,
job readiness, training,
HIV screenings case
management and so on.
And then just last month, Beyonce
initiated a new scholarship program
for young women studying
creative arts, music,
film and African-American studies.
These are called the
formation scholars.
But I want to draw
attention to something else
because there's more going on than
just these real world interventions.
As Amy Yeboah, who teaches Africana
Studies at Howard University says
in this quote, "Beyonce takes the
power of woman spirituality deeper
into African spirituality.
We see this in the
first of two baptisms
and her emergence as an orisha."
What's interesting about this is
that she focuses on the inmate
as being able to tell a story.
This is visual storytelling.
Instead of looking at the lyrics,
we're looking at the imagery.
The power of the imagery to narrate
a scene, images one might say speak.
And they speak in ways that is
not fully capturable in words.
What I want to show today is that
it is not just images that speak
but also sounds, sounds and rhythms.
They speak.
As a South African, I want
to draw particular attention
to Beyonce's ongoing perception with
African music, with African rhythms,
African ideas and cosmologies.
These index a much
larger history and take us
into the global framework
for her music.
But let's go back a few years
to that moment in the middle
of the Obama years where in some
sense Beyonce was still rising
dramatically in her stature.
It was just before she became
the go-to artist for everything,
ranging from the Super Bowl to
the singer of the national anthem
at the presidential inauguration.
And here, I want to just
play a song from that period,
just a short fragment from the
beginning to remind us of that time.
So--
[ Music ]
OK, I'll stop the song there
at this quite striking
image to which I'll return.
We're in 2011.
The song is called "Run the World
Girls" at 2011 from the album 4.
Musically speaking, we
can talk about a kind
of electro funk group
perhaps, drawing elements
of contemporary R&B, electron
soul and elements of neo disco.
The meaning of the song is what's
perhaps least argued about.
It is a message according
to the official account
of promoting female empowerment.
In Beyonce's words, I tried to write
songs that will bring out the best
in all of us and keep
us close together.
I think about saying the
things that women want to say
but sometimes are not
confident enough to say.
I'm going to continue to write those
songs that give women strength.
And all the way across from
Billboard to Pitchfork which is sort
of on the opposite ends of the
spectrum of the music bloggery,
there's a basic agreement that
this is about female empowerment.
It also was the song that
woke up the final mission
of the US space shuttle Atlantis
where the female mission
specialist Sandra Magnus was onboard
and it initiated a period even
in places like where I work,
in universities, of people beginning
to study this phenomenon
called Beyonce.
Kevin Allred at Rutgers University
had a syllabus that connected her
to a kind of black feminist optic,
a messenger for social change by way
of Bell Hooks, Alice Walker,
Sojourner Truth, and
Beyonce Knowles.
So, the message of the
song seems quite clear,
but let's go to the music.
What's going on in the music?
And here, I want to just draw
attention to the fact that a couple
of days ago, I gave in a talk about
the way in which American music
from punk and soul-- funk and
soul to Motown disco and so
on is often derived in large
measure from African music,
both by way of African-American
music and also particularly by way
of the Afro-Caribbean influence.
And today, I want to
tell that kind of story
which we might call a biography
of musical fragments and patterns
or what my colleague [inaudible]
and I would call the social life
of a sound by looking at some of
the details of Beyonce's song.
Let's start with that
syncopated bell pattern that--
[ Tapping ]
OK, where does that come from?
It's a kind of a block party
invitation, a summons to come
to an event and then it has
that strange synthesized vocoder
like cartoon voice above it,
kind of Mickey Mousing it.
And as the music enters, it
sort of erupts into a kind
of supreme being energized
by the rhythm.
Beyonce is suddenly
is alive and almost
in pantheistic manner also
drawing on a standard cabaret move.
But the track itself comes from
Major Lazer's track "Pon de Floor"
from an album called Guns
Don't Kill People, Lazers Do.
Major Lazer was working
in a Jamaican dance hall
tradition at this point.
He's a white DJ from Florida by the
name of Wesley Pence and he is--
he was first-- sort of became
more popularized on mainstream,
one might say, when he wrote Paper
Planes for MIA which was that--
this kind of soundtrack
to "Slumdog Millionaire".
At any rate, this had been
circulating quite widely in Jamaica
in 2009 and 2010 before
Beyonce decided to use it
as the central track for
"Girls Run the World".
So it is already, as I say,
widely circling, circulating.
Let me give you some example
of how it was circulating.
Here is Busy Signals' rendition or
version of it called [inaudible].
[ Music ]
OK, I'm sorry to cut it
off like that but we need
to try cover a bit more
ground than one once do.
But this is directly related
to or the typical sound
of Jamaican dab and dancehall music.
What is sometimes called versioning
or what my colleague Michael
Veal calls the aesthetics
of accumulation or
the rhythm method.
In this way there's a kind
of audio MIMO [phonetic],
a dance track that circulates
amongst different DJs and producers
and they repurpose that in different
context and toast over it or wrap
over it in different ways.
The tradition of repurposing
existing technology,
whether it's the turntable in
hip hop or mixing discs and so
on had a long legacy also in Jamaica
and is part of the dancehall scene.
I want to, however, push that even
further to 19th century Surinam.
Because if we listen closely
to the track, it was also--
had a very powerful
snare drum influence
and that snare drum influence
was probably mediated
by a DJ called Afrojack who was
the co-producer on the track
and he was drawing on a regional
dance style from Surinam.
In Surinam, this particular
dance style known as Kaseko
or Kaseko is played at
45 beats per minute.
In other words, just a little bit
faster than Jamaican dancehall
and itself draws on the tradition,
the kind of calypso-like style
inflected with marching rhythms
from the colonial time in Surinam.
This is interesting because during
this time you have black bands
playing in military-- black
performers playing in military bands
as part of the colonial regime
but they shift the cadences
of that European canon in a way to
reflect their own musicalization.
That's where the syncopations
come in,
the creolization we might call it.
Here is a typical track
of this babbling music.
Babbling is the sort of DJ version
of this older calypso Kaseko style,
and this is DJ Chuckie, probably
one of the most prominent DJs.
[ Music ]
Now, let's go to Johannesburg
in South Africa.
Here, I'm going to
show you a short clip
of a dance troupe called Real
Actions, part of what is known
as the pantsula scene
in South Africa.
In this case this is probably
our most important pantsula group
at the moment.
I'll tell you more about them.
Let's watch how they move.
[ Drumbeat ]
[ Whistling ]
OK. As you see, this is quite
virtuosic, low stepping but quick,
low to the ground kind of urban
street culture that has its origins
in South African townships and
draws heavily from the mbaqanga
and marabi musical traditions.
Quick darting steps,
geometric lines,
uneven rhythmic quality and so on.
The word pantsula itself actually
means to waddle like a duck.
And if you try to move like a
duck you will find yourself moving
like a pantsula, a sort of
flat-footed we might say African tap
and glide style often
with the buttocks out.
Other dance moves often also follow
the sort of metaphors of daily life.
There's one called [inaudible] which
means like putting butter on bread.
Now, Beyonce's choreography by
Frank Gatson officially drew
on this pantsula tradition.
But she actually didn't work
with Real Actions, instead,
she went across the
border to Mozambique
to another troupe called Tofo Tofo.
Tofo Tofo means or tofo
means shaking the body.
This is another derivation of
what Real Actions are doing,
and in some ways looked
down upon by Real Actions
as being derivative itself of
like the real pantsula back home.
Here is the connection between what
Beyonce found on a YouTube clip,
the Tofo Tofo performance and
then the relationship that took--
takes to the choreography
in the video.
[ Music ]
[Background Music] This is actually
a slightly different reference,
but we will get to the one
related to Tofo Tofo in a minute.
[ Music ]
OK. I'm, again, cutting
it a little short.
One can go into this
in much more detail.
But I would just want to draw
your attention to one small detail
of the dance in that
that in pantsula dancing,
there's many different styles.
And some are called western style,
the slow poison, there's
[inaudible].
And what they're doing is
dancing a little bit more
of the [inaudible] style,
which means your arms are kind
of wrapped quite tightly around
the torso while the feet do a lot
of moving.
It was this that was tricky
for Frank Gatson to work with.
And Beyonce had the singers
actually flown out to LA
to choreograph the official dancers
because they couldn't quite get
that relaxed feeling together.
Of course, Real Actions were
not that happy about this.
They thought that Tofo Tofo had
in some sense brought
their culture down.
That this was not the
original pantsula,
that they humiliated
us, I'm quoting.
Well, at the same time they did
express a certain kind of pride
in the active recognition from
someone as great as Beyonce.
But, now, I just want to briefly
make one more detour through Africa,
and that is, what about the imagery?
What about those visuals, the
bull, the hyena, and the lion?
Where did they come from?
Particularly this quite striking
scene from Tbilisi on the sign
which is unfortunately
hidden behind the chain
in her right hand is the sign
to Tbilisi which is the capital
of Georgia which at that time was
not uncontroversial because it was--
the Israelis had just
closed down the embassy
in that region and so on.
But these hyenas on the
chain, these are interesting.
What do they call up?
One might say that there's like
sort of exoticized invocations
of advertising for, you know,
colonial European tourism
back in the days of Rudisha.
And all more positively,
one might say, you know,
maybe it's because hyenas themselves
are deeply matriarchal animals.
Here is what Kevin
Richardson, a conservationist
in South Africa has
to say about them.
>> Well, hyenas are
really interesting animals
because unlike lions they do
have a restrict hierarchy,
completely misunderstood,
where everyone thinks
that they are just smelly and
scoundrels and scavengers.
They do not smell.
They're not [inaudible].
They just think [inaudible]
is in there.
Lowest ranking female ranks higher
than the highest ranking
male, if that make sense.
>> But the true reference for these
images is actually the artistic
photojournalism of Pieter Hugo,
another South African photographer
who has a particular interest in
photographing marginalized peoples
around the world, such
as blind people, albinos,
AIDS victims in their
coffins and so on.
This is edgy photography.
And in fact Beyonce is conjuring
that imagery quite strikingly
in Hugo's hyena and
other men portraits.
The Gadawan Kura, whom you see here,
itinerant minstrels in Nigeria,
in Abuja, who perform with pet
hyenas and other wild animals,
baboons, snakes, and so
on to entertain crowds,
to make music with them,
a kind of miniature circus
and sell traditional medicines.
Here are a few more of
these striking images.
Most interesting about them is
that in South Africa there's been
a long kind of genealogy or history
of critical realism in South
African documentary photography
that dates back to
the Bang Bang Club
as they were known photographers
who were deeply involved
with the anti-apartheid
struggle and would go
into dangerous regions
and take photographs.
Some got shot.
Others such as Kevin Carter
actually committed suicide in 1994
when he won a Pulitzer
Prize for taking an image
of a starving Ethiopian child
with a circling vulture.
He found himself also
facing a lot of controversy,
a few months later he was dead.
In Hugo's words, what he's trying
to do is problematize the very way
in which one captures images.
He says, I am other generation
that approaches photography
with a keen awareness
of the problems inherent
in pointing the camera at anything.
And just to be clear, a
year before the release
of "Girls Run the World", there
was an exhibition called Permanent
Error, 2009 to 2010, which was
driving home the darkest side
of his portraiture and looking at a
place called Agbogbloshie and Ghana
where he was looking at
the way in which digitalia,
our digital debris
circulates in the world.
One of the deep sadnesses of the
history of digital life spans is
that they begin Africa through
extraction of cassiterite
and columbite-tantalite in
the Congo and so on often
under severe conditions and
then find their way back
when we dump our waste
back in Africa.
And here you see the
Agbogbloshie toxic waste dump site
where people are trying to extract a
living out of this misguided policy
of shipping millions of tons
of obsolete materials
in that direction.
Pieter Hugo's response when he was--
when it was raised that this was
what Beyonce was referencing said,
you know, he was not sure if
it fitted really into the song
but that he did feel that perhaps
the hyena men might be looking
for compensation for some of
their efforts in that production.
I want to make one final
point before closing for today
because it's a purely musical point.
We spoke about a little bit about
the way in which the snare drums
that have been brought
in were referencing this
calypso style, Kaseko and so on.
We had gotten to the
Afro-Caribbean world.
What's often forgotten in
accounts that you find on Wikipedia
or in the bloggers
[inaudible] or in the, you know,
the large scale media
is the next step.
Where did that come from?
And I wanted to draw
attention these clave patterns
that are being drawn on,
that striking pattern
that goes like this.
[ Tapping ]
The forward clave pattern which
if I would have put a beat
to it would be something like this.
[ Tapping ]
OK? That is very strikingly
if you speed up the--
that pattern a little bit you
get precisely that opening track.
[ Music ]
OK. Now where does
that sound come from?
We know it as being this--
associated with this
on a clave pattern,
but I want to return it back to
its origins, which is in Africa.
And the way you feel that pattern
in Africa is just a
little bit different.
Instead of--
[ Tapping ]
-- you play it this way.
[ Tapping ]
Now you will hear in some ways all
I'm doing is playing a pattern a
little bit more slowly.
But in fact I'm playing
it in a different pulse.
So if I'm playing this
one and it's going--
[ Tapping ]
And the other one--
[ Tapping ]
The one is going [tapping table]
one, two, one, two, one, two, one,
two and the other one, one, two,
three, one, two, three, one,
two, three, one, two, three.
[ Tapping ]
One, two, three, one, two, three,
one, two, three, one, two, three.
And it's this change or the
transformation of ternary time,
we call it, in threes,
to binary time that I'd
like to note in my closing remarks.
Where does this pattern come from?
It's hard to find a region in
Africa where it doesn't play a role.
But I'm just going to play you
one of the typical bell patterns
that is associated with gankogui
which is a bell instrument
with two tones.
And it's part of an ensemble usually
such as agbekor or [inaudible].
And here's the way in slow motion
that that particular
bell pattern sounds.
[ Music ]
Seven strokes before
it begins again.
One, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, one.
OK. If I play a second part
and I'm just going to have
to demonstrate this quickly.
Here is the bell pattern.
[ Tapping ]
And I'll play all the
spaces in between
that which is what your rattle
player in this ensemble will do.
[ Rattle Sound ]
That is what will become the
clave pattern as it crosses
over into the Afro-Caribbean.
OK. So it's within the sort of
rattling of this particular ensemble
that that clave pattern is embedded.
One way in which we find a
transformation taking place is
that instead of hearing that in
ternary time, as said we hear it
in binary time, but what is striking
about the African version is
that you can hear that
pattern in any of many ways.
So if I play you that pattern
again, I'm going to beat
out different "drumbeats"
against it.
[ Tapping ]
Or--
[ Tapping ]
Or--
[ Tapping ]
Or--
[ Tapping ]
OK. What's interesting about it is
that it's organized in such a way,
for those of you that can
read [inaudible] theory,
that it can entrain
our bodies in any
of many different time
signatures at the same time.
The structure of it is long, long,
short, long, long, long, short.
A little bit like the structure
of the white notes on a piano
where you have a tone, tone, half
tone, tone, tone, tone, half tone.
And it is that ambiguity, that
possibility for entraining the body
in many different ways that is
in some sense lost when it moves
over into the Afro-Caribbean
and become something
that is a little more shoe
horned into binary time.
It is that small loss that I want to
register when we look at more depth
into what these-- what's at stake
globally into all these musics
that take us in some--
sometimes to some sad places
such as the toxic waste
dumpsite in Agbogbloshie and also
into a time signature
that it's a little less
than what it was in its origin.
OK, thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> Bill Bernstein: Thank you.
Hello. Are you out there?
>> [Simultaneously] Yes.
>> Bill Bernstein: OK.
My name is Bill Bernstein.
I'm a photographer.
And I'm beyond honored
to be here at the Library
of Congress in Washington, DC.
And I wanted to thank Dr. Hayden.
I think Dr. Hayden's here but thank
you for opening up the Library
of Congress to this
kind of craziness.
It's refreshing I think.
I want to just talk about my
experience with the disco culture.
I photographed disco
from 1977 to 1979.
And I was thrown into this culture.
I'll give you a little
background about myself.
I was born in the '50s.
I was one of the Woodstock
generation.
The first big cultural phenomenon
that I remember as a kid was
when The Beatles came over to
America on the Ed Sullivan Show.
And that for me kind
of changed everything.
I became a musician.
I got a set of Ludwig
Drums and I played
in a rock band in high school.
And I guess my culture as a young
man was kind of the hippie culture.
Although I wasn't a
full fledged hippie
but that was kind of
where I came from.
So we were, you know, antiwar.
We were mostly white,
middle class, long haired,
suburban, most-- a lot of us.
I got tear gassed in the mall like
right down the street here in 1970
when I was protesting the war.
Anyway, after I got out of college,
I decided to become a photographer
and this is in the '70s.
And the first place that would hire
me I guess was the Village Voice
in New York City.
And this was in about 1976.
