New Year's Eve, 1977. Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards are standing in the snow outside Studio 54 in suits that cost them a couple thousand dollars each. Grace Jones invited them. Grace Jones forgot to tell the door. They try the back entrance, do an impression of her voice to prove they're expected, and the doorman tells them to get lost and slams it.
They buy champagne. They go back to the apartment. Furious, they start jamming a song whose refrain is, word for word, what the doorman just said to them.
Then Rodgers points out they can't put that on the radio. So it becomes "freak off," which sounds terrible. So it becomes "freak out."
That's "Le Freak." Best-selling single in Warner's history until "Vogue." The most cheerful song on my dance floor is a middle finger with the profanity filed off, and once you know that you can hear it, sitting right there in the aggression of the guitar.
The set
My evolving Disco Set. Twenty-five tracks, just under two hours. Bee Gees three times, Kool & The Gang four, Earth Wind & Fire three. Trammps, Donna Summer, Sylvester, Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, Boney M., KC, Hot Chocolate, Lipps Inc., George Benson closing it out.
It's called evolving because it is. This is a working document, not a monument.
There's an author hiding in here
I built this by feel and only noticed the pattern later.
Rodgers and Edwards wrote and produced "We Are Family" for Sister Sledge. They wrote and produced Diana Ross's diana, which is where "Upside Down" and "I'm Coming Out" come from. Add Chic's own "Le Freak" and the Chic Organization is responsible for a fifth of this playlist.
I did not choose Nile Rodgers. I chose five songs I like, and Nile Rodgers turned out to be underneath them.
Which is the thing about a crate. You think you're collecting songs. You're actually mapping your own ear, and the map has authors on it you never consciously picked. Go look at your own dance floor set and find out who's secretly running it. Somebody is.
Sylvester is the reason this matters
Two years after that night outside Studio 54, a Chicago radio DJ filled a baseball stadium with people who'd brought disco records to be blown up between games of a doubleheader. July 12, 1979. The field got destroyed, the second game was forfeited, and the backlash it kicked off is generally understood now as having been about more than musical taste, given who disco belonged to.
Which is why "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" is the track on here I'd defend hardest. Sylvester was Black, gay, and gender-nonconforming in public at a moment when each of those alone cost you something. He made a record about being fully yourself and it went to the floor and stayed there.
This is not nostalgia music. Play it like it means something, because to a lot of people it did.