2. Queer Theories

First published in Plan B #38.

Various Artists – Dreams Come True: Classic First Wave Electro 1982-87 (Domino)

Jon Savage knows a thing or two about dreams: as the author of England’s Dreaming, he was the foremost chronicler of punk’s utopian moment. As Savage himself has pointed out, disco, punks’ most-hated genre, was, in its own way, a utopian movement: it created a cultural space in which gay and female liberation could be enacted as a norm, in which rock’s patriarchal assumptions held no power. Co-existing in New York with early hip-hop and the downtown avant-garde scene (both Grandmaster Flash and Sonic Youth played the Danceteria, namechecked here in C-Bank’s gloriously OTT ‘Get Wet’), disco’s commercialisation, and the new electropop flooding in from Europe, gave birth to the harder, nastier sound of electro, documented here – with obvious relish – by Savage.

Those European roots show through on the earliest track here, the 12” version of Yazoo’s ‘Situation’, matching Alison Moyet’s sexually ambiguous vocals against bubbling synths and stern drum-machine. The transatlantic transformation is enacted with Larry Levan’s extraordinary remix of Class Action’s ‘Weekend’ (originally released on Arthur Russell’s Sleeping Bag Records): 8 minutes of alternately skittering and squelching synths, handclaps, a relentless b-line, exploding syn-drums and disco strings backing up an hysterically sassy vocal: “I’LL FIND SOMEONE, SOMEBODY WHO WANTS MY BO-DY, BA-BY!!!” Such forthright carnality is profligate in these tracks, coupled to compulsive danceability and relentless innovation; free as they are of ironic quotation marks, to today’s ears they sound utterly compelling and downright bizarre. In track after track – ‘Love Ride’ by Nuance and Vikki Love, with sledgehammer beats played against hilariously cheesy vocals; Pamela Joy’s ‘Think Fast’, congas, shaker, syn-drum and nagging disco guitar driving home the message that “there’s always someone to take your place”; The Latin Rascals’ ‘Lisa’s Coming’, where, ahem, ‘suggestive’ moaning, relentlessly arpeggiated synths and vocal cut-ups point toward Chicago house – the intent is made patently, almost embarrassingly, clear: “a bit of the old in-out, in-out”, anonymously and without consequences.

This admixture of highly synthetic music and, um, organic concerns may strike the listener as incongruous, but the effect is more interesting than that: the all-pervasive electronics both amplify and mutate sexuality, onomatopoeically mirroring the body’s squelches and slithers, whilst simultaneously pointing toward a vision of a Deleuzo-Guattarian electronic ‘body without organs’ which would be refined by the likes of Mr. Fingers and the second wave of Detroit techno. This is most evident on Klein & MBO’s ‘Dirty Talk (European Connection)’, originally released in 1982, where only an occasional disco rhythm guitar disturbs what is otherwise a serene glide that looks back to the austerely lush eroticism of ‘I Feel Love’, and forward to the machine melancholy of ‘Blue Monday’; vocals, the very mark of organic presence, are subject throughout the album to vocoders, filters, machine cut-ups. As Mark Fisher wrote of Giorgio Moroder’s productions, “by suspending rock’s male-derived climax-based libidinal economy”, these songs, in all their pulp vulgarity, construct an “eternal Now”, an alternative model of sexuality that makes the rejection of reproduction – the primary so-called ‘sin’ of homosexuals – its very locus. The heretical question that resounded through England’s Dreaming – “If there’s no future, how can there be sin?” – is taken here for the norm, and the results are rapturous, energising, brilliant.

This collection spans the boom years of New York’s gay culture; by the time closer ‘Silent Morning’ by Noel was released, in 1987 the ravages of AIDS were already common knowledge. Savage, who is openly gay, surely feels the loss, judging by this last selection, which recounts a night of hedonism, and the morning after: “I wake up and you’re not by my side… How could our love have died?”