And so I was photographing
a lot of street photography
and portraiture, that kind of thing.
And one night, I was asked to--
I was assigned to go to Studio 54
to photograph an awards
presentation for Lillian Carter,
who is Jimmy Carter,
the president's mother.
She was being awarded
a humanitarian award.
And I had never been to Studio
54 before and I had no--
kind of no interest in going.
I had a curiosity but I was
not a big fan of disco music.
And at that time, my rock station
in New York overnight turned
from rock to all disco.
And a lot of people were
a little bit confused
and not happy with that.
So I was well aware of the
fact that disco was happening.
And I saw "Saturday Night
Fever" which came out 1977.
And so it was a phenomenon
that was occurring.
And I consider my self
a photojournalist,
a portrait photographer and a
bit of a cultural anthropologist.
I like to get involved in
different cultures and look at them
and photograph them and disco
certainly was its own culture.
So anyway, I was sent to Studio 54
and this is what it looked
like from the outside.
It was a very difficult
place to get into.
It opened up in '77.
And there was always a-- they
started the velvet rope policy
where people would stand outside
and be chosen, you know, based on--
I'm not exactly sure what but
I know a few were a celebrity
who had a good chance
of getting in but not--
you didn't always get in
but you had a good chance.
So this is what I saw the
first night that I got there.
And when I walked inside,
this is what I encountered.
And I had never seen
anything like this before.
I was just, you know,
shooting on the street
or if I was shooting a portrait,
I would have the person
pretty much all to myself.
And so this was, you know, the--
The word paparazzi was kind
of a new word back in 1977.
And, you know, here they are.
They're just like on
top of each other.
And to me as a photographer,
this was more interesting a shot
than what they were shooting.
But that's what they were shooting.
So that's Lillian Carter and--
sitting next to Andy Warhol.
And that's the shot that the Village
Voice sent me to get which I got.
And then I decided that after the
event was over that I would stay
because I didn't know if I
could ever get back in again.
So, I bought 10 rolls of
film from a photographer
who is leaving, from
one of those guys.
And I basically hung out in
the shadows up in the balcony
so I didn't get kick out, and waited
for the regular crowd to come in.
They put all the tables
away and cleaned up
and then the regular crowd came in.
And this is really one of the
very first pictures that I took
that night in '77, this
was in December of '77.
Studio 54 had opened I think
about a month or two before that.
Studio 54 was actually opened
from '77 to '79 which is like--
it was like two and a half
years something like that.
When I tell people that,
they can't believe it
because they think it was
opened for like 10 years.
But it was a very, very short
period of time when it was owned
by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager
who were the original
creators of Studio 54.
So this is the first
picture that I really took
after I took the shot
for the Village Voice.
And as I was taking this
picture, I think I --
this might be the only
real frame that I got.
I got a couple of pictures of them
from the back and then I asked them
if I could shoot them and
then I shot this and then went
on to shoot something else.
But it really stuck in my
mind because it reminded me
of a prewar Berlin Cabaret.
And I started to think about
that and I remember, you know,
seeing the movie "Cabaret" and
just, you know, the whole sort
of gender-bending undertone, sort
of gay undertone and sadomasochistic
and just a lot of things
sort of popped into my mind
when I photographed this couple.
And I started looking around.
This was later that night.
And I just started to have--
see these images all around me
of this prewar Berlin
Cabaret sort of thing.
This was a group that
was-- they would--
they came in altogether and they--
through the course of the night,
they would dance together, the
guys would dance with the guys,
sometimes the two guys
would sandwich the girl
on the dance floor.
I didn't know who was who
or what was what with them,
but they were like this group that
hang out together and they were
in this own little bubble.
And I just kept an eye out on them
and when they got on the couch
like this that was across the floor
and I just thought that's
really an interesting picture.
So I sort of like hoped I could
get across the floor with my camera
without them moving, you know,
without them getting up and leaving
which I did and I walked
over and I snapped a couple
of shots and that was it.
And people asked me
if this was posed?
And it was not posed at all.
It was-- They were
posing, but not for me.
I mean they were posing
before I got there.
And it's like-- almost like
they felt like as I watched them
that night that they were sort
of the stars of the evening.
And they had this, you
know, aura about them.
And they were in this little bubble.
So, I chose at the very beginning
when I went to Studio 54 not
to photograph celebrities, it
was like an early decision.
And the reason I did that
was a couple of reasons.
First of all, everybody was
shooting the celebrities
and that was what photographers
were doing at places like Studio 54.
And they were all kind
of getting the same shot.
So I thought, you know, if
I want to shoot a celebrity,
I want them like in my studio with
my lighting and I want to talk
to them and, you know, interact
and get a picture, you know,
get something that I want to get
and not just sort of snap a picture
of them sitting on a couch.
So, I decided that I didn't
want to shoot celebrities.
But I also thought that
what was more interesting
than the celebrities were like the
people who went there and the people
who like live the disco life.
And I started to see things also.
This looks like a transgender woman
with like a sort of a straight--
Wall Street banger type guy.
And I started to realize that were
something really interesting going
on at the disco.
I wasn't exactly sure what it was,
it wasn't crystal clear in my mind,
but I felt like there's
something really interesting here
from a photographic
point of view and just
from a cultural point of view.
And what it was, was it was this
freedom of expression, it was this,
you know, openness, acceptance,
inclusion that I'd
never seen before.
And what was happening
was-- move on.
What was happening is during
the '60s and early '70s,
there was the women's movement,
there was the civil rights movement,
there was post-Stonewall, you
know, there was the LGBT movement.
And all of these movements
sort of came together
at the same time disco happened.
And the disco was a place for all
of these different movements to go
and have what one writer
described as a victory dance.
So, they were all there in unison
having their victory dance.
And I'd never seen anything
like this, you know.
You know, again coming from
the Woodstock generation.
And if you go back and take a
look at the movie "Woodstock",
you can probably count on one hand
how many African Americans there are
in the audience.
They're all mostly white, long
haired, you know, middle class kids.
Most of the entertainers were
African American or, you know,
Hispanic, but the audience itself
was not like this kind of inclusion.
You can see that many transgenders
in the "Woodstock" movie, you know.
So, this was all completely
new to me.
It was just-- I was just--
My eyes were, you know,
bugging out of my head
by what I was seeing.
It just seemed like a place
of freedom of expression and,
you know, be who you want to be.
And it was young, old and this was
a particular interesting character
name Rollerena.
And Rollerena had this gown like
it is, you know, and the glasses
and the hat and this magic
wand and roller skates.
And he was a fixture
in Greenwich Village.
You would see him all the time, you
know, out roller skating around,
and he would bless
you with his wand.
And he was a fixture
at most of the--
like Xenon, was one of the
big discos, and Studio 54.
This is Disco Sally who was
I believe in her mid 70s.
She was a lawyer and her husband
was a lawyer and her husband died
and she was left alone and
heartbroken and never been
to a disco, but some
friend said, come on out,
let's go, you know, to Studio 54.
And she went and she
actually loved it
and she became a regular
at Studio 54 and Xenon.
People used-- Usually young African
Americans or Hispanic muscular guys,
young guys would-- she'd
wrapped her legs around them
and they would spin her around.
[ Laughter ]
Again this is-- you know, really
just freedom of expression
and a safe place to
be and a safe haven.
This is a contact sheet,
and I don't know how--
I can't really see you people
but I don't know how many people
know what a contact sheet is.
Yeah? Good.
[ Applause ]
That's heartening to know.
But when I started shooting,
that's what we had to deal with.
We-- I would go out at night with
my Canon F-1 and Vivitar 273 flash
and I would shoot with Tri-X
film which was the fastest film
of its day, it was 400 ASA.
And I needed fast film because these
clubs were dark, like I'm looking
out here now, this was-- some
clubs were as dark as this
but there'll be flashing
lights so I would have a moment
to focus my camera when
a light flashed on.
But it was a really
difficult shooting situation
that took me a long
time to figure out.
But-- So what I did was when
I was seriously shooting a lot
for this project, I would go
out sometimes at about four
in the morning and I come back and
I take my 10, 15 rolls of film,
I put them on my table and I go
to sleep and I had an assistant
that would come in about 10 o'clock
in the morning and develop the film
and hang it up to dry and I would
rise at about four in the afternoon
and have a really strong
cup of coffee or two and sit
and I'd make a contact sheet and
I'll sit and look at it and I'd see
if I got anything the night before.
Because, you know, it's not like
being able to shoot and look
at the back of your camera and say,
oh yeah, that's good, you know.
You had to wait and look
at the contact sheet.
So that was the process that
I went through to shoot.
And, you know, honestly,
I don't miss it.
[ Laughter ]
Much easier to shoot digitally.
Another thing at the disco
in this particular time
period was the evolution
of the technology of
the sound system.
You know, if you remember
or you won't remember this,
but when The Beatles played at Shea
Stadium, the sound that they played,
the speakers that they played
through were the little
blow horns that, you know,
they would announce the
next, you know, batter,
that was the technology of the day.
Well, this was, you
know, now 10 years later
and the speaker system was
incredible and, you know,
the mixing devices and the
amplifiers were very high tech.
This is a-- This is really the only
female DJ that I've photographed
or found in New York
City during that period.
And I'm not saying there weren't
others that I didn't find but at one
of the major discos,
this is the only one,
this was the place called Sybil's.
It's pretty much a men's
club and I think it still is
to some extent today although
I've met some amazing female DJs
in the last few years.
So, it's-- you know, they're
kind of breaking through.
This is a-- These are the
speakers, I mean, they're huge.
And like this is-- this would be
a one sort of set of speakers here
and in some of the clubs they would
just have these speakers lining
the wall.
So, when they played, you know,
that-- you know, the disco beat,
the base especially, it would
really rock your insides.
And you would like get
a physical high just--
even if you had done no drugs
and walked in off the street,
just if you were standing
in that room for a while,
you would actually-- your insides
sort to shake and, you know,
you would get high
just for being there.
So, you add the drugs and the
alcohol to that and, you know,
it was a pretty amazing scene.
So, after Studio 54, I decided that
this is interesting and I wanted
to see what else was going on.
And this-- again, this is '77, '78.
I want to see what else was going on
in Manhattan and the five boroughs.
So, I went to-- this
is 2001 Odyssey where
"Saturday Night Fever" was filmed.
And it wasn't exactly the most--
it was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn
and it wasn't exactly like
the upscale Manhattan disco,
it was kind of like a local disco.
This is the floor that
was in the movie.
It was actually built
by Robert Stigwood
and is-- his production people.
But it stayed in 2001
Odyssey after they left.
And when the building was
torn down some time later,
some private collector
bought this floor.
And I don't know where
it is but somewhere in--
probably in California, in LA, in
somebody's basement is this floor
and he has parties on
Saturday night [laughs].
This was really one of the
most famous clubs of its time.
I don't know if all of
you know of it, yeah?
[ Applause ]
This was an amazing, amazing
club and it's-- I think it--
you know, those who knew
about it then were all over it
but people are just beginning to
find out about Paradise Garage.
And it had a couple of
things going forward.
It was a, you know, members club.
They didn't serve alcohol,
they serve juice and fruit
but people brought their own
poppers, you know, amyl nitrate
and alcohol and grass and,
you know, there was plenty
to get stoned on when
you were there.
But the great thing about
this club is this guy.
[ Applause ]
Larry Levan.
And there's not-- I don't have
enough time to really talk
about Larry Levan, it's a whole,
you know, lecture in itself
because this guy is-- this guy
really created modern DJing
in a lot of ways.
And I've spoken to a lot of
DJs today and everybody looks
at Larry Levan as being pretty
much the major innovator
of a lot of different styles.
And he played every kind
of music that he wanted to.
You know, most of the clubs,
they were handed music
by the record companies and
said, you now, here's the great,
hot one to play, you know.
Larry Levan would look at it and
go, I'll listen to it, you know.
But he would play rock and
roll, he would play rhythm
and blues, you know, Motown.
Pretty much played everything.
I wasn't there that night
but I heard one night,
he really liked the Pat Benatar
sone, Love is a Battlefield.
I don't know if you know that song.
But he really liked that song so he
played it like 10 times in a row.
[ Laughter ]
You know, because he
really liked it.
And he had a way of really
hypnotizing his audience.
They loved him.
They used to call his
playing a Saturday mass,
they go for Saturday mass.
It would start at Saturday and
ended like way late Sunday.
So, these volumes that had
been written about Larry Levan,
well worth reading about.
This is what the dance floor
looked like at Paradise Garage,
mostly Hispanic and
African American.
Although the thing about
these clubs is that, you know,
if a white person walked in there,
if a transgender woman walked
in there, if-- you know,
anybody walked in there,
it wouldn't have been a problem
but most clubs had their sort
of like group but it had that
inclusiveness to it, you know.
This was another one of my
most favorite clubs that a lot
of people never heard of.
It's called GG's Barnum Room.
And it used to be the Peppermint
Lounge where the twists started.
And after the Peppermint
Lounge closed,
it turned into GG's Barnum Room
which was a transgender men
and women's haven basically.
It was like their club.
And they had a net
over the dance floor
and they had the disco
bats performing.
It was a mixed crowd.
It was, you know, all
kinds of people went there.
Yeah, there is too.
And this is a picture that sort
of become famous from my book.
It's-- This is a transgender--
pre-op transgender named Eva
who I actually saw so many times
when I went there, that
finally we sat down
and actually had a
long conversation.
It was very interesting.
So, you know, a middle class
Jewish boy like myself, sitting,
talking to a transgender-- pre-op
transgender woman at a club
like this, it was just, you know,
it was an amazing experience.
And, you know, I just
learned a lot just
by doing this, it opened
my mind a lot.
It became a place where if you're
an out-of-towner, you would stop
and go to GG's Barnum Room.
Another club named Crisco Disco.
[ Laughter ]
Pretty much a gay club but again
became so popular that it became one
of those, you know, let's stop off
at Crisco Disco before we go home,
you know, at four in the morning.
And that Crisco can was the
DJ booth in the back there.
Another club-- I wanted
to hit all of these clubs.
So another club is the Mudd
Club, a little applause.
This was considered an anti-disco.
They didn't like Studio
54, you know.
They were political.
They didn't like the commercialism.
But it became very, very
popular and they ended up having
like a velvet rope outside
after awhile too, so.
This is a famous bathroom
at the Mudd Club.
And I won't go into the
stories but just trust me,
it was a famous bathroom.
This is a place called Hurrah's,
which is another kind of anti-disco.
Also I went to Roller
Disco which was big.
And Roller Disco was
a place of sweat
and competition and a lot of fun.
And if you were a good skater,
you know, you put on your skates
and you head out for the Empire
Disco in Brooklyn and, you know,
show everybody your moves.
And again, it didn't
matter if you were white,
African American, whatever,
you know.
It was, you know, it was a
competition and it was fun.
I was a little nervous going here
to tell you the truth because it was
in a part of Brooklyn
that I didn't know
and it was mostly African American.
But the minute I walked in, I was
completely at ease and at home.
There we go.
So, a couple of things
happened in like 1979
that changed the disco scene.
And I sort of say sometimes
that it ended disco
but that's not exactly true.
And there's a writer, Tim Lawrence,
who wrote a book about "Life
and Death on the New York Dance
Floor" about disco from the '80s
to I think '80 to '83 and
he describes, you know,
the fact that it did keep
going and it was still creative
and it was still happening.
But the disco that I knew and
the disco that I experienced was
in my opinion over
in like 1979, 1980.
The first thing that happened
was Studio 54, the famous coke,
spoon and moon, they were
closed down by the IRS.
And what happened was Steve Rubell
and Ian Schrager were skimming the
cash registers and taking the money
and putting it in the
ceiling panels of the office.
You know, they'd come
down every couple hours
and take the cash out of drawers.
And Steve Rubell who wasn't
always the most sober person,
every time I saw him, he
go, "Who are you again?"
You know, and I met
him all the time.
"Bill Bernstein from the Voice."
"Oh, yeah, yeah."
And so, anyway, so Steve Rubell
one night was being interviewed
and they-- and he said, "You know,
if the IRS knew how much money we
really made, they'd shut us down."
And so guess what happened
about two days later?
And they went to jail and
that place was shut down.
It opened up under some new
ownership but, you know,
to me it was never the same.
There was a cultural backlash
against disco music, disco culture,
the rock and rollers
wanted their music back.
They got sick of disco music.
And there was a racial overtone to
it that-- you know, is, you know,
is pretty much clearly there.
But it was-- there was a racial--
yeah, there was a racial overtone.
But it-- disco became unpopular
and it became sort of a dirty word.
So that happened.
And then in, I believe it was 1981,
the "New York Times"
published an article saying
that there was an AIDS epidemic
and that it was spreading.
And everybody knew
something was going on.
They called it the gay cancer.
But they officially
declared it an epidemic.
And so what happened was
people didn't know anything
when AIDS was first announced.
