In 1979, just as disco’s cultural omnipresence waned, a baseball stadium on Chicago’s South Side expressed its exhaustion with a ritual of destruction and fire. During a White Sox doubleheader, a local radio station ran a promo christened “Disco Demolition Night,” where audience members got in for a discount if they brought a disco record to be blown up between games. After the explosion, the predominantly white, rock-oriented crowd, hungry for more violent catharsis, rushed the field. The melee and the aftermath of the destruction got so out of hand that the second game scheduled for the night never occurred.
As silly and weirdly personal as the whole thing was—the event was largely the brainchild of a disc jockey who was fired from his rock radio station on Christmas Eve after they changed formats to disco—“Disco sucks” took hold across culture. Disco and by extension Black music’s primacy on the charts disappeared, leaving many Black musicians uncertain of how to move forward, how to make music that wouldn’t be reflexively hated by the audience that received it. There was no unscorched terrain in which it could grow and develop; it had to reinvent itself or else face extinction.
So they cleared everything away. Slowed time to a mid-tempo bounce. Used drum machines and synthetic handclaps to punctuate the beat. (“After they said [Chic] was a disco band and we sucked, that’s when we started to use a drum machine,” Nile Rogers said in a 2011 interview.) They absorbed the oscillating synthesizer innovations of Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk and used them to build a state-of-the-art R&B that to this day no one can agree on the name of. “Post-disco” is the most common designation, though it’s still known primarily as “boogie” in the UK. There’s also “electro-funk,” “funk and soul,” on and on. As with any imprecise genre, the different names are all intended to describe something specific but they blurrily apply to almost every R&B track released in the ’80s.
This new tradition steadily differentiated itself from disco. For one, disco music was crowded. It tried to contain everything, pack as much detail as possible into every second: strings, horns, synthesizers, ecstasy, devastation. You can hear how aggressively its surface glittered in order to barely disguise the pain beneath it, to keep people dancing even as they wept. Post-disco/boogie, by contrast, makes so much space available that, despite its lushness and generous detail, you could almost think of it as minimal, a canvas where the few elements painted on it make you think as much about the space they’re contained in as you do about the strokes themselves. It doesn’t usher you into an infinitely-repeating moment on the dance floor like disco. Its appeal is slower, subtler, not quite as desperate for your attention. It makes you nod your head, lean a little further back in your seat.
One of the leading post-disco producers in the early ’80s was Kashif; his work exuded an icy cool that female R&B singers with warm, volcanic voices, such as Whitney Houston and Melba Moore, melted through gorgeously. Born in New York City and hired to play keyboards for B.T. Express when he was just a teenager, Kashif developed a sound that took the melodic and rhythmic complexity of his favorite band, Earth, Wind & Fire, and reduced it to something a single person could execute on a programmable synthesizer. Chords in his productions are rich crystalline blocks of sound. Synths fall from the sky like threads of digital rain. This is all on display in his debut single with Evelyn “Champagne” King, “I’m in Love,” made with co-producers Morrie Brown and Paul Lawrence Jones III; guitar upstrokes sound like ripples in time, synths and pianos gleam in chromatic chains around King’s voice, and, of course, there’s that voice, sparkling like sun on snow as she sings about a love so transportive it places her in the realm of dreams.
King’s career began as if she were in a biopic rushing through the events of her life. As a teenager she got a job cleaning offices at Philly International Records; a producer overheard her singing “A Change Is Gonna Come” to herself while vacuuming and immediately signed her to a deal. The “Champagne” she added to her name signified her entrance into the adult world, an upgrade from her childhood nickname of “Bubbles”; now she was associated with a drink denoting status and sophistication, despite the fact that she was still in high school. But there was something undeniably effervescent about her voice, evident from the very beginning of her career. It floated to the top of any mix she was placed in, fizzed and popped when it got there.
After releasing “Shame,” an early, enduring disco hit from 1977, King’s follow-up singles never reached the same height on the charts, until a head at RCA introduced her to Kashif. “I’m in Love,” from its titular 1981 album, became a No. 1 R&B hit, and on the follow-up, 1982’s Get Loose, helmed entirely by Kashif, Brown, and Jones, there’s a sense that every element has been refined into an express delivery system of soul and funk so crisp, so light, it feels like a chill you get from the wind. Not a song on it feels perfunctory, and it neither slows down nor lets up—there are no ballads on Get Loose, unless the closer, “I’m Just Warmin’ Up,” counts for being more of a quietly storming bedroom whisper than the others. Nor do any of the tracks feel like mere dressing for the album’s lead single, “Love Come Down,” a song so perfect that it is potentially the defining statement of post-disco R&B; there are few moments in music as incandescently ecstatic as when King lapses into a wordless “doo doo doot doo doo” before the chorus, as if her delight defies language.
But Get Loose only offers songs as feverish and fierce as the opener; King can throw herself into various highs and lows, overwhelming emotions and embittered jealousies, and the music is always shaping them into their sharpest forms. She even makes the title track, a song about abandoning the stresses of the material world to go out dancing, feel lived-in, like there is a complex sequence of emotions running behind it. “I’m gonna get down with the groove/Get funky tonight,” she sings as if there were no other choice, as if she just can’t carry the tension in her body anymore.
I wouldn’t hesitate to call Get Loose the post-disco Thriller, at least if Thriller, released just three months after it, wasn't itself a post-disco record. But where Thriller signified the arrival of a megastar, of a force in pop so massive it was inescapable as a black hole, Get Loose was more about the music itself, the various mutations of a distinctly Black tradition, reinvented both by market forces and the auteurs and svengalis within it until it achieved a kind of chilled perfection. This music dances, not to draw attention to itself, but because dancing is in its design.
