Assignment 1:(Thesis Statement due by July 23 evening, paper due by July 30 evening) For this assignment you are asked to engage one of the themes from this course (appropriation, race, gender, etc.)
'I Will Survive': Musical Mappings of Queer Social Space in a Disco Anthem
Author(syf 1 D G L Q H + X E E s
Source: Popular Music, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May, 2007yf S S 4
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4500315
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Popular Music (2007yf 9 R O X P H & R S \ U L J K W " & D P E U L G J H 8 Q L Y H U V L W \ 3 U H V V S S 4
doi:10.1017/S0261143007001250 Printed in the United Kingdom
'I Will Survive': musical
mappings of queer social space
in a disco anthem
NADINE HUBBS
U-M Women's Studies Program, 2229 Lane Hall, 204 S. State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1290, USA
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
This essay reconsiders the constituencies of fans and detractors present at prime and bursting
1970s dicsos. It argues for a more gender-inclusive conception of discos multiracial 'gay' revellers
and for a particular convoluted conception of 'homophobia' as this applies to the Middle-American
youths who raged against disco in midsummer 1979. Their historic eruption at Chicago's
Comiskey Park came just weeks after the chart reign of Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive', today
a classic emblem of gay culture in the post-Stonewall and AIDS eras and arguably disco's greatest
anthem. Disco inspired lovers and haters, too, among music critics. Critical adulation and vitriol
are conjoined in the present reading of musical rhetoric, which explores disco's celebrated power
to induce rapture in devotees at the social margins while granting anti-disco critics' charge of
inexpressivity in its vocals. In 'Survive' musical expressivity is relocated in the high-production
instrumentals, where troping of learned and vernacular, European and Pan-American, sacred and
profane timbres and idioms defines a euphoric space of difference and transcendence. The use of
minor mode for triumphant purposes is also a striking marker of difference in 'Survive' and is
among the factors at work in the song's prodigious afterlife.
On 12 July 1979 the Chicago White Sox hosted the Detroit Tigers in a double header at
Comiskey Park. Also scheduled was a promotional event for the Chicago album-
oriented rock (AORyf V W D W L R Q : / 8 3
7 K H / R R S
O H G E \ D \ R X Q J G L V F M R F N H \ Q D P H d
Steve Dahl. Against the chant of some 90,000 present - 'Disco sucks!' - Dahl towed a
dumpster-load of disco records onto centre field and detonated it. A mob of young
white males stormed the field, torching records and wreaking mayhem. Among the
displays of anti-disco backlash in the late Carter-early Reagan years, including
incarnations of the 'Disco sucks' motto as bumper-sticker slogan, punk song,
and tee-shirt inscription, that day's near-riot in the heartland stands as the most
menacingly emblematic.1
Such a violent reaction must seem impossibly disproportionate to its object, if
that object is taken to be nothing more than a style of popular music. But there was
more at work and at stake than such a surface-bound reading can admit. The cultural
crusaders of Comiskey were defending not just themselves but society from the
encroachment of the racial other, of 'foreign' values, and of 'disco fags' - symbolised
Hollywood-style in the bodily and dramatic extravagances of John Travolta's Saturday
Night Fever (1977yf S U R W D J R Q L V W 7 R Q \ 0 D Q H U R Z K R V H P D U N H G H W K Q L F L W \ D Q G 4 L D Q D -
swathed chic was counterbalanced by conspicuous whiteness and heterosexuality.2
231
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232 Nadine Hubbs
By now various writers have retrospectively located disco's origins in DJs spinning
black music at gay Manhattan dance clubs (e.g. Cummings 1975; Tucker 1986; Thomas
1989yf D Q G P D Q \ V R X U F H V U L J K W O \ O R F D W H E R W K U D F L V W D Q G K R P R S K R E L F L P S H W X V H V L Q W K e
anti-disco backlash (e.g. Tucker 1986; EMP 2002yf % X W L Q W K H Z R U G K R P R S K R E L F Z D s
not in general circulation.3 And in 1980 Diana Ross could proclaim 'I'm Coming Out'
against a disco beat without raising mainstream eyebrows or controversy: The song
rose to number five on the pop charts, its double-voiced meaning hidden from all but
a scattering of insiders.4
Thus, in the event, the threats against which the Comiskey Park mob reacted
surely included such 'faggotries' as ballroom dancing, fashion consciousness, and
music that used horns, strings and harps.5 Real men ca 1979 found their music at AOR
arena concerts, adhered to a jeans-and-tee-shirt dress code, and by their inept dancing
and off-key singing affirmed the redoubtability of their gender and sexual identities.6
We can only imagine the disco inferno in centre field had many of those guys known
about the real, live faggots, dykes, and others who created and thrilled to disco's
endless beat.