And so they were afraid that
if you're talking to somebody
and they accidentally like spit
a little and it goes in your eye,
you could get AIDS or if they were
sweating and you touched them,
you could get AIDS or
if you shook their hand.
So, nobody knew anything.
It was just-- There
was no information.
And Ronald Reagan came
into power at that point.
And he didn't want to deal with
AIDS for the first two years
of his office, his administration.
So, it just really
affected the whole scene.
And those three things in my opinion
really accounted for, you know,
shutting down or changing I
should say the whole disco world
that I knew.
Real quickly, what happened
was these pictures ended
up in a box somewhere and they ran
in the Village Voice once in awhile
but basically I just
put them away like 1979.
And in about 2003, I got a call
from a guy named David Hill
in London who's a music producer.
And he said, "Did you do
these pictures of disco?"
And I said, "Yeah."
And he said, "Well, there's a
renewed interest in this period.
Would you like to do
a coffee table book?"
So I said, "Yeah, absolutely."
And so he found a publisher,
Reel Art Press in London
and Tony Nourmand, the
publisher, and David
and I started putting
this book together.
And I was-- this was 2015.
I realized as we were doing this
that it became crystal clear to me,
you know, what I had here
because in 2015 the equal marriage
amendment passed.
The flag-- The confederate
flag came down in the south,
transgenders were allowed
in the military.
It's like there was this sea
change during that year of sort
of cultural awareness and
acceptance and inclusion.
And I thought to myself, like
what I captured here was really
like the beginning, you know.
Like it was like a small
microcosm of the world
that we're just beginning
to see today.
And I sort of feel that, you know,
in cultural movements like this
that you take two steps
forward and one step backward.
And I think we might be taking
a step backward right now a
little bit.
[ Applause ]
But I believe in my
heart that inclusion
and acceptance is a natural way
of being, as a human being, and--
[ Applause ]
And I think we're going to move
forward in our culture again.
So thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
>> Alice Echols: Hello folks.
Hi, my name is Alice Echols.
I teach at the University
of Southern California.
And I wrote a book back in
2010 called the "Hot Stuff,
Disco and the Remaking
of American Culture".
And I first of all want to thank
the incredibly competent staff here
at the Library of Congress.
They've just been terrific.
I would like to linger for
a moment on what I consider
to be the irony of this event.
An event that really
frankly seemed highly--
would have seemed highly unlikely
until I think just even
about 10 years ago.
I mean, the idea that the Library
of Congress would be staging
this event, unthinkable.
[ Applause ]
You see for those of you who
were too young to remember this,
disco really was not meant to be
the subject of books and films
and conferences where
participants would grapple
with its meaning and its effects.
You know, disco was supposed to
have been buried some 36 years ago.
And it's actually true that
by 1981, all across America,
radio stations were
ditching disco in favor
of really anything
else, any other format.
In very many places across the
country, actual disco started
to shut down, to be
replaced by anything else.
In 1981, the Grammy Awards dropped.
It short lived disco category
after having grudgingly
just established it.
Gloria Gaynor's "I Will
Survive" remains the only record
to have been awarded the best
disco recording which had won
in 1980, and that was that.
Record labels also
went about shutting
down their disco divisions
if they had once.
And soon the record jackets of
those club singles that your DJ,
if you went to a disco, that
your DJ played changed as well
and I remember this very clearly
because I was a DJ in
Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Yay!
[ Applause ]
So, gone were the drawings
of platform shoes
and all those other signifiers of
disco and instead they were replaced
by graphics that were supposed
to conjure up new wave.
And really so complete was disco's
banishment from the mainstream
that it had to be re-branded
and henceforth it became
known as dance music.
But a funny thing happened on
the way to the musical graveyard.
Disco, well disco persisted,
that's--
thank you, thank you
for [inaudible].
[ Applause ]
Yes, this new dance music
employed some of it,
a less predictable beat
than the 4/4 thump.
But it sounded an awful
lot like disco.
Some of the biggest artist of
the 1980s, Madonna, Prince,
Michael Jackson, cut disco tracks.
Even if their record companies
studiously avoided ever calling
it disco.
And fast forward to today,
and you tell me that Lorde's
"Green Light" doesn't bear
a distinct depth to disco.
So, you know, disco
continues to exact its revenge
through contemporary music
and through events like this.
Now today, I want to focus on some
of the cultural work that disco did.
But before I get into the specifics,
I want to note that there is
in fact a paradox that I
think is at the heart of disco
and that paradox is this, disco
in its classical period
was lyrically very slight.
You know, even partisans
of disco could not argue
that its lyrics were
especially meaningful, you know.
"Get Down Tonight", "Boogie Down",
and yet disco packed real
cultural and social wallop.
That's the paradox.
That it did to me suggest
that sometimes music
that isn't explicitly political,
music that might even strike some
as trite, can nevertheless
do political work,
take for example Sister
Sledge's "We Are Family".
A track that ignited dance
floors, believe me, it was the song
that could always, was guaranteed to
get people out in the dance floor.
But it also was the song that
kept Nelson Mandela going
when he was in prison.
Now, I'm not knocking songs such
as "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young or Public
Enemy's "Black Steel".
But I am saying that a song
need not be overtly political
to get people feeling, moving,
and even thinking differently.
And I think what disco offers
us is a case study of the ways
that music can be usefully
understood as a social process.
Through it, we learn in fact how
to experience our own feelings,
our own desires, and
sometimes even our own bodies.
And this is why when thinking about
music, it's important to acknowledge
that music not only reflects what's
happening politically, culturally
and socially, it also enacts change.
And speaking of change, I want
to turn to this first slide.
Here, I have quoted Nona Hendryx who
was the song writer and, yes, Nona--
[ Applause ]
-- who was a member of Patti
Labelle and the Bluebelles
and was the person within that
group who was perhaps most strongly
in favor of converting that group,
transforming it into Labelle
which recorded the 1974
hit "Lady Marmalade".
And here she is talking about
the group's transformation
from a conventional girl group into
something far less conventional,
much more chaotic and
wild and in archaic.
But I think that the same
could be said about the ways
that disco affected
particular populations
of listeners and dancers.
And let's just hear a little bit
of "Lady Marmalade" if we could.
>> Yes.
[ Laughter ]
[ Music ]
[ Applause ]
Yeah. You know, if you're
talking about Beyonce's feminism
which I think is a great topic,
you have to give I think credit due
to Nona Hendryx and Chaka Khan.
[ Applause ]
You have to give props to--
really, both to Nona Hendryx
and to Chaka Khan because they
really are among the most important
black feminist voices of the 1970s.
Now, there are other people
that I have put up here.
This is--
[ Applause ]
Grace Jones, model
turned disco performer.
Monti Rock III, the wink, wink, nod,
nod homosexual personality who was
on TV-- a fair amount and who
fronted an early disco group,
this being the disco group, and was
also the DJ in Saturday Night Fever.
[ Applause ]
You know, actually Sylvester
was a reluctant disco star.
He really didn't like
disco at least initially.
And then of course
the Village People.
[ Applause ]
And this was before the Village
People were quite so processed
and quite so predictable.
Now, I focused here on these
slides on disco artists
who are indeed really
more unconventional.
But it's important to acknowledge
that, you know, a lot of critics
and listeners thought that
disco was regressive actually.
I mean, disco was attacked for both
being too gay and too straight,
too black and too white, over-sexed
and asexual, leisure class
and leisure suited working class
as in Tony Manero of
Saturday Night Fever.
And so disco for the person who's
trying to understand and makes sense
of it, it represented anything
but a stable signifier.
It was really a moving target.
Now, how can that be?
How was that possible?
Well, in my book "Hot Stuff"
which I called hot stuff
for several reasons.
One of which was that
there were these two sort
of bookend disco songs,
one by the Stones
and the other by Donna Summer.
But I also called it hot
stuff because I wanted
to explore disco's hotness.
It's up ending of America's
racial rules
and gender and sexual conventions.
And in the book, I argue that
disco broaden the contours,
the contours of identity
in three areas.
First of all, disco
evolved out of the work
of African American musicians and
producers who were experimenting
with lavish, sophisticated
arrangements that broke
in some cases with some of
the conventions of soul music.
So much so that some
critics and listeners thought
that disco didn't sound
recognizably soulful or even black.
Secondly, male homosexuality shifted
with disco and the disco years came
and became newly visible largely
through the dissemination
of disco culture.
Their self-presentation also shifted
as a effeminacy and
this is a key point.
Effeminacy begins to give away more
fully to a macho style recognizable
to anyone who was ever
glitz, the Village People.
And here's the third
thing that shifted.
Feminism's critic, because remember
the 1970s is also the decade
of second-wave feminism.
Feminism's critic of 3-minute sex,
heterosexual sex, I shouldn't have
to explain that, but
feminism's critic
of 3-minute sex founds its
voice in disco, displayed itself
out in especially important ways
with black female performers
who broke with really longstanding
representational strategies
that were rooted in respectability.
I mean, long before Madonna put
on those breastplates, you know,
this had already been done in
Labelle by Sarah Dash in the center.
Think of-- When you're
thinking about representations
of respectability and a kind of
obsession with respectability
which is entirely understandable
given our country's history,
nonetheless, think of Motown
and think of the girl groups
in their gowns and
their white gloves.
And so, when I think about
disco, one of the things
that I think is important
about it is that the only way
that you can make sense of how we
get from Diana Ross in the 1960s
to Lil' Kim in the '90s is
to take onboard how disco
validated female desire.
Perhaps most famously with Donna
Summer's "Love to Love You Baby".
[ Noise ]
I don't know what all that
noise is that's our there.
OK. So these changes that I've
outlined we're experienced
as liberating by some but
they were also controversial.
Was disco a repudiation of
racial profiling of sorts
or was it turning R&B music beige?
Was it transmogrifying it into,
as one critic put it, a
mush of vacuous Muzak.
And what about the new "Gay Macho"?
Was it best understood as
a parody or as a mimicking
of conventional heterosexual
masculinity?
Was it liberating in its rejection
of the age-old association
of homosexuality with
effeminacy or was it regressive
and it's stigmatizing of sissiness?
And what about women?
Disco filled the air with what one
singer called "Women's Love Rights"
but this happened in a context in
which the social and legal policy
that would ensure a
more level playing field
for women lagged way behind
the sexual revolution.
Indeed, disco's promotion of
greater sexual expressiveness seemed
to some to-- seemed to
some people to run the risk
of exacerbating women's
sexual vulnerability.
And certainly, it has to be said
that disco would not really I think
proved to be anymore conducive
to the empowerment
of female performers
than any other pop music genre.
And here I'm talking about
the working conditions.
So I said I wanted to talk
in more specific terms
about the cultural work
performed by disco.
And I want to now turn
to the relationship
of gay men in particular to disco.
Even before disco became
disco, gay male sociability
and subjectivity were beginning
to shift as queer night life began
to register the reverberations
of the 1960s.
These reverberations first
registered above ground,
in funky bars rather
than in exclusive unmarked
clubs visible only by the lines
of people cued outside
in front of them.
Indeed, the bar where these
reverberations were perhaps most
keenly felt was a sleazy
Mafia-run dive
in New York City called
the Stonewall Inn,
the site of the famous Stonewall
rebellion of June 1969 which is said
by many and its many, many
historians would agree
that it get started the gay
liberation movement in America.
Now, scholars have puzzled
over the Stonewall uprising.
That it happened when it
did, and that it seemed
to trigger this big movement.
Some historians have argued that
by the time of the rebellion,
there was already what was
called the Homophile Movement
that had been active for almost
two decades with Frank Kameny
who was a DC activist being
a leading figure in it.
And research has shown that
indeed sexual minorities had taken
to the streets before
Stonewall in one case in LA
at a bar not far from where I live.
Others have argued that if
gays and lesbians were open
to movement making in '69, it was
because of their participation
in bar culture which
had for decades put them
on the front lines of
everyday resistance.
Now, I want to make a different
but related argument and it's
that what went on outside the
Stonewall and on those June nights,
some 48 years ago, built on change
is already underway inside the
Stonewall Inn.
Now, the Stonewall was a gay
dancing bar which as late as 1969,
that is at the height of the
'60s, was unusual in New York.
Most of the city's gay male bars
did not permit dancing while the
Stonewall actually
had two dance floors.
Testimonies from Stonewall regulars
suggest that the bar's dance floors,
particularly the room in the
back which was frequented
by African American and
Puerto Ricans street kids,
undermined the sexual
indirection and repression
that characterized most other-- that
characterized most other gay bars.
In that room, in that back room,
Judy Garland, was all ready passe,
she was already a thing of
the past, as soul music blared
on their jukebox and the
dancing there was not today.
One of the many young street queens
who frequented the Stonewall argued
that the culture that existed
in the back room fostered the
articulation of gay desire.
He said at other gay bars, you know,
you could look across the room,
you could see a sexy
guy, you could fantasize
about getting involved but,
you know, you couldn't go
over and ask him to dance.
Another regular at the
bar credits the Stonewall
with making him confront
his own sexual uptightness
and internalize homophobia.
So the Stonewall was itself
a site of transformation,
one that was forging
a stronger connection
between going out and coming out.
It was also forging a relationship
between commercialized leisure
and gay, what would become
gay liberation, an association
that disco would build upon.
Now, by the time music
writer, Vince Aletti,
wrote about what he
called party music.
Party music and discotheque
rock in the fall of '73
in Rolling Stone magazine,
gay men had been dancing
in discos for three years.
It would take another year before
"Billboard Magazine" began
keeping track of hot dance clubs
as it called, cuts
as they called it.
And two more before the majors
began to take the music seriously.
When one considers the context
in which gay disco took shape,
one in which dancing had been
restricted, had been surveilled,
had really been illicit, you
now it's nearly impossible
to disaggregate dancing
from politics.
Even if there had been no instances
of DJ's leading dancers off the
dance floor and into the streets
to protest, and this by
the way actually happened
in 1971 in New York City.
Dancing still constituted an act of
defiance for gay men and lesbians.
Now, gay disco amplify the
shift towards greater sexual
straightforwardness which
intend to-- with gay liberation,
would change bar culture radically.
It would also change gay sociability
and gay male subjectivity.
How they understood
themselves as they shift away
from effeminacy to
macho accelerated.
How did disco participate
in the shift?
Well, first, nonstop music.
In a disco, silence
was not tolerated
which was why disco featured those
very clever segues that fooled you
into thinking that you were dancing
to the last song, not the new one.
Seamless music signaled I
think a break with the past,
a break with those nights when
a flashlight or a red light
and the police brought the music and
the dancing to a very abrupt halt.
The volume and the
sheer relentlessness
of this music obliterated
shyness and inhibitions
and a good disco sound system
which emphasized the music's
thunderous base was like,
as one person put it,
an audio orgasmatron.
And the sweatbox conditions of
many discos ushered in the era
of nautilus with the
result that gay men--
gay men began fashioning their
bodies into what our critic,
Douglas Crimp, called
dancing machines.
The owner of one of Manhattan's
trendiest gay bars was himself gay
and a gym enthusiast.
And he claims, although I don't
think he's entirely right,
to have engineered the practice of
dancing bare-chested and I quote,
"There was no AC and I make
sure the windows were closed
so it would heat up.
They had to take off their shirts."
[ Laughter ]
Now, this practice of dancing
half naked quickly spread.
OK. So this buff body, it was
about style but it was critical
to the reconfiguring of
gay identity and desire.
Before gay men had been,
as one person put it,
gay clubber Mel Cheren, hunters
after the same prey rather
than allies or perspective partners.
Now gay men,, rather
than heterosexual men,
became the embodiment of
covetable, desirable masculinity,
and the fantasized object
of desire for one another.
"We're brothers," was the feeling
recalled novelist, Edmund White,
"We're the men we've
been looking for."
"We're the men we've
been looking for."
Not the trade that
might beat you up.
Now, I think the macho turn
is one of the most significant
and least studied shifts in
20th century gay history.
In his novel, "Faggots",
Larry Kramer or the--
this is his novel but the narrator,
and it e ponders the possibility
that the macho look has
taken hold because it's a way
of hiding or homogenizing.
On the other hand,
it also occurs to him
that maybe it's a send
up and a turn on.
And I would argue, "Gay Macho"
operated in multiple registers
with its meaning shifted,
shifting according to context.
The author of a very wonderful
blog, New York City not Kansas,
concedes the "Gay Macho" could
be silly in it of itself.
But he argues that as a consequence
of this shift, gay men seemed
to behave more decently
toward each other.
Now that what he identified
and I'm quoting as effeminacy
and corrosive bitchiness, end
quote, which had been so much a part
of Camp sensibility were waning.
Others agree and point to macho
was liberating for the way
that it challenged this
automatic association
of homosexuality with effeminacy.
But macho had its critics,
even at the time a number
of gay writers questioned
whether the normalization
of homosexuality was being achieved
through the continued
stigmatization of effeminacy.
