On behalf of, I guess, cultural criticism, I spent last night reviewing old Grammy Awards footage, just like Sontag used to. Although the history of this particular industry spectacle (happening for the 56th time on Sunday) suggests that world events are secretly guided by some dads who’ve really gotten into the Mumfords lately, it’s still an illustrative archive, however skewed. The 1979 ceremony I watched was enlivened by some of the usual surreal juxtapositions: Ragtime pianist Eubie Blake (born in 1887) presented Best New Artist, and, as the official site puts it, “the Grammys managed to do what it always does best—highlight all kinds of music, including Chuck Mangione’s flugelhorn hit ‘Feels So Good.’”
What dominated the night, however, was disco, drawing awards for Donna Summer, A Taste of Honey, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Bee Gees, whose Album of the Year Saturday Night Fever sat atop the album charts for half of the previous calendar year. Commerce has always been one way to impress unadventurous Grammy voters: a year later, whether to recognize or quarantine, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences introduced a dedicated Best Disco Recording category. Then it never handed out the award again, the sea of potential winners supposedly drying up into hard rock. What happened to American dance music in between two trophies?
That lone group of nominees for Best Disco Recording was shockingly well-chosen, given the typical Grammy approach to emerging genres, which reminds me of early European navigation around Australia: they knew something vast was there, but blundered obliviously in exploring it. (The first rapper who ever contended for Album of the Year? MC Hammer.) Alongside the inexhaustible “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” there was Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” and (here the author glances to one side for several moments) Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” You know MJ’s single, vocal abandon amidst the tightest horn charts, the saviour of any wedding dancefloor. “Boogie Wonderland” is a song about clubbing out of forlorn anguish, and validates that so beautifully that I never even realized it until glancing at a lyric sheet. The other nominees don’t untangle so easy.
