I was thinking about all the Jes Grew epidemics throughout the world’s history when I thought about a form of Jes Grew in the 70’s. Disco. The date at the end of the epilogue is right at the emergence of disco, with 1971 being the first time Disco reaches television with Soul Train.
As disco emerged it was met with backlash from rock fans because it didn’t carry the same subject matter that rock did, yet was becoming just as popular. Also, part of that reason was because disco embraced themes that weren’t exclusively white and heterosexual. According to Wikipedia, “[disco’s] initial audiences were club-goers from the gay, African American, Italian American, Latino, and psychedelic communities in Philadelphia and then later New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Papa Labas is giving his speech in New York around this time, so evidently he must know about the rise of disco in America. Perhaps this particular lecture is focused on because it is the dawn of a new Jes Grew movement and Papa Labas wants to try to educate everyone to know that eventually Jes Grew will win and whatever that particular strain of Jes Grew is will be let into the culture of the atonists. What do you all think?
With disco there was a dancing everywhere, as characteristic of Jes Grew. With television it spread rapidly and by the mid 70’s there were movies coming out that were focused around disco dancing such as Saturday Night Fever -- which you all probably have heard about.
It seems that with disco, it was tolerated and embraced far quicker by the “atonists” than Jes Grew was. Within a few short years it’s transfer onto television makes everyone familiar with it and many people are overtaken by how groovy it is. However, the age of disco is quite short, ending in the early 1980’s. Its ending is very abrupt, just like Jes Grew in the book.
Those are some parallels that I saw, do you all see anything else?
I will be completely honest with you, I don't know that much about disco. I think that you bring up a very interesting and unusual example of Jes Grew. I say that because when you think of other examples of modern day Jes Grew that people come up with, such as rap or the Black Lives Matter movement, the separation between the Atonist thoughts and those that support the Jes Grew are clear cut. I don't see that clear of a distinction between those when it comes to disco. I'm not saying that it isn't there, I'm just saying that it may be harder to find. I think that you do a good job at tying together disco and the outbreak of Jes Grew in the book. I would have never picked up on the time period in which Papa LaBas was giving the speech coinciding with the emergence of Jes Grew. The argument you present here shows does a good job at showing those connections. I will say that I would had never though of it as an outbreak of Jes Grew before reading this. Great post!
ReplyDeleteYou're right that disco (at least initially) was a racially, ethnically, sexually diverse scene (and that a lot of the reaction against it among rock fans was racist and homophobic at its root), and that it got coopted by mainstream culture really quickly. By _Saturday Night Fever_ we've got the Bee-Gees doing disco, danced to by Italian American kids from Brooklyn, which is about as far from Jes Grew as we can get. But at the same time that disco was exploding in the mainstream, there was a more afrocentric and subversive dance culture happening with funk music, and I'd say that's much closer to a Jes Grew dynamic. In fact, the funk master George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic apparently cites Ishmael Reed's fiction as one of the influences that led to his intergalactic Mothership funk metanarrative. Funk music is more raw and gritty than disco, and its themes are more explicitly Afrocentric (and its audiences in the 70s were almost exclusively black). The classic P-Funk admonition to "free your mind and your ass will follow" certainly fits _Mumbo Jumbo's_ representation of dance as relevant to social/political consciousness.
ReplyDeleteI never really though about how Papa LaBas's speech at the very end could be the foreshadowing of a new Jes Grew epidemic, but that's a really interesting idea. And I feel like disco was probably accepted faster than that of the Jes Grew around the time of the 1920's due to the thick racial tensions the 1920's possessed as opposed to the 70's.
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