Edmund White warned our old
fears of sissiness still
with us though messed by what he
called the new macho fascism are now
located quarantine through our
persecution of the transvestite.
So if homosexuality was
destigmatized in these years
to some extent, it was at
the expense some would argue
of effeminacy which was
this about to such an extent
that the drag queens who are
on the front lines that June
at the Stonewall were relegated to
the far margins of the movement,
and even Sylvester when he would go
to a gay club with sometimes face,
when they didn't know him,
harassment for the
way that he looked.
The macho turn did prove daunting
to effeminate gay men
particularly drag queens
who in the post-Stonewall
'70s found themselves shoved
to the very sidelines of gay
life, even gays camp style.
The identification with
tragic-doomed women
like Judy Garland, the
obsession with Broadway musicals
which suggested as literary
critic, D.A. Miller,
argues that transcendence
lay in the strength
to endure a depressive status quo
that no longer had
the same resonance.
Now the gay masculinity no longer
signaled failed masculinity.
In this ship's sideline, as I said,
whole categories of gay existence
as many people came to seem
antique in this new word.
It's worth noting that this macho
turn was completely unanticipated
by gay liberationists who thought
that the future was androgyny.
Dennis Altman, a prominent
gay writer and activist said,
"Our biggest failure was an
inability to foresee the extent
of which a new gay culture
would emerge that would build
on existing male, female
differences."
Another unanticipated result of
disco has to do with class and race.
Now, no doubt, subcultures
tend toward the tribal.
And the culture of gay
disco was no exception.
I think scholars in general had been
far too ready to buy into the idea
that gay disco constituted
entirely the sort of democratic Eden
but it is clear that, to me at
least, that A-list gay discos,
those that required a good
amount of money to join,
had a problematic effect.
I mean, it could be very difficult
to get pass the doorman
in certain clubs.
For instance, close to
impossible if you were a woman,
even Bette Midler was stood
high to membership at one
of the most prominent
gay clubs in New York.
Throughout the '70s and beyond,
gay newspapers were often filled
with stories of discrimination
at discos.
So, you know, at the same
time that there was the sense
of brotherly love as I've indicated,
it had a distinct downturn
which was the pull towards a
greater class and racial homogeneity
which in tandem with gentrification,
something you guys know a lot
about here in DC, made for gay clubs
that were increasingly segmented
along class and race lines.
So, the racial and class
crossings that for--
had for so long characterized
gay communities and bracket this,
read George Chauncey's
"Gay New York"
if doub it, that began to fade.
Something else I think that gay
liberation has didn't get quite
right was the relationship of
new gay communities to commerce.
As it happened, the beneficiary
of gay liberations cry
out of the closets and into streets
was not so much gay liberation
and the movement around it.
It was the discos and
bathhouses that emerged
that really became the
kind of glue for community.
Now, despite discos,
that possible downside,
again that could be debated, the
commercialism of disco culture.
It was nonetheless
through disco that gay men
of the '70s charted a course
that really permitted them
to feel sexually legible
to each other,
to reject the prevailing
construction
of gay masculinity as defective.
It was on the disco dance
floor, surging with energy
of so many bodies becoming one.
The gay men created an alternate
sexual subjectivity in them,
powerful feeling of solidarity.
This makes-- This-- What I'm going
to say might seem counterintuitive
but the hedonistic promiscuity
which certainly characterized
gay disco seems
to have actually enabled
communal aspiration
as Michael Warner has argued
rather than impeding it.
One sees this in the
years when gay men began
to fall sick and die of AIDS.
Those dance floor communities that
have been building for years became
for many gay men with HIV
their real support community.
And I'm going to end here.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Nicholas Brown: Hi everyone.
>> [Simultaneously] Hello.
>> Nicholas Brown: I hope
everyone is getting excited
for the rest of today.
There's a lot of awesome
stuff going on.
And we really appreciate your being
here throughout this symposium
for Bibliodiscotheque.
My name is Nicholas Brown.
I'm one of the producers
of the series.
I work in the music
division here at the Library.
I come from a conductor, French
horn player, singer, music colleges,
arts administrator kind of pedigree.
And a-- And so with great pleasure
that we are all gathering here
on stage to a bit of a discussion
and then open it up
for your questions.
And we of course have Martin
and Alice and Bill back on stage
who have given us some wonderful
lectures this afternoon.
Giving a really-- a range of
the different elements that go
into dance culture from
the disco area and also
in a more contemporary settings.
So, I'd like to just
start by asking you.
Where is disco now compared
to where it was 10 years ago
in terms of cultural memory?
>> Alice Echols: In
terms of cultural memory?
Oh, I think everything has changed.
I mean, one of the things
that I was very struck
by when I first began writing about
disco, I think it was in 1994,
I published an article
in the "LA Weekly".
And, oh my goodness,
some of the letters
to the editor were so vicious.
I was shocked and I was
used to disco haters.
I mean, disco although
I was a DJ in Ann Arbor.
Ann Arbor was a punk town,
it wasn't a disco town,
and those lines were very much
strong in the 1970s and '80s.
When my book came out in 2010,
it was an entirely different
environment because young people,
for the most part they don't
know about discophobia.
They don't know about the time
when disco had been the
biggest cultural joke
of the 20th century, right?
So I think everything has
shifted and of course,
disco permeates popular music.
I mean, there's disco-- as I
was saying, disco never died.
So I think it's-- you know, I
think it's entirely different now.
To answer you fully would be
take much-- too much time.
But I think it is true that
in some sense the culture wars
in the US people usually
focus on abortion,
what's say affirmative action.
But I think the ERA,
the 1970s and beyond,
I think that disco was very much
a part of those culture wars.
>> Nicholas Brown: Martin, could
you share us some of the sort
of more international
perspective on American disco
and then the divergence with other
countries kind of disco cultures
and how they're similar
or how they're different.
>> Martin Scherzinger: Yeah.
And especially in relation
to the contemporary question,
because I think a strong
point you make is
that even though the semiotics
around disco change and then partly
out of perhaps some embarrassment
about its, you know, apparently sort
of [inaudible] character and so on.
And then these associations with,
you know, gay subcultures and so on,
which help to marginalize
it as a kind of movement.
But then that becomes
sort of transforming
into the more palatable
kind of dance music.
Now we can't even imagine
the last 30,
40 years without dance music
being front and center.
Whether it's, you know-- whether
that's a trance music, house music,
however this is all be-- you
know, garage music and on and on,
the genre is proliferate
in some sense.
But it was disco in
some ways that provided
that foundational moment
for all of that.
And in the-- just of the
folks that I mentioned
in my presentation thinking
of-- I might have lost sound.
>> Alice Echols: Yeah.
It's--
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
>> Martin Scherzinger:
Did I lose sound?
But the folks that I
mentioned in my presentation
such as the kwaito music
in South Africa today,
which is really something as oppose
to party kind of music that is run
on automated digital machinery,
which I think is a very
important kind of the disco
by the way is the technologies
that came
into the mainstream at that point.
The TR33 drum machine for example,
right, as being somehow a place
in which you could now organize
rhythms using a different way
of interfacing with your machines.
It was no longer that embodied
kind of work being done usually
by a white male heterosexual
drummer with all
of that expressive apparatus.
Now you had a drum machine in South
Africa that's kwaito music is one
of the first music to which
you can now purely dance
like those consular we're doing
and the music auto-generates
in some ways.
And it's been, you know,
sort of feedback loop
between continents produce
that, so it's a house music
but slowed down this time.
And, you know, it's understood
to be a kind of slowed
down garage house music
that is itself ricocheting
with American elements and
then being re-Africanized
and re-Creolized in
these other spaces.
>> Alice Echols: The only thing
that I would add is the
early disco however--
although, disco was always attacked
as plastic music for plastic people.
I mean, that was one of the
criticisms that was made.
I mean early disco did not use
synthesizers or drum machines.
That does develop.
But in the early years,
it wasn't a feature of it.
They used full orchestras.
>> Nicholas Brown: Question for Bill
is how has kind of the disco era
and the disco culture differentiated
in how it is portrayed and still
and moving images since the era,
like has there been an evolution
in terms of like how the film 54
was, you know, portraying Studio 54
in the culture or other, you know,
the marketing for the peer
disco CDs from the '90s.
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
Well, I haven't seen
the movie before.
But there's a TV show
called "The Get Down",
which is a disco, you
know, based show.
And I watched about
two or three episodes
and I basically couldn't
watch it anymore.
I mean, it just so-- it's so
packaged for commercial TV and,
you know, it's-- you know,
it had some of the elements
of the disco that I remember.
But it was, you know, that
particular time was so unique and,
you know, like I said before, you
know, there were so many factors
that contributed to that, you
know, perfect storm that, you know,
you can't really-- they can't
do that again for example.
I mean, you couldn't create a
disco again just because those--
it's a different time, you know.
And it's usually different,
you know, people are different.
So I haven't seen anything
like currently, you know,
that really captures the essence
of what I saw during that period.
>> Nicholas Brown: Great.
And one question for all of you
which is going to be very thematic
to the Library of Congress, of
course, and I'm a librarian too, so.
What is the role of Library's
archives and museums in terms
of providing access to the research
that can happen and discovery
that can happen about an era or
a musical movement such as disco?
And is there a significance
that, you know,
the Library of Congress
is programming disco,
does that do something for the study
of disco or is it more important
that local public libraries are
doing something related to it.
I don't know.
Just like to open the floor
on that kind of topic.
>> Alice Echols: Well, I would love
to have it happening at all levels.
I think it's wonderful
that the Library
of Congress has put this event on.
I just think it's terrific.
But I mean I know in my own
research what was really important
to me was going to England actually,
and using some libraries in England
where I was able to look at the
music press because the music press
in Britain actually was much more
sympathetic to this new sound than,
let's say Rolling Stone or some
of the American music press.
So just in my own research
it was really important.
>> Martin Scherzinger: Yeah.
I mean, it's fascinating.
I haven't-- I don't do an
archival work in disco.
But from-- you know, from the
project I've alluded to you today
in my presentation, I'm
looking at the global biography
of rhythmic sounds and so on.
And particularly emanating from
Africa and then taking up residency
within dance musical forms in the
west and also right across through
at your classically music forms.
So that's broadly speaking
where my project is.
To find out anything about how
this actually happens historically,
I have been utterly dependent on
libraries, mainly in Europe as well
but also here that, you
know, indicate what kinds
of contact was there, what were
the ethnographic transcriptions,
when did, who travel where,
what letters were written
between an ethnographer
or between a composer
and say an African
ethnographer and so on?
And then movement of tape and
cassette and vinyl, and computers,
all of this media that
carry imprints
of what might have happened.
I mean, Alice is a
historian which is, you know,
so she'll know the
truth [inaudible].
But reconstructing
history is a no mean feat.
It gets forgotten even if
it is assumed by some of us
that have lived through certain
periods, it really leaves--
it needs to leave traces
and documents.
And I think libraries are
essential even if they don't seem
like very populated spaces, it
takes that special researcher
to really bring it back to us
libraries have been essential.
>> Bill Bernstein: The only
thing I can comment on that is
that there was an article in
German Rolling Stone in November
and I had it translated
by my German friend.
And they used pictures from
my book to illustrate it.
And the writer described how
back in the early Nazi days,
there was a kind of what was
the disco of today in the sense
that the youth who were
maybe politically apathetical
or apolitical, you know,
they would meet sort
of underground and they would dance.
And it was kind of a
rebellion sort of thing.
But they would do that and they
would talk a little bit about,
you know, what we're going
to do in the politics
and things that were going on.
But it's really like a
celebration of just being not part
of what was happening in the world.
It was like a, you
know, a private event.
So he was trying to sort
of trace back, you know,
what happened in New York to
that early, you know, 1939 era.
>> Alice Echols: And I would
say also just to add this.
I mean since the early
adapters of disco music,
we're a marginalized group.
It's especially important
that we have documentation
and it makes it especially
difficult too.
>> Nicholas Brown: So how
would you document your DJ sets
if you were to do it all over again?
>> Alice Echols: That
would be easy actually.
>> Nicholas Brown: Yeah?
>> Alice Echols: Yeah.
Very easy.
It's not difficult.
>> Nicholas Brown: Do you use like
some cloud or that type of thing?
>> Alice Echols: Well no,
I mean I don't myself.
Believe me, I hardly have the time.
But I have some of those
sets that are written down.
And I had beats per
minute charts, you know.
And so I didn't do this
for a very long time.
It was only for a few years.
And so I have a pretty good
sense of what I would segue.
And then I also practiced a lot.
And because I was not a
natural born mixer, all right.
So making that segue
from one song to the next
which in those years were
so critical, you know.
You really had to do it seamlessly.
You know, I practice a lot and
I would make tapes for friends.
And so I still have
some of those tapes.
So I have a pretty good
sense of what I was doing.
>> Nicholas Brown: Cool.
And with your photography, how
do you archive it for yourself
or do you even-- well you
have to do that because
or else you're not going to
be disseminating it, right?
You have to have it
organized in such--
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
>> Nicholas Brown: Were you
thinking about it in this--
the archival sense of long
term where it's going to go
or is it just the working
kind of archive?
>> Bill Bernstein: Well
it's a body of work
that is you know, now
complete obviously.
And you know the book that I--
that was produced, the "Disco,
The Bill Bernstein Photographs"
is a volume of that work.
And I was trying to cover as much
as we could in, you
know, a short space.
I have 4, 500 rolls of film that
I shot during that time period.
And there's probably two or three
other volumes that could be--
might have produced from there.
But-- And they would have different
feelings to them, you know,
different you know, covering
different subject matter.
But it's all just-- you know,
on my computer at this point
and I do get requests from different
people for different purposes,
you know, articles, and pieces--
do you have a picture of the club,
you know, that kind of thing.
So you know, it's just
sitting there at this point.
>> Nicholas Brown: Cool.
>> Martin Scherzinger: I
wanted to just add something
since we're talking about
documentation and archives and so on
and the challenge that the
archive presents and non archive.
Just to amplify your point in
relation to some of the work
that I'm doing which is not
just marginalized communities
but to some extent you know,
in geographically remote spaces
sometimes involving musical
traditions that are withering
and don't have a record.
It doesn't have a history of for
example documentation by notation
but other modes of transmission
and that are not the same,
sometimes more effective
than notation.
This isn't saying notation
is better.
It's just a different
kind of document
that survives a few
more days of time.
But that challenge is, you
know, another layer particularly
if you're trying to
access deep history.
So if for example with the--
with some of the patterns
that I was tracing,
if you look at the Wikipedia
page or the blogosphere
or the mainstream media
or the big media,
I call it the mainstream is gone
become a strange word to use now.
But the way in which the stories
of these big songs is narrated is,
you know, full of information.
I mean you know, so we've
experienced ourselves
as being an information
age cornucopia all over.
And yet there's a primitive path
making of redundancy and it's kind
of got a short-term memory,
often 15 years or so.
So on the Beyonce page for
example, you won't be able to find--
or on the fan generated
Wikipedia page for that song.
You won't be able to
find that many references
that go beyond DJ-- Major Lazer.
After that, you have to
start to do additional work
and you can't just enter
it on the Wikipedia page
because it will throw you off
unless of course you're a scholar
and you take the time to.
You know, it's got its rules.
And then you particularly
cannot get all the way to Africa
because at this point, most of that
information is just not known even
by the protagonists
producing the music.
And so you have a really
deep challenge, you know.
This-- The other day I was talking
in this institution about some
of these in relation
to the mathematics
practices in Southern Africa.
Many of which were wiped
out as they happened.
So to keep your authority
say when you were drawing
up too soon idiographs in Angola,
you would after the lesson wipe
out the record so that you could
keep sustain your authority.
In the west we have copyright
to sustain that copyright.
Emerging at the time
the paper emerges.
So different rules of the
game across the globe means
that the challenges of the
archive are, you know, are real.
And as we move into a globally
are aware the copyright regime is
in some sense the dominant one,
we need to do some serious
reconstructing works
and so we're already dependent
on again the archives.
>> Nicholas Brown: That gave
me a perfect segue there.
The Library of Congress is of course
the home of the US Copyright office
and so many of our popular
music holdings are a result
of the copyright registration
process where we
for example have the copyright
deposit of "I Will Survive"
or other things like that, and
going back to the late 1870s.
In your unique kind of professional
worlds, at least in relation
to each other, what is the
important role of copyright
and how does it differ perhaps based
on the mediums that you're seeking.
So like Alice if you're
sampling at--
sorry to go back to the DJ
thing, but if you're sampling
as a DJ how cognizant are you of
the copyright situation for that
or for Bill when you were managing
your collection of photographs,
are you very flexible with fair
use for academic institutions
or is it something that you really
stay close to and then for Martin,
where do maybe you pay some
barriers with copyright
for your own scholarship.
You don't have to answer those.
