The Disco Box
But what passes for disco now is a small group of pop hits that used disco’s rhythms and production sounds: “Ring My Bell,” “Fly, Robin, Fly,” “Boogie Nights,” “Funkytown,” and so on. These songs bypass disco’s campy crassness, but also its grandeur and peculiarity, the way it pumped up the drama of the rhythmic moment and drew it out as long as possible. The Disco Box, a four-CD Rhino set covering the era in approximate chronological order, is an almost completely redundant restatement of the established disco canon. Of its 80 tracks, all but eight appeared on Rhino’s earlier series “The Disco Years”; roughly half the songs on the three “Pure Disco” discs on Polydor are here, too. There are only a few really obvious artists missing–Diana Ross and, less surprising, the Bee Gees, whose Saturday Night Fever hits aren’t available on any 90s disco retrospectives. Almost everything here was a hit of some caliber, and almost half these songs went to number one on the pop chart, the R & B chart, or both.
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The other major consequence of disco being winnowed to a list of a few dozen songs is the disappearance of the single-artist disco album meant as an aesthetic unit. Disco LPs tended to include only four, five, or six long tracks; sometimes, as with Cerrone’s Paradise, the entire first side would be devoted to a single robust number. Maybe this looks too skimpy on a CD, and best-of compilations are an effective way to ditch the dreck that often padded the hit. But, again, assuming that disco was important only as a vehicle for pop hits leads to the discarding of a lot of worthwhile stuff that wasn’t intended as pop. Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, on their own records and the ones they made with Sister Sledge and Diana Ross, were responsible for some of the most interesting musicianship of its kind, and they sequenced their albums to be listened to in their entirety. The singles are still on anthologies and greatest-hits collections; Chic’s four decent-to-excellent albums from the early 80s are currently out of print. The liner notes to The Disco Box include an annotated list of 50 “essential” disco albums; only about 20 of them are currently available on CD in their original form.
