the late 1970s is also known as the height of the disco era. there were too many beats and less substance. the important thing –in creating music –was as long as you could make people shake their body, that was enough. i could avoid buying anything came out, but i couldn’t escape the hype.
like every kind of fad, there’s always the victims. and the disco fever took its own. many of my friends were among them. i just couldn’t stop hanging out with them for that reason. so i had to keep up with the latest.
that means i frequently had to attend parties thrown around for the sake of disco music and dancing. it wasn’t because i hate disco music that i felt i had no choice; in fact i don’t hate disco music, not all of them at least. (there were the bee gees, among others, of course, who made great disco music. try to listen to their hits like jive talkin’ or stayin’ alive.) it was more about friendship.
i disliked being in the crowd of those kind of parties. but somehow i enjoyed watching bodies moved to the beats and grooves of the music being played. some of them looked cool. i remember one of my friend, an easy going guy who had a lot of luck with girls, had always tried to reassemble every john travolta’s routines in the movie saturday night fever.
i didn’t blame him –or whoever acted like him at the time. i watched the movie. i understood why it was so… “poisonous”. there were stuff in it most teenagers couldn’t resist, though the main character was depicted as a nowhere-to-go guy: haute-couture styles of clothing, high dose of hot sexy music, graceful choreography.
i must to admit, the same “poison” almost got me burnt. with the saturday night fever soundtrack cassette i had, i tried my luck to learn the travolta tricks. i did it at home, of course; in my room with the door closed. i did it hard, day after day. but there wasn’t any luck. i couldn’t do it. it’s just not me, as simple as that.