You can just kind of jump
on copyright, wherever.
>> Bill Bernstein: Well copyright's
really important for photography.
>> Alice Echols: Yeah.
>> Bill Bernstein: And even
copyright, it doesn't protect people
from using my images, you know,
especially with the internet.
I mean that's the big
problem for me.
All the images that I
have in this body of work
for disco are copyrighted
through the Library of Congress.
But I also have the software
program that shows me
who in the world is using images.
And it's astonishing
like all over the world.
You know, announcing some
club opening, there'll be one
of my pictures, you know,
like Larry Levan you know.
So you know, there's not
much that I can do about it.
The way I see it, if it's being used
for a real commercial money making
usage, then I can actually go
after them you know, and you
know, let them know that they--
you have to take it down or
they have to pay me something.
But copyrighting, I know that
there's been some changes in terms
of photographic copyrighting lately.
And I'm not really up on it but I
know it's become much more difficult
and it's become much different--
you know, harder for photographers.
And I would like to see
that sort of eased down.
>> Nicholas Brown: Sure.
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
>> Alice Echols: Well you know
copyright, I mean it's been decades
since I was DJing, you know,
so I mean I guess that--
you know, I've had problems when
I've been writing books whether it's
about Janis Joplin or about disco,
getting the ability to quote lyrics
and obviously, you know, in today's
world, you cannot quote very much.
And that's kind of a drag.
On the other hand, you know as
somebody who writes, you know,
it pains me when I
go online and I see
that somebody has downloaded
my whole book, you know,
whether it's the Janis book or the
disco book or another book and it's
like wow, can't we do
anything about this?
Well maybe for a week but you
know, it will come back up.
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
>> Alice Echols: So
copyright, you know.
>> Martin Scherzinger: Yeah,
I'm going to switch the question a
little bit to the content of some
of the work rather than the
problems I've encountered
which are similar to
both of you really.
And I think that this is
one of the central issues
of our time is we have a kind of
microeconomy, which is deeply sort
of fueled by new technologies
and music exacerbated
by what one might call the
MP3 effect after Napster,
which means the genie of the
commodity form got out of the bottle
in some ways and became free.
And we have a paradoxically now in a
period of time where the commodity,
the debased rational segmented
musical sounds are in a sense free
and it's the concepts that
have become very expensive.
So it's a little-- everything is
gone experiential, so you know,
a huge increase in prices in
music concept watching and so on--
>> Alice Echols: Because that's how
artists can make their money now.
>> Martin Scherzinger: That's right.
>> Alice Echols: It's the only
way we can make the money.
>> Martin Scherziner: So we
have this inverted relations
and in a way, we can send back to
the 18th century because in a sort
of pre-copyright age,
where now you have
to become the troubadour
in the street again.
And this is a fascinating problem.
Now if you take something like
again the work that I presented,
there's a number of serious
copyright issues that emerge.
And that that is you know-- and many
artists being used along the way,
its' a corporate collaborative
endeavor which is standard practice
in the industry, you know.
And yet, very often the
authors are not the ones
that are necessarily properly
monetized in that arrangement.
So you have, you know, Tofo Tofo
or you have in a sense, Peter Hugo,
a photographer, had to make
an appearance in this work,
very important one or you
know, Messina in "Formation"
or Big Freedia and so on.
Well Messina, who most people
are less aware of as a, you know,
queer transfigure from New Orleans.
So again, Beyonce doing this
amazing social work in a way
by drawing attention to
these intense and beautiful
and powerful subcultures
from footwork to balance.
But at the same time the sample
of the voice is left unmonetized
and so you have this sort of
deference but at the same time,
the political economy undercuts
a little bit or cuts very much
against the grain of the
deeper message of those songs.
So Diplo for example in song
that I presented was paid
as a creditors as the cowriter.
But Diplo didn't start there
and that's why I was giving
you the [inaudible] layers.
And the irony is that everybody
that was not the artist got a piece
of the pie but the true artists
at the source if you like
and there's always a
source behind the source
but if we can push it
always a little further,
doesn't get monetized.
So this respect for, you
know, the proper demands
of the author concept is very often
in a crisis today and we feel it.
>> Nicholas Brown: The copyright
office has put together a really fun
thing, which is a webpage dedicated
to exploring copyright
through disco.
And it's that copyright.gov/disco.
I think it's pretty awesome.
And you can explore the catalog
copyright.gov to, you know,
see what types of registrations
came in,
see that Gloria Gayner did
not write "I Will Survive"
and that kind of business.
And tonight if you're coming to the
event, you'll have the opportunity
to get a very quick and fun
introduction to copyright at one
of the photo booths, which
is going to be really cool.
So you get a printout of your photo
and there's this little folder
that tells you the basics
about the copyright process
and how important it is to
creators in the hope of, you know,
making us all more
aware of that process.
So before we open up to Q&A,
I'd like to ask you all one more
question and it might be one
of those annoying questions but
where do you see disco's reception
in 10 years compared to
where we're at right now?
[ Laughter ]
>> Alice Echols: Well I think, you
know, certainly one of the things
that I found fascinating about
what's happened, you know,
you started this out by talking
about the cultural memory
around disco and I think that
certainly one of the things
that I was struck by as I was
writing my book was the extent
of which disco which again had
been treated as a kind of joke
in its time had become for
both queer artists and artists
who are some-- in some
respects allies, all right.
I mean, I think of everybody from
the Pet Shop Boys to Lady Gaga
and beyond, that disco had
become understood not as a kind
of regressive political and musical
move but rather as transgressive
because of its associations with
gay liberation and this real break
with the past, past of repression.
It's very-- I think it's very
hard to know what the future is
and how disco is going to be
understood 10 years down the line.
But I do think that probably this
vilification and demeanization
of disco is probably behind us.
>> Nicholas Brown: Great.
>> Bill Bernstein: I think that--
I don't know that you know,
the perception of disco from that
era is ever going to really change.
I think it is what it is but I think
that the music itself
has evolved certainly.
I mean after New York, it went
to Chicago and became house music
and went to Detroit, you know,
it's EDM and I think what happened
in my case was in early
2000, this record producer
who produces you know, what's
contemporary, you know,
EDM music all the sudden
these younger people realize
that like wait a minute, this
comes from disco, you know.
So think that there's a new
respect for disco in a sense
as being the source of
a lot of the, you know,
new music that's out there today.
And yeah, I think that's changed
a little bit of the, you know,
the feeling of, you know, the kind
of silliness we miss of what we,
you know, think of
as disco back then.
But I think it's evolved.
I think it's just evolved--
evolution.
>> Nicholas Brown: Martin
do you have any thoughts?
>> Martin Scherzinger: I mean,
aside from the recurring kind
of retro tropes, right, you
know, the ever reappearing Abba
or something like that,
you know the--
in fact, Jaron Lanier
speaks about music history
as having becoming retro, retro,
retro, that it's all just looks back
and picks up pieces and he
is not excited about that.
He thinks it's, you know,
eating on the seed stock
of culture and so on, a debate.
But, I think, I would take the line
that has been suggested by both
of the previous speakers.
In the following sense that I think
in some sense, disco kind of want
out in the way that, you know,
it emerged and flourished
into these multiple dance forms.
And if we look at the musical
techniques used, like the shaping
and shifting of time,
the flattening of all--
of harmonic space is such that you
in some sense undercut
the functional principle
of chords moving in
traditional ways.
And I think, Donna Summer,
right, the extended space,
the sidling up effect of that what
was once a high hat in between
and the offbeat that then
became a gigantic synth.
That then became a
dominant sound of, you know,
mainstream dance music, as
well as EDM and IDM and all
of these other offshoots.
So, I think, in terms
of the grammar,
we actually find that's
a pivotal moment
that in some sense one could
argue, generated an after life
that is much bigger than it.
And in some ways the
question of its pre--
of its focal point as a historical,
you know, emanating moment,
I think, is on to contest.
>> Nicholas Brown: Excellent.
>> Alice Echols: Yeah.
I mean, I think it really did shift
pop music, musical architecture
and in very important ways.
And I suspect it's going to
continue to have an influence.
There is nothing to indicate
that this changing anytime soon.
>> Nicholas Brown: Fascinating.
Well, the time is here for you
to ask the experts, so to speak.
There are microphones at the
front of the aisle in either side.
If you wouldn't mind just
walking up to the microphone
and sharing your question.
And as soon of you-- as you--
as soon as you have asked your
question, you're free to return
to your seat and we'll get
the next people queued up.
Sir?
>> Hi. I have a question for Bill.
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
>> I first saw the body of
work you were sharing here
at a different institution in
New York at the Museum of Sex
where it had been installed
in a separate room
with a bar and everything.
Could you talk a little bit about
how that show came about and what--
kind of what the purpose
of that was or?
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
Sure. There is-- I guess,
about a year ago I got a call--
I live in New York, from the
curator at the Museum of Sex
on 5th Avenue and 27th Street.
And they were looking for
something to cover the disco era.
And they came across my book.
And the thing that liked
about my book was the fact
that they didn't want
to focus on celebrities,
they wanted to focus more
on the culture of disco.
And that's basically
what my book does.
So, at first they asked me if they
could use one of my pictures just
as an ad in the subway,
as a subway ad.
And do some discussion of, you know,
at some point turning
this into an exhibition.
So, they ran the subway ad, and
then we had later discussions
and we talked about
what we would do.
And my general idea was
that it would be great
if you could create a space,
which they had actually,
where you could walk in off the
street in 2017 back to 1997 and be
in the-- have a feeling
of a disco in that time.
And so that was kind of where
the starting point of it all.
And so, they did a terrific job
creating the lighting and, you know,
they basically reworked
the entire room.
There is a bar there and they
do serve a drinks from the era,
like long island tea, you know.
And at like 1970s prices
too which is--
>> Nicholas Brown: Oh, wow.
>> Bill Bernstein: And the
exhibit is for free too.
So, it's-- you know, I always
tell people it's a good excuse
to go the Museum of Sex.
Most people don't really want to go,
but, you know, and you-- it's free.
And they picked out a selection
of my images that really describe
about six or seven different clubs.
And they also added some
pictures that aren't in the book
because of the sexual
nature of them.
Because I really wanted to
describe that part of it
because it's a museum of sex.
And the literature really
describes each one of the clubs,
and how it started and who
started it, and who went there.
And, you know, it's just
become very popular.
It was supposed to go-- it was
supposed to be up until February,
and then they decide to extend
it to the end of the year.
So, if anyone is in New York,
it's really a fun a thing to do.
>> Nicholas Brown: Yeah.
Great. Sir.
>> Hi. Hello.
Thank you for being here.
My question, obviously disco is
important and that's why we're here.
I feel like one of the main themes
that's coming out of this is that,
disco created this inclusion
and empowerment vibe,
and that's what made it important.
At least what's one
of the core of it.
But then that also lends itself
easily to commodification, right?
I-- This is more of an
open ended question, but,
commodification is I think one
of the things behind
backlash against disco.
And I wondered the panelists
thoughts on this paradox
between inclusion empowerment
and yet easy commodification.
>> Alice Echols: So, I think you
were asking about commodification.
And I think you were suggesting
that commodification was one
of the reasons that disco became
sort of the whipping boy, right?
I think it's really interesting
because I think it is true
as I was saying that certainly
people who were in the gay movement,
political movement assumed that, you
now, it would be community centers,
gay community centers, and
gay community dances held
in those centers, and the
activities out of those centers
that would really become
the glue for gay men
and for their communities.
And as I said, in fact, it turned
out to be the bathhouses
and the discos.
And Dennis Altman, the-- one of the
gay activists whose work I cited
in my talk said that he found
it both ironic and disappointing
that as gay men, and I think
he meant also lesbians,
became freer as he put
it in their sexuality.
They also became, and again
to quote him, more reliant,
more reliant on business
institutions.
And I think that that's true.
On the other hand, you
have another gay writer,
this person from Britain, Richard
Dyer, a cultural study scholar,
who as early as 1979 was making the
argument that in some circumstances,
capitalist cultural production
which at a certain point
in time disco became can
produce really unlikely
and even transgressive results.
So, you know, scholars
debate commodification.
And they've been doing
it for decades.
They've been doing it about the
1920s, you know, because it turns
out that a lot of more recent
scholarship would suggest that,
you know, there was a lot wrong
in the 1920s including
the income inequality,
which we know a little about today.
And because we have exceeded it.
But it's certainly true that for
people of color and for women and,
again, people who in some respects
were on the margins culturally,
that commodification whether
it was happening in the movies
or in the spread of
movies, or in the spread
of department stores could have,
and I know this again they
seem counterintuitive.
But it could be used in
ways that were understood
to be liberatory to those groups.
So, a lot of scholarship
really debating this.
It's a very good question.
>> Martin Scherzinger: Yeah.
And also, I think-- I just want to
make two sort of additional points
about that, the one is that
I'm not sure that all forms
of commodification sort
of are, in some sense,
at war with some social project.
>> Alice Echols: Yeah.
>> Martin Scherzinger: In fact,
when it comes to, I think, I mean,
I'm speculating a little bit,
but the sort of gay
liberation more or less.
I think it's deeply
mired in social sort of--
and cultural icons and symbols
that are mobilized on television
and then later online and so on,
you know, "Modern Family" and so on.
And that played a rule.
It wasn't just on the picket fence.
It wasn't just act up, you know?
Picketing Al Gore, it was
also in some sense happening
in a so-called commodified space.
So I think these things
are antithetical.
That said, I think in
the history of music,
the role of automated
technologies, has put, you know,
increasing numbers of
people out of work.
So we have the story of
automation, you know,
Tesla barely hires an employer
and so on, it's not [inaudible].
Actually music is in
substance the vanguard of this.
And so back to the TR 808, which
in the context of, you know,
house music, became initially just
the way of amping up the party
or the turntable, the
Panasonic, right?
It's such an important technological
device for early hip hop
and became spaces that a little bit
like yours are sonic geographies
where people galvanize in ways that
were deeply, deeply indifferent
to the commodity form, and yet,
tethered to the technologies
that were going to, in the
future, put people out of work.
I think it's a tricky question
and not something we want
to be easy and dualistic about.
>> Alice Echols: I would also add
that, you know, one of the reasons
that so many rock and rollers
resented disco of course is
that very many of their
clubs and bars were turned
into discos and they had no work.
And that was a real complaint
and an understandable grievance.
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
>> I'm up here in the back.
Way up in the back
because I can't get
down to the microphone down there.
My question is for Alice and I
wanted to ask about the phenomena
of Grace Jones and the gay
community during the disco era
and if you have any comments about
that, particularly in reference
to the Paradise Garage which was a
big meeting place during the disco
era, that Grace Jones
was practically royalty.
Thank you.
>> Alice Echols: Yeah.
I mean, Grace Jones obviously
a very, very important figure.
She turned up at Studio 54, too.
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
>> Alice Echols: But the
Garage was certainly one
of the most important discos in
New York City and it was important
because it resisted quite
deliberately that sort
of homogenization and exclude-- you
know, in the kind of exclusionism
that existed in some discos.
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
>> Alice Echols: And you
know, again, the people who--
and Mel Cheren was one of those
people, who was somebody I cited
in my talk, were quite deliberate
in trying to make a space
that really truly was inclusive
and I think Grace Jones was
a really important figure
because whatever her own sexual
desires, wherever they went,
I don't know anything about.
But she was certainly somebody who,
in the way that she
presented, presented as queer.
And so she was-- she
could be understood.
She should be understood,
I think, as an ally.
So I think she was a
very important figure.
Again, as I think the women
of Labelle were, as well.
>> I just wanted to make a comment
and to add on to some of the stuff
that you guys have been talking
about, and one of them is
that the disco era that
music has been recycled
over and over and over again.
And then one of the other things is
that the musicians from that time,
they are still out
there and touring.
And that's one of the
things I think we need
to make sure we don't forget,
the Gloria Gaynors, you know,
the Bee Gees were doing something
before, you know, the Bee Gees,
some of the brothers started dying.
And some of the other musicians
from that time are still touring,
which is very important so
that that music still is alive
and then even piggybacking on that
is like you were saying the DJs
and some of the young rappers
and some of the musicians
of today are sampling
tremendously from that era.
So, I-- to comment on
what you were saying is
where is that music going to be.
I don't think it's
ever going to die.
>> Alice Echols: Yeah.
I agree.
>> Because it's always
going to be recycled.
Someone is always going to be doing
a '70s theme party, that still goes
on in tremendous amounts, you know.
So it's always that easy
go-to for one thing,
if you wanted to do a theme party.
So I think it's going to be around.
It's just going to maybe
change in some instances,
but it's always going to
be the core '70s music,
that core disco is
always going to be there
in whatever iteration is
going to be in the future.
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
Thank you.
>> Alice Echols: Absolutely true.
