More about: Kylie MinogueRoisin MurphyJessie WareDua Lipa

The first time I watched a YouTube video of a Queen performance, I distinctly remember this odd feeling that I’d never encountered before. Freddie Mercury was engaged with a cultish call-and-response with the audience at the legendary Wembley performance: 

Eeyoh! (Eeyoh!) … Eeyoh! (Eeyoh!)

Eeyoh! (Eeyoh!). 

EeyoreREEEEEEE….yoh!

At that point, the crowd stumbled, being tricked by Mercury’s sustained note. Though I wasn’t singing, I stumbled too, as if I was part of the crowd. It was a warm feeling of euphoric community (although that might have been my duvet). Despite this, I also found myself yearning for a future I knew was impossible. I was caught between a past, a present and a future that I was somehow experiencing and yet had never, and would never, experience. 

Welcome to the world of hauntology, which is responsible for the sudden onslaught of ‘nu’-disco. Four albums in particular have helped bring disco more prominently into the mainstream: Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, Kylie Minogue’s DISCO, Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? and Róisín Murphy’s Róisín Machine. At first, it seems like a colossal joke that dance music would rise from the grave just as we went into lockdown. The twisted irony, however, is this: disco’s resurrection is indebted to the spectres of its memories, who echoed louder in empty bedrooms than your average packed dancefloors. 

Hauntology is a tricky term to define, but I think hauntology boils down to two things: the ghost as a metaphor, and the disjunction of time. It was Mark Fisher who applied this to electronic music, recognising the failure of a particular future juxtaposed against the nostalgia of the ghostly past. Burial’s landmark album Untrue is cited by Fisher as an example, its crackles and hisses evidence that ‘we hear that time is out of joint’. Electronic music was once exciting and innovative; once we became too accustomed to its sounds, we became ‘ghosts’, forced to look back to the past to recover the feeling we once had. Hauntology is not just the superficial act of reflection – it’s a kind of mourning, too.

A similar phenomenon is happening with disco music, owing to its whitewashed absorption into EDM. There’s only so many times we can hear a bass drop, after all, before we become too familiar to enjoy its climax. And so, musicians like Dua Lipa decided to reach back into the vestiges of the past, bringing a renewed focus onto disco after realising just how shite the Chainsmoker’s album was. Thank God for that. 

It can be argued, however, that disco didn’t really go ‘die’, either. Shows such as Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race have shot to fame in recent years, the latter of which I believe has contributed to reviving the history of disco. The highlight of Drag Race is the ‘Lip Sync For Your Life’, in which queens will lip sync to gay classics to avoid being eliminated. Some of the most iconic performances have been set to disco music: ‘MacArthur Park’, ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’, ‘Got To Be Real’, to name a few. 

Considering that Dua and Kylie in particular are gay icons, it’s only natural that their fanbases would be thrilled to hear disco make a triumphant return. The musical references strewn throughout the aforementioned Big Four became easier to identify with, too. Think of Donna Summer’s ethereal presence on What’s Your Pleasure, or the jaunty sampling of White Town’s ‘Your Woman’ in Dua Lipa’s ‘Love Again’. Queer POC had been prepared for this for years now. Combine that with the phantom of clubs and crowds, and disco was bound to become a hit. 

If disco supposedly never died, what exactly is it being haunted by? The people that originally produced it: a combination of Black/Latinx, gay, trans, and womxn. The euphoria of disco was born out of the suffering of a community beset with trans-/homophobia, racism and economic strife. Later, AIDS tore its way through the community, and in 1979, a crate of disco records was blown up, inciting a riot now known as Disco Demolition Night. Disco is so often pigeonholed as hedonist, escapist music, but sometimes it’s disturbing that we forget exactly who it was made for – and what they were escaping from. 

In a way, reminding these communities of the suffering they experienced is antithetical to the aims of disco, but it wouldn’t be a problem if the genre wasn’t so gentrified: Saturday Night Fever began the process of making disco for straight, white people. As much as the Big Four have paid homage to disco’s origins, there’s something to be said about four white women being the biggest faces of the movement. Think about some big names in the DJ world, too: Disclosure. Horse Meat Disco. Chromeo. Nearly every disco DJ nowadays is some nerdy white dude, a trend which is all too familiar in the music industry. 

It’s not just the fault of said nerdy white dudes, however. An excellent article by Stephanie Phillips for The Independent outlines the challenges that Black people face when attempting to create disco music: ‘a Black DJ that plays disco would be seen as old and irrelevant. They would never get the same bookings playing the same music that a white DJ would get’. Coupled with the outdated belief that Black womxn don’t sell records as well, you’ll sadly find that their stories are more valuable than the people themselves. Not to mention the price: live bands, analogue synthesisers… traditional disco is expensive to make. It’s all pretty bleak. 

So where do we go from here? Disco still has some energy left to enjoy popularity – after all, coronavirus continues to ravage countries like the US and the UK. Now that it’s in the spotlight, I believe there are potential solutions in solving the issues that come with disco. 

Artists should continue to credit and uplift QPOC voices, whether that’s in songwriting, singing or concept. We cannot, after all, repeat the injustice that was Loleatta Holloway’s uncredited and unpaid feature on Black Box’s ‘Ride On Time’. Jessie Ware has credited the influence of QPOC in her music to Gay Times, and Dua Lipa brought back the infamous club Studio 54 as Studio 2054, a live performance which featured countless QPOC. Industry executives should also allow disco to become a reclaimed space – one that allows artists to self-identify with its origins without fear of being pigeonholed or stereotyped. If you’re going to lift up white women, lift up QPOC too. 

Ultimately, we have an important role to play in supporting new artists, particularly those of QPOC backgrounds. Artists like Empress Of, Maria’s Boy and Andreya Triana are all doing wonderful work interpreting disco in their own unique ways, whilst Studio 54 have launched their own record label featuring artists from these backgrounds. It is crucial that we do not forget the ghosts that haunt the music who have danced and died before us to make the genre what it is. Queer POC aren’t just consumers of disco – they’re also the creators, and it’s up to us to show the music industry that their voices are worth hearing. 

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More about: Kylie MinogueRoisin MurphyJessie WareDua Lipa