Phantom attacks: homophobia and the unreal enemy
In the historical scene just sketched I would highlight two points that diverge from
familiar representations. First, I regard disco as a musical, social, and cultural space
with critical African-American, Latino/a, and variously queer involvements. The
customary naming of gay men in this last slot perpetuates an effacement of queer
women in male-centred narrations of 'gay' history, and of dance-clubbing queer
persons of other configurations of sex, gender identity, and object choice. Historical
accounts locate disco's origins in Manhattan clubs whose clientele were African
American and Latino, and gay - meaning: gay men. But we need to extend our
perspective on disco beyond the instant and place of its birth - beyond New York,
beyond that moment ca 1969-1970 and the handful of dance clubs in which DJs first
spun mixes now identifiable as disco or proto-disco. Outside Manhattan, in large,
medium-sized, and small cities across the US, many gay bars and clubs of the era were
gender- and sex-integrated. And their male and female clientele alike often called
themselves 'gay' with no thought that the term applied more to one sex than another.
Gay men and lesbians, drag queens and 'fag hags' were all part of the 1970s-1980s
disco scene in countless queer locales, whether or not at disco's New York debut.7
Second, in pointing to the presence of homophobia in the anti-disco backlash, I
expressly am not using 'homophobia' as simply equivalent to 'fear of known homo-
sexual persons' in the disco world. Certainly this is one meaning I intend to invoke
here. But I would cast a broader definition of 'homophobia' so as to capture also the
far greater phenomenon of fear and loathing towards any perceived aura of homo-
sexuality (often figured as gender crossingyf L Q D F X O W X U H L Q Z K L F K N Q R Z O H G J H R I D F W X D l
homosexuals and homosexuality was taboo, avoided and denied. Thus I view disco as
a musical and social phenomenon situated within the overarching twentieth-century
Anglo-American condition of 'homosexual panic' theorised by Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick (1985, pp. 88-9 etc.; 1990, pp. 184-8 esp.yf .
In Sedgwick's formulation, the establishment of proper masculine heterosexual
subjectivity simultaneously requires and stigmatises male homosocial bonds, whose
rules of engagement are shifting, arbitrary, and often self-contradictory. Only men
who successfully navigate the brutalities of this double-binding path may claim the
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'I Will Survive' 233
privileges of material, power and knowledge that constitute masculine entitlement.
Meanwhile, the threat of the unsuccessful alternative motivates considerable anxiety,
and many violent eruptions. And it motivates a great deal more: In modern patriar-
chy, a cultural system structured by relations of exchange between men, the impera-
tives of male homo/heterosexual definition regulate definition, representation, and
knowledge of every kind, and thus give rise to an 'epistemology of the closet'.8
Sedgwick's theory can lend support to my assertion that homophobic reaction to
disco in the 1970s and 1980s was often focused on the mere (attributedyf V W \ O H R f
homosexuality: The culture of homosexual panic rendered its actual substance so
taboo as to be irrelevant, if not irreal. Under a regime in which male homosocial
relations are 'at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds', as
Sedgwick (1990, pp. 186-7yf Q R W H V
V H O I L J Q R U D Q F H > L V @ F R Q V W L W X W L Y H O \ H Q I R U F H > G @
7 o
possess knowledge about homosexuality is itself suspicious. Thus, the function of
secrecy in the modern social and sexual economy is 'not to conceal knowledge, so
much as to conceal knowledge of the knowledge' (Miller 1988, p. 206yf $ Q G V R Z e
shouldn't be surprised that homophobia in Anglo-American modernity has fre-
quently manifested itself not only in explicit anti-homosexual statements and acts, but
in violent attacks on a homosexuality evoked subliminally, as phantom. This mech-
anism is illustrated vividly throughout Vito Russo's (1987yf D Q D O \ V H V R I P L G W Z H Q W L H W K -
century Hollywood cinema: In one instance after another, implicitly homosexual
relationships and characters are killed off in horrific fashion. But even before their
extinguishment these unfortunate creatures smoulder. What precedes their gruesome
deaths is something less than real life.