And in terms of rap, I mean, really
so much of the rhythmic architecture
of early rap was derived
from Chic's "Good Times",
which of course was the sample used
in the first big crossover rap
record by Grandmaster Flash, so--
or by the Sugarhill
Gang, I stand corrected.
So, it's absolutely true,
that sort of inescapable.
>> Bill Bernstein: Yeah.
>> Also now rappers too would
going-- going out on tour, so--
and it would not come in on
[inaudible] because that's kind
of reserved in that formula
too is producing even more, so.
>> Alice Echols: Yes.
Exactly. Exactly.
>> Yeah.
>> Nicholas Brown: OK.
>> My question is, having lived
through all that music and all
of it is really about the
beat that distinguishes it.
And this is what-- why it's
great for me to come to this
because to me, when I
was living through it,
it was all merging into one.
I was going to, you know, one
time hearing Earth, Wind and Fire,
the next day I'd go
parliafunkedelic,
and so the distinction
between the disco, I--
until I came here and got a--
you know, I knew who I liked.
I see Nona Hendryx
and all of them and--
but I didn't see that clear
distinction at all of sort of merge
and that's why I kind of
agree-- I agree with her too,
that I don't think
it will ever go away.
I just think it kind of
evolves, as you said, but what--
you have mentioned a little
bit, but what is this?
Is it the base, but I hear the
base and everything, but that's me.
So what would you say is
specifically the beat and disco
that distinguishes it from
funkadelics or anybody else?
>> Alice Echols: Well,
that's a great question.
I mean, what, what really--
>> Right.
>> Alice Echols: -- is disco?
I think that the 4/4 thump
was pretty important.
But that was derived from Motown.
>> Right.
>> Alice Echols: And--
>> And see that's why--
>> Alice Echols: -- I mean--
>> I don't hear it.
I hear-- I see the
different singers,
but I'm not-- I'm trying to--
>> Alice Echols: But I think
that there are some distinctions.
And again, these really
derived from the music
that was coming out of Philadelphia.
>> Right. Right.
>> Alice Echols: Philadelphia
International Records,
PIR, Gamble and Huff.
>> Right.
>> Alice Echols: And they
were creating soul music
that was washer, it was silkier.
There were different
instruments being used.
More, you know, instead of
a trombone, they would use
like the flugelhorn or something.
And I think would use different,
different sounds and they were going
for a more deliberately
sophisticated sound.
And so that was why I was
saying that, in some sense,
you can understand what they
were doing as an active rebellion
against the notion that soul music
had to sound a particular way.
One of my favorite quotes is
from Mary Wilson of the Supremes
from her memoir, in which she
said, you know, I was constantly
and the Supremes were
always being criticized
for not being soulful enough,
but why is it that I have
to sound like a Aretha Franklin?
No knock against Aretha,
love her, but come on,
why can't there be diversity, right?
But I think that disco did sort of
amplify Motown music in the sense
that Motown too was
deliberately working to try to get
out of what had once been
called the Chitlin Circuit.
>> Right.
>> Alice Echols: And to really
sell to white Americans,
but not in a way that-- in my view,
not in a way that compromised
that music.
That music was soulful.
Motown music was soulful
and disco music was soulful.
>> Right.
>> Alice Echols: But I think
it is very, very difficult.
I mean, to try to actually,
what was disco?
What is disco?
And one of the things that,
that I argue in Hot Stuff,
is that it's curious to me
the extent of which we try
to create this very narrow
sort of categories for disco
and what constitutes disco, when
that's not true for rock music.
>> Right.
>> Alice Echols: You know, you say,
punk rock is considered
rock music, right?
You could say blues
rock is country rock.
But it's considered rock.
I mean, nobody is trying
to cordon it off and put it
in its own little box,
whereas with disco,
it's assumed that for instance,
David Bowie's fame wasn't disco,
but at the time, it was
heard and discussed as disco.
What about PIL's "Fodderstompf",
which played at Studio 54?
That was John Lydon's second
group after the Sex Pistols.
In my mind, that was disco.
Blondie was-- A lot
of Blondie was disco.
Madonna was disco.
Lorde's as I said, "Green
Light" sounds a disco to me.
So, I take the expansive view.
>> Yeah, that's right.
Thank you.
>> Martin Scherzinger: To
the question of the beat
in Alice's question, I mean, the
answer was basically covering,
but there's one thing maybe
I would want to just pull out
and draw some attention to
about how the beat is organized.
And I think this prominence
again of the open high hat
in between the dominant beat.
>> Alice Echols: Yeah.
>> Martin Scherzinger: So that
when you tuned in to a song
that doesn't have that many
chord changes, it starts to take
on a certain kind of hypnotic
character, that [beatboxes],
that it almost, you can't quite
tell if it's speeding up or slowing
down against the main beat,
has sort of accelerating,
decelerating effect
within that environment.
And that becomes, I think, a
dominant feature of how a beat--
how the beat, if that's--
just technically about how
the beat gets organized.
And then that gets pulled out
in a very sort of prominent way,
almost a muscular insistence
on an alternative.
One might even want to make some
sort of more speculative case
about how that relates
to subcultures and so on.
I mean, if we think of Chaka
Khan like in 1974, you know,
"Tell Me Something Good",
that's an absolute on-off,
that is like taking
funk to a new level.
And through this insistent--
insistence on the off beat,
the in between beat, so
that we have these moments
that give us definitive, how should
we say, syntax for disco, right.
>> Alice Echols: Written now
by Stevie Wonder, wasn't it?
>> Martin Scherzinger: I'm not sure.
>> Alice Echols: I think so.
And the thing that's interesting
about Chaka Khan's group then,
Rufus was that they did not define
themselves according to genre.
They prided themselves
on being genre-less.
I mean, they developed some
strange name for what they did.
But they saw themselves
as being right
at the intersection
of funk and rock.
Fascinating.
>> Martin Scherzinger: Yeah.
>> Alice Echols: As did Labelle.
>> Nicholas Brown: Time
for one last question.
>> Sandy: I wanted
also to make a comment.
When [inaudible] became
rock and roll,
it was the advent of the guitar.
The guitar's footprint.
And that you would-- could clearly
say when Bob Dylan went electric,
that was a huge movement.
Did anything in disco reach that?
Bo Diddley had his own beat.
And I don't think it was
the artists who were trying
to define themselves, it
was the radio stations.
Radio stations decided what they
were going to play and if the--
and as disco was in its hay day,
the Eagles were still being played
on other radio stations,
selling trillions of records.
So it-- it's the marketplace
and it's
where you get broadcast
in the marketplace.
Someone-- DJ might say,
I don't want to play PIL.
Now, things have changed.
Now we're in a modern world where
people can download and stream
and do whatever they wanted to do.
But until that happened,
people were prisoners
of a certain radio station.
And what was there,
what they were playing.
>> Alice Echols: OK.
I'm going to take issue
with you a bit.
[ Laughter ]
>> Nicholas Brown: We can
handle it, don't worry.
>> Alice Echols: Because
here's the thing.
You know, people were
always saying about disco.
It was something that was
basically cooked up in the back room
by all these major
label guys, right?
>> Sandy: No.
I worked at Atlantic Records.
>> Alice Echols: OK.
>> Sandy: I was director of
publicity of all of that.
And it was money.
People were in it for the
money, what's hot, what's new?
>> Alice Echols: But
people are always--
I mean, the idea that
music exists outside
of the commercial is
a delusion, I think.
But let's talk about the very early
days of the music that became disco.
You know, the first big disco hit
was Barry White's Love Unlimited
Orchestra, "Love's Theme", 1973.
Radio did not break that song.
In fact, his label was completely
uninterested in promoting that song.
What happened was two very
enterprising DJs were visiting
somebody at Barry White's label and
there was a dead album box, right,
they these bins of dead albums,
albums they weren't going
to promote that were going nowhere.
And these DJs spied Barry
White's album there.
>> Sandy: And broke it.
>> Alice Echols: And they
played it in the clubs
and it was the first time that a
single had been broken in the clubs
and then it went to radio.
>> Sandy: I [inaudible]
sing first time.
And because you claimed
that something is a first--
a disco record, they
have been arguing
for 50 years what is the
first rock and roll record?
>> Alice Echols: No, no,
I'm not saying it was
the first disco record,
I'm saying it's the first disco
record to become a huge hit.
And the point here is--
>> Sandy: I'd have to see the
documentation but I wanted to take--
>> Nicholas Brown: So,
you can buy her book.
>> Sandy: Right.
Right. I wanted to
take another point
with you which is you have said.
>> Nicholas Brown:
Sandy, I'm so sorry.
Sandy we don't have time because we
have-- we have to go to Gloria now.
>> Sandy: OK.
>> Nicholas Brown: I'm sorry.
We're done.
So as you can tell, disco
is an important topic
that deserve scholarly attention.
>> Bill Bernstein: It's funny.
>> Nicholas Brown: So this is a
whole body of work just craving
to be unearthed, I think.
And these are some of the
pioneers in doing that work.
But seriously, if you're out
here and you're a grad student
or an undergrad even and you want to
do a cool paper, come to the Library
of Congress and research primary
sources having to do with disco.
Who were the people
writing the songs
and sending them in for copyright?
Who was making money off
of them versus the people
who actually did the creative work?
Who is ripping off Bill's photos
or how is Bill working
to protect his photos?
There is so much cool stuff in this
area of study and it kind of for me
as musicology type as well,
is indicative of the way
that popular musical
genres are becoming more
of the hot thing in scholarship.
You know, there's only so
much that we can do with--
well, no, I'm not going to say
that because I'll get in trouble.
[ Laughter ]
You can study Bach
for eternity, right?
However, there's a lot of other
musical genres that need that kind
of attention, that kind of
discourse so that we find
out what was really going on
because like with disco, OK,
I grew up with disco,
I heard it, you know,
from my parents listening
to their records.
And then I got the pure disco CD
from my BMG Music subscription
because I'm not old or young
enough, however you want to put it.
And I have one and two.
And then, you know, you get
a certain perception of it
from what you grow up with
and what's in the media,
just like we're talking
about the commodity business.
But that's not necessarily
all of what was going on
and Bill's book sheds light on that
in a very visual way,
which is fantastic.
And then if you want to go back
and see for example the film "54",
you can compare that to what the
actual primary source document
reveals as there's a
lot of fun stuff to do.
And even if you're not a researcher
,just come and hang out and explore
because that's honestly
what we're here for.
OK? We're for all people regardless
of your interests, professional,
academic, if you're a
high school student,
if you're at home trolling Twitter,
you will find cool primary
sources having to do with disco
from the Library of
Congress, who knew?
So a bit of logistics before we
switch over to the next thing
and I-- we do have a
giant surprise for you.
So you need to stay in your seats.
Nobody run away.
Thank You Martin, Alice and Bill.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
>> Bill Bernstein: Good, thank you.
>> Nicholas Brown: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Welcome everyone to Library
of Congress Bibliodiscotheque.
My name is Nicholas Brown and I'm
a music specialist at the Library
of Congress' Music Division.
The Library of Congress is the
largest library in the world
and within that, we have the
largest music library in the world,
so we are super excited to be
bringing disco to you, all day today
and out online, to our viewers on
Facebook and YouTube, can we give it
up for those viewers all
over the world, please?
[ Applause and Cheering ]
Library of Congress
Bibliodiscotheque is a month long
look at disco, music, dance, fashion
and culture, where it came from
and how does it influence
popular culture since the 1970s.
These programs have been made
possible through partnerships
with the host of cultural
institutions
and organizations both
based here in DC
and that are nationally recognized.
Including the Recording
Academy, Brightest Young Things,
Capital Pride, the District of
Columbia Library Association
and the Silent Dance Society.
This program specifically is made
possible at the Library of Congress
by the generosity and
support of private donations.
If you would like to see more
programs like this happen
in the future, we invite
you to visit loc.gov/disco.
Yes, we made that theme
just for today.
To make a contribution of
an amount of your choosing.
Throughout the special events
coming up for the rest of the day,
we invite you to live tweet
using the hashtag, LC disco.
You are also invited to tag
@librarycongress and @libnofcongress
which is Dr. Hayden's
Twitter account.
Now if you thought
Bibliodiscoteque was awesome,
we have some other really
amazing things coming
up for you in the next few weeks.
We have a new pop up exhibit
series beginning in June
with an exhibit called "Pride
in the Library" featuring LGBTQ
collection items and also references
to LGBTQ communities
in the US and abroad.
And then the following week, also
in June, we are opening up Library
of Awesome, which is actually the
title and it's pretty awesome.
And it is happening at the
same time as Awesome Con
and the library is
going to be bringing
out its unparalleled
comic book collections.
This is first editions
of things like Superman,
all the Marvel, that kind of stuff.
It's going to be mind blowing,
so please mark your calendars.
You can visit our website at loc.gov
to find out all of the details.
Also this summer, we're going host
the first ever outdoor summer film
series at the Library of
Congress, which will start in July.
For more on that, visit loc.gov.
Now without further
ado, I'm going to bring
out a very special treat for you.
Here at the Library of Congress,
we are very fortunate one
to have an amazing cast of
librarians and subject experts
and technicians and
architect of the capitol staff
and the US Capitol police.
And something that brings us all
together is amazing leadership.
And here at the Library of Congress,
we have some of the
hippest librarians
that are found anywhere
in the world.
And the two hippest ones for you are
going to be Dr. Carla Hayden who is
of course the 14th Librarian of
Congress and the Deputy Librarian
of Congress, Robert Newlen.
Please give it up for Dr.
Hayden and Robert Newlen.
[ Applause and Music ]
[ Music ]
[ Cheering and Applause ]
>> Robert Newlen: OK.
Here's the pitiful part, we've
been practicing that for weeks.
[ Laughter ]
>> Carla Hayden: We really have.
>> Robert Newlen: Welcome
everyone to disco week
at the Library of Congress.
Thank you Nicholas Brown
for all your hard work.
Yeah, Nick you deserve
some applause.
[ Applause ]
[inaudible] Holly Selassie,
Angela Newburn
and Clay Pensic [assumed spelling],
thank you for all the work
that you've done to
make this possible.
[ Applause ]
So Dr. Hayden, we're both
products of the '70s.
We started out as librarians
in the '70s
and still here and alive and well.
>> Carla Hayden: We
went to library school
in the '70s and we made it through.
>> Robert Newlen: We did.
>> Carla Hayden: And Robert started
in a lustrous career at the Library
of Congress and I went to
teach in public libraries
and here we are 40 something
years later together as partners.
So we thank you.
[ Applause ]
Now, we also were talking
about '70s fashion
and you'll notice what
we are wearing.
[ Laughter ]
This is as far as we can go now.
>> Robert Newlen: Yes.
[ Laughter ]
But wait until tonight,
has she got an outfit.
>> Carla Hayden: And let's just
say there is going to be more hair.
>> Robert Newlen: Yeah.
[ Cheering and Applause ]
>> Carla Hayden: I
couldn't grow it back then.
By the time I grew it,
the '70s were over.
>> Robert Newlen: Yes.
>> Carla Harden: What we're saying
is that the fashion in the '70s
when we looked back at some of
the photos and we said, oh my god.
>>Robert Newlen: Yeah, right.
>> Carla Hayden: It's an
oxymoron, fashion in the '70s.
However, you could excuse the
fashion because of the music.
>> Robert Newlen: It's true.
And tell me what was your
favorite disco song of the era?
>> Carla Hayden: The one
that still faze with me
and that's why they were playing it
when we came out is "We Are Family".
It symbolizes so much in terms
of their all kinds of families
and it brings everybody together.
And so I was really pleased to
select it this year to be put
into the national registry now.
[ Applause ]
Now, we should know before
I got here, Robert was part
of the selection process and he got
to select, your favorite disco song?
>> Robert Newlen: Three
guesses, "I Will Survive".
[ Applause ]
So one of the exciting things is
that we can place wonderful songs
that have a great legacy like this
on the National Recording Registry.
And it's something that you
can contribute too as well,
all you have to do is go
to our website, loc.gov
and search recording registry
and you can make suggestions too
for what you would like
to see on that registry.
So--
>>Carla Hayden: Think about
it because it's not just songs
that maybe were the top 20.
They are songs that
resonate with you.
And we want to also use the registry
to introduce people to music
and significant works
of art and just culture.
So think of any song, or any
recording that you would like us
to consider and we'd
love to have it.
>> Robert Newlen: And think
about today as being a window
into the entire music collection
of the Library of Congress.
It's an amazing, amazing
collection and so much
of this is accessible
through our website.
So I hope you'll take the
opportunity to explore it.
>>Carla Hayden: So speaking
of "I Will Survive",
the reason why we are really here
today is because of the music
and the persona really of
the legendary, Gloria Gaynor.
[ Applause and Cheering ]
We want to talk about her song,
I feel like we're at
the Academy Awards.
>> Robert Newlen: I do, I do.
Well, as we said, her hit song
"I Will Survive" was inducted
into the Library of Congress
National Recording Registry in 2016.
Hey, just like us, her
legendary career spans 40 years.
And--
>>Carla Hayden: She looks better.
>> Robert Newlen: Yes, well,
I have to say that too.
And has never lost steam.
We just had the privilege of
being backstage with Ms. Gaynor
and we were showing her some
treasures from our collection.
We were showing here the original
manuscript from Porgy and Bes
and she impromptu started
singing "Summer Time".
And it was quite a moment.
>>Carla Hayden: And she then
looked at the score and this is
in George Gershwin's hand, these
are with his notes and everything
to what she said one of
my favorite songs, My--
"Our Love is Here to Stay".
>> Robert Newlen: Yeah.
>>Carla Hayden: And then
started to hum that.
Well, I must say, Robert
had a moment.
>> Robert Newlen: Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
>> Robert Newlen: I
was her [inaudible].
I admit. It was really wonderful.
And one the things
that she'll be talking
about today is her second
book, "We Will Survive,
True Stories of Encouragement,
Inspiration and the Power of Song".
>>Carla Hayden: And joining her
on stage to discuss her book
and her career is a person you
invite into your home every morning.
I know my mother does and there
are very few things that you can do
to sometimes either
impress your parents
or to show them their
efforts were worth it.
I was able to let her stand by
and meet the co-anchor of ABC's
"Good Morning America", the
Emmy Award winning journalist
and an author herself,
Ms. Robin Roberts.
[ Applause and Cheering ]
>> Robert Newlen: So without further
ado, please welcome to the Library
of Congress' Bibliodiscotheque,
Robin Roberts
and the one, the only Gloria Gaynor.
[ Applause and Cheering ]
>> Robin Roberts: I love
you Gloria, I love you.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Thank you.
>> Robin Roberts: I had to
dig this jacket out the back
of my closet but, you know,
I'm a child of the '70s,
honey, I'm a child proud of it.
>> Gloria Gaynor: I'm loving it.
>> Robin Roberts: Proud
of it, proud of it.
Gloria Gaynor.
I'm telling you, you have just
inspired me and countless others
and I've been looking forward to
just sitting and chatting with you
and letting people to get
to know even more about you.
Now, music was a part of
your home from the beginning.
You grew up with music.
Tell us about that.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Grew
up with music,
my mother sang not professionally
but she had a wonderful voice
and of course, my estimation, it
was a beautiful voice in the world
and my father sang as well,
but my father did sing
professionally for a time.
As a matter of fact, he
was the opening act for--
an act back then called
Stepin Fetchit.
>> Robin Roberts: What
was that again?
>> Gloria Gaynor: Stepin Fetchit.
And he plays ukulele and sang.
>> Robin Roberts: And your
brothers, weren't they in a gospel?
>> Gloria Gaynor: My
brothers all sang.
They were not in a gospel group.
They had-- They formed
a group of their own.
It was just in the neighborhood.
They didn't do anything
professionally.
But they would sing on the
street corners and in front
of the house and where they could.
When I was growing up in the
neighborhood where I grew up,
these little bands would collect on
the street corners during the summer
and they would just start playing
conga drums and bongo drums
and singing and dancing and as I
grew up and became a teenager going
to high school, traveling a bit
from my home to go to school,
I was very sad in that the
whole world wasn't like that.
I thought that happened everywhere.
>> Robin Roberts: Isn't that
amazing, when you grow up,
what you see you feel but that's--
>> Gloria Gaynor: That's the world.
>> Robin Roberts: -- universal.
>> Gloria Gaynor: That's your world,
so you feel that that's the world.
>> Robin Roberts: Right, exactly.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Yeah.
>> Robin Roberts: When
did you realize
that the disco was going
to be its own genre?
>> Gloria Gaynor: I realized
that while I was still singing
rhythm and blues and jazz.
I was performing up and down
the east coast and a lot
in New York City and in cabarets.
And they'd-- suddenly
the disco music,
this dance music started coming out
and Barry White really was
probably the first one.
>> Robin Roberts: Barry White.
>> Gloria Gaynor: He's
called Barry White.
>> Robin Roberts: Barry White, yes.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Barry White.
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah.
>> Gloria Gaynor: He was
called the king of disco.
And so, they were in
the clubs that I was--
in the cabaret clubs
that I was working in.
They started to move chairs and make
dance floors and they would have --
there would variably be a closet
that they would take the--
open the door, cut the
top half of it off.
Put a plank like this across that
bottom half of it and that was
where the DJ's turntable set
and there was your discotheque.
>> Robin Roberts: Just like that?
>> Gloria Gaynor: Just like that.
And so then someone got
the bright idea of starting
to build discotheque from the
ground up to build establishments
that were specifically for people
who wanted to come in and dance.
>> Robin Roberts: Yes.
>> Gloria Gaynor: And, yeah.
>> Robin Roberts: And hear music--
>> Gloria Gaynor: That's
when I realize,
OK, this is going to happen.
And this is a market that doesn't
have any music at the moment,
has very little music that is
specific to this style of party.
And so, I think I'm
going to supply them.
>> Robin Roberts: Yes
you did, yes you did.
You most certainly did, and
we're glad that you did.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Feel a need.
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah, feel a--
[ Laughter ]
[inaudible].
How did you go about
"I Will Survive",
creating that, writing that.
When did you become a part
of the creative process?
>> Gloria Gaynor: I
didn't write it at all.
I had-- I don't know
if you know the story.
I've been in-- performing
in New York and so,
back was over monitor during
a performance jump back up,
finish my show, went out
to breakfast and went home,
went to bed, woke the next morning
paralyzed from the waist down.
And-- But I was only paralyzed
for that period of time
and until a while after
I got to the hospital.
Whatever they did to work on
me, they relieve the nerves
and the paralysis was gone.
I don't remember any of it.
The first thing I remember
is saying,
"Did they serve the lunch yet?"
[ Laughter ]
But I was in the hospital.
So, March until July because they
were trying everything they could.
It was traction and had to
have a spinal tap, scary.
There was no such thing as an MRI
then, so they were really trying
to found out exactly what was
going wrong and what they could do
so they ended up giving me surgery
on my spine having a fusion,
spinal fusion, bone graft from
my hips and all of that and so,
when I came-- while I was in the
hospital, I was like, OK, so,
what do you mean by this?
What are we going to do?
Because the record company had
told me they were not going
to renew my contract.
People were going around the record
company saying the queen is dead
and so, I was really,
really praying.
I hadn't prayed for a long time.
You do some dance.
And so, I was like, you
know, praying, got a Bible
and started reading and all of this,
and I left the hospital quite
confident that God was going
to do something I didn't know what.
While I was at home,
not long after--
a few weeks after I was home,
the record company sent me a
letter saying they were not going
to end my contract and they
wanted me to go out to California
to record a song that the record
company president has chosen.
When I got out there, I talked
to the producers and I wanted
to know what was the B side.
Remember the B side?
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah, I know that.
You remember that?
How many of you all
remember the B side ?
Yes. Yes.
>> Gloria Gaynor: If you didn't
clap, ask the person next to you.
[ Laughter ]
So, the B side was
called "Substitute".
So, I asked them what is
going to be the A side?
I mean, the A side was
"Substitute" so I asked them,
what's going to be the B side?
And they said, well, what
kind of songs do you like?
And I said, well, I like
songs that are meaningful,
that touch people's hearts,
that have good melodies,
people can sing along, you know.
So they said, you know what,
we think you're the
one we've been waiting
for to record this song
we wrote two years ago.
So, they held "I Will Survive"
for two years waiting
for the right person.
>> Robin Roberts: And you
were the right person.
[ Cheering and Applause ]
>> Gloria Gaynor: And I just
looked up and said, thank you.
Because when I read the lyrics,
I realized that this was a timeless
lyric and I said to them, I said,
this is a timeless lyric?
What are you, stupid?
You're going to put
this on the B side?
And they said, well, maybe
if they give us a chance--
so it has got anything to do with
me, it will get a chance now.
Because as I said, it's a timeless
note everyone is going to be--
>> Robin Roberts: And you knew it.
You knew it.
>> Gloria Gaynor: I knew
it when I read the lyrics
because I'm standing there
relating to this song--
>> Robin Roberts: Back brace.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Being
in a back brace.
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah.
>> Gloria Gaynor: The fact
that my mother had passed--
I mean, it's like nine years
since my mother passed away
but that was something I
never thought I'd survive.
>> Robin Roberts: I know that.
>> Gloria Gaynor: And I was
still suffering from that.
Those of you who have lost
your parents, you know,
no matter how many years
ago, you're still suffering.
And so, yeah.
I thought anybody was going to be--
everybody is going to
be-- relate to this.
And so, you know, time
has proved me right.
>> Robin Roberts: So, when
you stepped on this stage
and you sang that, what was
the response from the audience
and when it was played on the radio?
What was-- How did it
resonate with people?
>> Gloria Gaynor: Well, first,
let me tell you that when we--
when I got to the song in my hands
and took it to the record company
to say, this should be the A side.
You need to promote this.
They wouldn't even listen to it.
So, we-- because the president
had chosen another song,
but I don't want to go
against his choices.
So, we went to Studio 54.
>> Robin Roberts: Oh yeah.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Gave
it to the DJ there.
He played it and the
audience immediately loved it.
I said, OK, I know I am right
because the New York audiences are
so jaded, they'll immediately
love anything.
And if they-- yeah.
I am- -yeah.
This is right.
So, we gave him a stack of them.
He gave them to his friends around
New York and they began to play it.
People getting it requested on
radio because they want to hear it
on their way home, they
want to hear it on the way
to work and the rest is history.
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah, what
was your experience, 1970s,
this music is bringing people
from diverse communities together
but they have a voice, what
was that experience like?
>> Gloria Gaynor: It
was a discovery for me.
I discovered that there was one
music, the only music in the history
of music, ever to bring together
people from on to the dance floor,
people from every nationality,
race, creed, color and age group.
And that was amazing to me and
I was in the forefront of that.
And so, I felt really privileged.
I felt really great about it,
especially since it is a
music that is so uplifting.
So, encouraging.
So, you didn't bring people
together to moan together.
>> Robin Roberts: Right,
right, right, right.
>> Gloria Gaynor: You
know what I'm saying?
You didn't bring people together
to cry, you know, to complain.
You brought people together
to uplift and encourage
and inspire one another and this
is why I've done a website called,
iwillsurvive.org.
Please go to it because it is a
community for that very purpose.
Where people come together and
tell one and tell the stories,
uplift and encourage one another.
It's a charity-based website
on which you can purchase.
We love to purchase, yeah, yeah?
And at the same time, support a
charity of your choice and some
of the charities are represented--
maybe I don't know if they're here,
but they're going to be here.
Yeah, they are.
There's BCRF, there's Thrive, there
is Dan and Ron's animal rescue,
there's Taps for the soldiers.
>> Robin Roberts: For the veterans?
>> Gloria Gaynor: For the veterans
a number are gone, please go on
and see all of these charities
that you can support while you're
encouraging at lifting one another.
Join this community
because it's really great.
>> Robin Roberts: Because
when you say, I will survive,
everybody can take it
personally and use it differently.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Absolutely.
>> Robin Roberts: It means something
different for everyone, doesn't it?
>> Gloria Gaynor: Yes.
Yes.
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah.
>> Gloria Gaynor: It
does mean something.
It can be applied to so--
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah.
>> Gloria Gaynor: -- many
different areas of your life,
so many different things, all of
which, any of which might be things
that you are feeling
is insurmountable and
yet hoping you'll survive.
And that way, we can relate to one
another because of those things.
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah.
I can relate when you were
talking about my mom and daddy,
they are cheering us on right
now from their heavenly balcony.
And I thought like you, I am not--
how am I going to survive without
Col. Lawrence and Lucimarian Roberts
and then going through
health crisis in that.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Of course.
>> Robin Roberts: And so I
understand and so many people,
who are there-- who are fellow
thrivers here who have been
through something and it's
gotten-- that's been your anthem.
And to know that it's here
in the-- so again I sit up,
Library of Congress and we
heard earlier, you know?
You know, oh come on now.
Come on! What that means--
>> Gloria Gaynor: My friends
would tell you this is not normal
for me to be speechless.
[ Laughter ]
But it does.
It's overwhelming to know
that someone who started
from such humble beginnings
that I can say that, you know,
I'm now going to be
history, you know?
People will come for years
to come and be inspired
by something that I've done.
Something that I've been a
part of and it's such an honor.
It's such an unbelievable honor to
be here, to be sitting before you,
to be a part of the Library
of Congress, to be inducted
into the Library of Congress,
to be a part of American
history, it is wonderful.
And it's not only wonderful
because for me but I'm hoping
that it's wonderful for so many
other people who started like me.
>> Robin Roberts: Right.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Who are
starting out even now, like me,
to know what heights you can
reach simply by the gifts, talents
and abilities that God
has placed in you--
>> Robin Roberts: Amen.
>> Gloria Gaynor: And
we all have them.
We all have them.
>> Robin Roberts: Yes, I love that.
[ Applause ]
And, you know Gloria, as you became
emotional when you were looking
at the pieces of Mozart
and other pieces
that they shared with you today.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Yes.
>> Robin Roberts: They're going to--
years from now, there's going to
be somebody like yourself coming in
and they're going to see your music
and see, "I Will Survive" in that.
And just talk about how
you became emotional
when seeing the great
recordings that are here
and the great archives
that are here.
>> Gloria Gaynor: I looked at that
music and realize that I was being--
having the privilege of being
transported back in time.
You know, we don't really
need a time machine.
To be transported back in time just
to experience and gain the rich--
be benefit by the rich
legacy that other artists
and other people have
left from their art,
from their talents,
and their abilities.
This is what this place is all about
and what an honor to stand there
and see that and be a part of it
and to experience it and to know
that it is still available
to me now.
That someone had the forethought
to preserve these wonderful things.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Right.
>> Gloria Gaynor: That I can
benefit from them, I can see them,
that I can experience
them that it's--
>> Robin Roberts: Can you
express the importance of it
for not only you, the general
public that can come here
and witness this and see it?
And they'll also know that disco,
the culture, the fashion, all of it,
you know, is part of this
and you brought this here.
>> Gloria Gaynor: It's important
to-- for self-discovery.
It's important to recognize, as I
said earlier, that you can do this.
Anybody can do this.
Just hone in on what you have
or who you are and be recognized
as I've often said recently,
you are a designer's original.
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Every single one
of us is a designer's original.
Every single one of us has been
given something to contribute
to the betterment, to the
welfare, to the progress,
to the pleasure of mankind.
And if we hone in on what that
is, not try to be someone else,
not to try to have
mire other people,
but recognize that you have
something too to contribute.
Recognize what that is and be about
finding out what your purpose is
and bringing that purpose
to the pot, so to speak.
It's a wonderful thing because
that's what we're all meant to do
and deep down inside
somewhere, that's what each
and every one of us wants to do.
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah.
And we have great guardians
here, the people, the staff--
>> Gloria Gaynor: Yes.
>> Robin Roberts: -- at
the Library of Congress.
Don't we?
>> Gloria Gaynor: We do.
They are a special people.
This is what they bring.
This is their particular
talent, their particular ability
to preserve what we've done.
Everything that is being preserved
here is showing off their talent,
their abilities, their desire to
be a part of humankind, to add to,
to contribute to humankind.
>> Robin Roberts: Yeah.
Their passion is-- Their passion
and compassion is unparalleled.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Is amazing.
>> Robin Roberts: And now "I Will
Survive" is going to be among them.
I know that you performed
for the 30th Anniversary,
Michael Jackson Concert.
Thriller is also here.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Yes, yes.
>> Robin Roberts: OK.
So, yeah, "Thriller" is also here.
>> Gloria Gaynor: It's wonderful.
[ Applause ]
>> Robin Roberts: The album, great.
I know a little bit about that.
That did bring-- this is to bring me
back, you're just bringing me back
to my great college days.
What was it like to
perform for Michael Jackson
and not many people got to know him?
>> Gloria Gaynor: It was wonderful
to perform for someone that I called
and believed to be the
consummate survivor.
He survived so many different
things throughout his life.
And to stand there onstage
and perform for him was--
and that to have him sitting in
the audience applauding and smiling
and all of that was
absolutely wonderful.
I became 295.5% grade A ham.
[ Laughter ]
Because I had to my best for
the best and it was wonderful.
>> Robin Roberts: Give me some
back stories of some other songs.
"I Never Can Say Goodbye",
"I Am What I Am".
>> Gloria Gaynor: "I Am What I Am"
was brought to me by my producer.
He had been to the play
[inaudible] and heard the song,
right sitting in his
seat, watching the play,
he decided he make a great disco
song, came up with the arrangement,
called me the next day and had me
come over to his studio and listen
to what his idea for the song.
I was like, great.
This is a great idea.
Was very, very happy to do that
and I was thinking of as we--
I was going through the
lyrics, I was thinking
of all the different things that
all the different reasons why people
need to say, I am what I am.
Like I said, I'm a
designer's original.
I am not any more, any less
than you or anybody else.
And because of who I am and what I
am and how I look and what I wear
and what I think and how I
feel and all that, any of that,
make me anything less than anybody
else and, yeah, I am what I am.
>> Robin Roberts: I am what I am.
And it's-- everyone
wants to feel inclusive
that you're part of something.
And that's what "I Am
What I Am" and other songs
that you have brought to us.
Do you think that's part of the
message, about being inclusive?
>> Gloria Gaynor: Yes, I really do.
Because I think that's
why disco music is
so popular because it is inclusive.
It is inclusive, like I said every
nationality, race, creed, color,
age group, everything, everybody,
is included in this music,
come together and let's be a family.
And if you wouldn't mind, if you
wouldn't mind, I have something
that I think I'd like to say--
>> Robin Roberts: Please.
>> Gloria Gaynor: --
and it fits right here.
I'm going to-- if you don't mind,
walk over to the podium and do this.
>> Robin Roberts: You're Gloria
Gaynor, you do what you want.
[ Laughter and Applause ]
Is it not?
It's all good.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Bear me with me.
Bear with me as I do this.
Do these work?
Are these working?
Are these working?
Wonderful, wonderful.
OK. Survive is defined as to
remain alive, to sustain oneself,
pull through, hold on or out,
to keep body and mind together.
In 1978, I recorded the
song "I Will Survive".
Since then until millions
of men, women,
and children as you know
have adopted this song
as their mantra including myself.
But through the years, I've come to
realize that while we were singing
"I Will Survive" with our
mouths what we were hoping
in our hearts is that,
I'm going to thrive.
Thrive is defined as to continue to
live in spite of danger, hardship,
and to manage to keep going
in difficult circumstances.
Everyone goes through
difficult situations
and circumstances in their lives.
And we need to recognize that and be
aware of other people's struggles,
and be willing to help
when and where we can.
If we don't care about others,
we cannot expect anyone to care
about us, and none
of us will survive.
If one group begins to
perpetuate inhumane acts
against another while
everyone else simply stands by
and ignores what's happening,
it provides impetuous
for other selfish individuals
and groups to do the same,
until such acts become
commonplace and seemingly normal.
The atrocities of the
death camps of Auschwitz,
the slavery of the confederate
states of the United States,
South Africa as apartheid, the
slavery of the confederate states
of the United States, South Africa.
South Africa as apartheid.
The ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian
War, all went on far too long.
And those that manage to survive
it not do so without the help
of concerned and caring others.
Any of it can happen
again anywhere at anytime.
As the adage goes, the only thing
necessary for evil to prevail is
for good men to do nothing.
So, it is up to each of one of us
to read about, know the stories,
relate, tell and discuss the stories
with others to keep them fresh
in our minds because if we don't
care about all persons and watch
out for each other, evil will
prevail, and no one is exempt.
This United States of America
used to stand for under the banner
of one nation under God, indivisible
with liberty and justice for all.
Part of that liberty and
justice means that if--
what I believe to be truth is
different from what you believe
to be truth, we can and do
share what we each believe
without reproach from one another.
It means that we are able to
disagree without being disagreeable.
It means we share our beliefs with
one another without condemnation.
It means we speak the truth
to one another in love.
It means that we respect
one another enough
to examine what the others
believe to be the truth,
to find what truth we might be able
to accept in what they are saying.
It means that if we are sure
that what we believe is true,
we show no hostility,
disdain, arrogance
or anger toward anyone
else's point of view.
We show no hostility, we have no
problem with or fear of listening
to what someone else has to say
because we are confident
in our own beliefs.
If I had a diamond and someone
else had a cubic zirconia.
And they felt that that diamond,
that cubic zirconia was just
as valuable as my diamond, I
wouldn't be angry with them.
I would try to share with them
what I know to be the difference
and the benefit of the
diamond and what it has,
the benefit that it has
over the cubic zirconia.
If they refuse to listen and never
believe me, I will simple hope
and pray someone else could and
would one day be able to explain it
to them in a way they
could receive it.
If that never happened, that person
will simply lose out when they get
to retirement age and I
would be very sorry for them.
But I would have done
all that I could to help.
This attitude in way of dealing
with others is the only way to live
in peace and harmony with others
of differing ideals and ideologies.
Because of the popularity
of "I Will Survive",
my name has become synonymous
with the word survive.
That has caused me to take a greater
interest in survival, what it means
and what it takes to survive.
Of course getting on in age, I have
to admit adds a little to that.
Among the many things that
extensive travel has done for me is
that it has convinced me of
something I already suspected,
that I live in the greatest
country in the world.
I have often quipped that
I am 295.5% American.
We sing "God Bless America".
Well, because what I have seen
and experienced in my travels,
I can tell you God
has blessed America.
My travels have also made
me cognizant of the fact
that we are the babies or at
least the teenagers of the world.
And yet we are pretty
much running things.
America has become a
teenager rock star.
I learned that people of other
nations have loved and respected us.
They have sought to emulate us.
They have copied everything from
our politics, desire for person
of freedom and tolerance to our bad
habits of cigarette smoking strange
and ever changing fashion sense.
And I'll bet eating habits.
I call McDonald's our American
ambassador because it's everywhere.
I also find that we have the
best junk food in the world.
Happened to love that.
Fortunately or unfortunately
depending on your point view,
we are the richest
country in the world.
Why? We have become
like international rock stars
unfortunately in every way.
We seemed to be so wrapped up and
impressed with our fame and fortune
that we have begun to
believe our own hype.
Once the very important things began
to go sour, we just seem to focus
on what was still going good.
And as much as possible
smooth over the bad publicity
like the teenage rock star.
It seemed to me we didn't try
to analyze too closely any ills.
We just decided to
downplay the cause
of any problems and
treat the symptoms.
I'm really not a political person.
So, I'm not about to
really become political.
But I'd say it's the best-- it's a
safe bet that a lot needs to change.
For one thing, we have
become a nation
that is obsessed with
treating symptoms.
I have said to my friends,
we here in America have got the
remedies for whatever ills you.
If you have a pain in your
body, we can give you something
that will get rid of that pain.
Now, in the process your arms
and legs might fall off,
with the side effects.
But the pain will probably
go with it.
We have got to become
concerned with treating the core
and causes of our problems.
We've got to get back to absolutes.
Without absolutes, we will parish.
We know right from wrong-- sorry.
We know right from wrong,
we know good from evil,
we know how to cure the
ills of this nation.
We've got to change this
infection of greed and selfishness
that has consumed this nation.
It has to start with you.
With you, the individual, you must
become, I must become the instrument
in the hands of our savior.
Our savior is righteousness.
Our savior is unselfishness.
Our savior is grace
and mercy for those
who are less fortunate than we are.
Our savior is concerned for them.
Our savior is recognizing
that we are a family and just
as with your blood families,
there are those we
don't particularly like.
But in selfness and righteousness
say, that if we are to survive
as a family, as a nation,
we must all have the
opportunities to survive.
When you deprive or trampled
down the rights or opportunities
for another person to
use their gifts, talents,
and abilities to prosper, to reach
his or her greatest potential
or highest level of productivity,
you deprive yourself of whatever
that person might have been
able or willing to contribute
to the betterment of mankind.
It really amounts to cutting off
your own nose despite your face.
The Bible says, we have
the inherent ability
to hide iniquity in our own hearts.
We must understand
that when we do that,
we make our hearts the
breeding ground for sin.
Now, that's an old fashion word.
One that we really hear because
we are ashamed to say it,
although most-- many of us are
not ashamed to do what it means.
The Bible also says that
you shall know the truth
and the truth will set you free.
What we need to recognize in
those passages is that the truth
that you walk in will set you free.
In other words, you need to do
what you know to be right in order
for what you know to set you free.
It's as if we've all been put in
prison by ignorance, arrogance,
and selfishness and greed.
And in order to get
out, we must pay bail.
Our bail is truth.
It has been paid because
we know the truth.
We are free.
But we insist on staying in jail
and not walking in our freedom.
Why? Very simply and very sadly
because everyone is doing it.
No one seems to have the
courage to say this is wrong,
this is counterproductive.
This is not in our best
interest in the long one.
No one is willing to recognize
the fact that if we stay
on this path, we will perish.
We know the truth.
So we're not the blind
leading the blind.
So, when did everyone is
doing it become the criteria
for our behavior.
Are we all followers?
Are there no leaders among us?
Are we all sheep just following
some unwary leader to slaughter?
The big difference
between us and sheep is
that we get to choose our leaders.
And to avoid anarchy, we must
follow those we choose to lead us.
But what criteria are we,
each individual using
to choose our leaders?
And are our leaders concerned with
or using our needs and desires
to make their choices to create laws
that are in the best interest of us
who chose them or even in
their own best interest?
Are we also bogged down in what's
good for me, what feels good to me,
that selfishness and greed had
become the creed of both choosers
and the chosen, both the
voters and the electors?
The elected.
Have we forgotten that we
are one nation under God
or is that no longer really true?
Because we stop saying it in schools
and other government-run
establishments out loud
in public places, have we truly
stopped saying it, believing it,
or even wanting it in our hearts?
Our we truly so wrapped up in
ourselves that we are willing
to reject the only one who knows and
wants what's best for each of us?
And the only one who is
capable of working things
out in way that we all win.
I know some of you
are probably thinking,
I didn't come here for a sermon.
Well, when I decided to speak,
I didn't intend to give one.
However, I did want to say things
that would be meaningful and helpful
and would call us all
to responsibility.
This is an idea whose
time has come, again.
The next crop of leaders of this
nation whether in government
and the industry, in
corporate America or in homes,
is going to have the responsibility
if joining the incumbent leaders
in helping this nation fall or rise,
fail or prosper, die or survive.
We can either survive intentionally
together or we can perish by default
because not enough of us
care enough about anyone else
to strengthen the foundation
of this nation together.
Everyone knows you
must care, take care of
and keep strong the foundation.
The working class is the foundation.
Those who have risen up and
become wealthy have done
so because we have a
strong working class.
We stand on their shoulders.
Has no one noticed
that from the creation
of this nation we have prospered,
progressed and become stronger
as a nation as we acknowledge
and champion what's right
for those too weak to
fight for themselves?
Has no one noticed that the
nation prospered and became strong
as the working class became
stronger and more prosperous
as the downtrodden and victims
of discrimination became fewer
and as basic righteous
ethics remained our credo.
This is no coincidence.
Have we all been lured into a false
sense of security only to be awaken
by threats from the outside?
Well, to quote a famous cartoonist,
"We've seen the enemy
and they is us."
Another wise man is quoted
as answering the question,
what's wrong with the world?
I am. If you will study the lessons
of such books as "Seven Habits
of Highly Successful
People" and the "Road
to Character" you will
learn the characteristics
and ethics necessary
for sustainable success.
You will learn that it is
dangerous and you are doomed
to eventual failure if you
allow your gifts, talents,
and abilities to take you to a place
where your character
cannot sustain you.
This applies to a nation
as well as an individual.
It is equally dangerous because
it is arrogant and a flaw
in one's character to think that
you can sustain success built
on good character even
though you allow
that good character to deteriorate.
That is what this nation has done.
The truth is, if you cannot honestly
say that you have done all you can
to fix what's wrong, you cannot
honestly say it's not my fault.
I'm not naive enough or
idealistic enough to think
that this can happen quickly or even
within the next generation or two.
We need radical change, and radical
change always calls for revolution.
It will be an arduous task.
Because while it can be a peaceful--
while it must be a
peaceful revelation starting
at each individual heart, it must
be spread throughout the nation,
not necessarily to all but
to a large enough majority
to bring that radical change.
Therefore, it will be met with
opposition from those who are
so limited in foresight, that
they prefer the status quo.
But every journey begins with
one step and this is the journey
that must begin, the
nation is broken.
And as a great-- And as greater
task as it is, as unfair as it is,
as young people say,
it is what it is.
And it is our daunting
task to fix it.
The good news is we can.
Call me an optimist,
but I believe we can.
But only if enough of us are willing
to take the bull by the horns,
tighten our own belts, refuse to
be self-indulgent, refuse to walk
in ignorance or arrogance and
recognize that like it or not,
we are a family and you
are your brother's keeper.
If we are true to and persistent
about these things, I promise you,
as a people, as a nation,
we will survive.
[ Cheering and Applause ]
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Thank you so much.
Thank you for bearing with me
through that and it was on my heart.
>> Robin Roberts: I'm telling you,
we're back stage and Gloria said
to me, she said, I have something
that I want to say to folks.
Didn't tell me what it was.
She said at some point
that she was going to share
that she wanted to go to the podium.
Wow!
>> Gloria Gaynor: Thank you.
>> Robin Roberts: To
have the courage
to speak what's in your heart.
Where-- Why did you want to do this?
Where did this come from?
Because as you said, you're
not a political person
and it shouldn't been seen that
if you talk about the challenges
that we're facing, that it's all of
a sudden you're right, left, this,
that, you're human, we're all human.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Right.
>> Robin Roberts: What was it
that led you to say those words?
>> Gloria Gaynor: Well,
the truth is I--
this is part of a speech
that I had--
I was going to give in a college.
And when I-- they asked me for
the speech so that they could look
at it, they cut it down and
cut out 90% of what's in here.
But I felt that it
needed to be said.
It was on my heart and
where it came from.
Well, when I was called to speak
to these young people who are
to be our next crop of leaders,
I went into my prayer closet,
literally, went into my
prayer closet and sat down.
And I said, Lord, I don't
know what to say to them.
I need you to tell me what to say.
And I felt this almost like
gurgling up in my spirit
and I grabbed my cellphone, my
iPhone and I put it on dictate
and I begin to say--
there goes an iPhone.
[ Laughter ]
I didn't call you.
And I begin to say what
I heard in my heart.
And that's what-- I didn't
change, I didn't fix it,
I did nothing, that's it.
That's what came.
>> Robin Roberts: Right there.
[ Applause ]
God bless you.
[ Applause ]
Your story, your words, your music,
who you are has been something
that has helped a lot of people.
Living your truth as you have,
facing the challenges that you have.
Everybody's got something.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Oh, yeah.
>> Robin Roberts: And you talked
about the loss of your parents,
you talked about-- you didn't tell--
talk about your sister who was lost
in such tragic ways and such.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Yes, yes.
>> Robin Roberts: How
have you been able--
how have you been able to survive?
>> Gloria Gaynor: I
survived in that closet.
>> Robin Roberts: The prayer closet.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Really I do in
that prayer closet, I really do.
I just take everything to
God, my faith is very strong.
I know God in a personal
way that I believe he wants
to know each and every one of us.
And I sit down and I talk to
my daddy and I say, you know,
was-- I don't understand.
I do understand but I don't like it.
I need help in this.
Somebody else needs help.
My friend, I'd like you
to do this for so and so.
We-- You know, if it's your will
be done but please can you--
you know, I just go to him and
that's how I survive everything.
>> Robin Roberts: I have this
plaque in my dressing room
and it says, this too shall pass.
>> Gloria Gaynor: Amen.
>> Robin Roberts: Now would be good.
[ Laughter ]
Right, that's helped me.
>> Gloria Gaynor: That's true.
That's true.
>> Robin Roberts: It's
true, it's right there,
right there in my mirror.
>> Gloria Gaynor: That's true.
>> Robin Roberts: As we
conclude, other people,
we have different challenges.
What is the one piece of advice
you could give us to help us?
>> Gloria Gaynor: I follow-- I
can only give you what I have.
I follow one particular scripture
as my favorite scripture.
In all my ways, I acknowledge
him and he directs my paths.
>> Robin Roberts: Amen.
Gloria Gaynor, ladies and gentlemen.
[ Cheering and Applause ]
Oh no, she's going to sing.
She's going to sing.
No way, she's going to sing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
This is going to rise,
there's going to be a piano.
It's the director of
me, the producer.
We're on. Yes!
>> Gloria Gaynor: Oh, OK.
[ Cheering and Inaudible Remark ]
Shall I?
>> Robin Roberts: Let me in.
>> Gloria Gaynor: I didn't know--
I didn't notice the thing they had.
How are you?
[ Music ]
[ Applause and Cheering ]
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
[ Applause ]
Thank you very much.
That's a sample.
That's a sample of my forthcoming
Christian album called "Testimony".
So look for it and let him
take you back in many areas.
Thank you.
[ Applause and Cheering ]
God bless you all.
Enjoy the rest of the afternoon
here, the rest of the evening,
please come in to and
enjoy the concert
and because we go and
get down really.
Yeah, it's a-- We're going
to let it all hang out
and we want you to do the same.
Have fun. Enjoy.
Be blessed.
[ Applause and Cheering ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.