In our twenty-first-century present, homophobia is often overt and directed at
queer persons who are granted realness, their actual existence explicitly acknowl-
edged - as the current US battle over gay marriage illustrates. We must therefore
summon a historicising perspective to apprehend the homophobia in Middle Ameri-
ca's anti-disco furore ca 1979, for homophobia in this context was frequently enacted
through assaults on queerness that simultaneously denied queer existence. This same
perspective can help us understand and appreciate the role of twentieth-century
queer subcultural space, including that of disco: It served not just to provide contact,
safety and acceptance, but crucially to confirm queer persons' very existence and
intact survival in a world that would make of them, if not monsters, then walking
ghosts, nonentities.9
Transcendence in A-minor: the musical rhetoric of difference in
'Survive'
The historical context just outlined grounds the analytic frame into which I will place
my consideration of Gloria Gaynor's disco anthem 'I Will Survive'. Released in 1978,
the song attained platinum-single status, pinning the No. 1 spot on the pop charts
from 20 January through 25 May 1979 in the weeks leading up to South Chicago's
anti-disco tumult. But the track enjoyed even greater success in club rotation and
endures still as a queer dance classic. In my reading, 'Survive' stands as the archetypal
emblem of disco as a musico-social movement born of and bespeaking a cross-
subcultural mingling in the margins. I hear in the song a rich interplay of musical and
verbal discourses of difference, yielding a pop-cultural trope whose residual signs of
otherness were perceptible in the following ways: (iyf W K H \ F R X O G H O X G H D S S U H K H Q V L R Q ,
and thus 'pass' in mainstream culture, or (iiyf W K H \ F R X O G E H D S S U H K H Q G H G D Q G V R D \f
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234 Nadine Hubbs
A A A A A
8 -7 6 5 #7
Am Dm G C F BW Esus4 E
//// //// //// //// //// //// //// ////
i iv WVII III WVI ii"7 V4
Figure 1. 'I Will survive' (Fekaris-Perrenyf E D V L F Y R F D O P H O R G \ R Y H U R V W L Q D W R .
provoke disfavour, fear and loathing, on behalf of the status quo or, alternately, (byf
inspire identification on the basis of experienced marginalisation.
Vis-a-vis this last possibility, (iiyf E \f: from a marginal subject standpoint, the title
and lyrics of 'I Will Survive', particularly given their appearance around the time of
the Comiskey Park fracas, already resonate beyond their narrative surface10 - which
depicts, in the first person, one woman's experience of romantic abandonment and
eventual hard-won transcendence. Vis-a-vis possibilities (iiyf D \f and (byf E R W K J L Y H n
music's mysterious, often subliminal, seemingly inscrutable powers, we might expect
special potency to attach to musical markers of difference - that these would be
potently threatening or potently cathartic, depending on the perceiver.
A host of musical signifiers in 'Survive' serve to telegraph, embroider upon, and
reinforce its textual thematics of marginalisation and transcendence. The first of these
to greet the listener is the song's high-drama opening gambit, which launches with a
sweeping, Liberace-esque piano arpeggio, up and down several octaves of an E
dominant-seven-flat-nine chord. The singer then enters andante and, with quasi-
recitative accompaniment from the rhythm section, presents the song's essential vocal
melody over the eight-bar A-minor falling-fifths harmonic ostinato (i.e. chord patternyf
that will repeat throughout (see the Figureyf , Q L W V U H S H W L W L R Q W K H R V W L Q D W R G H W H U P L Q H s
the song's form - which proceeds gradually by the addition and subsequent sub-
traction of instrumental layers, and so exemplifies pop-rock 'accumulative form' (see
Spicer 2004yf 5 K H W R U L F D O O \ W K H R V W L Q D W R L Q L W V G H V F H Q G L Q J F R X U V H D Q G P L Q R U P R G H ,
evokes the Baroque lament. All these features combine for a mise en scene in which
'Survive' musically asserts difference from its first notes and establishes a distinct
conversance with imported and 'exotic' musical idioms. With the start of the second
stanza, the slow intro shifts to an upbeat groove, and the sparse recitative-like scoring
is abandoned for a denser mix: the dance track begins.
I mentioned the use of minor mode in 'Survive'. In concert music, minor is
semantically marked as the 'sad' mode and, in relation to the conventionally norma-
tive major, the 'other' mode. A shift from minor to major here can powerfully signify
a move from tragedy to transcendence - as exemplified in Mahler's 'Resurrection'
Symphony, with its journey from C-minor death to Eb-major transcendence. Minor-
mode usage in 1970s album-oriented rock is largely comparable. The minor frequently
arises in slow-tempo tender or tragic love ballads - the Rolling Stones' 'Angie' (No. 1,
1973yf I R U H [ D P S O H D Q G L Q V O R Z W R P L G W H P S R
P H D Q L Q J
V R Q J V O L N H / H G = H S S H O L Q
s
'Stairway to Heaven' (1971yf D Q G $ H U R V P L W K
V
' U H D P 2 Q
1 R \f. But up-tempo,
danceable AOR anthems are typically in major. Examples from 1979 include Cheap
Trick's 'I Want You to Want Me' (No. 7, 1979yf D Q G % L O O E R D U G
V 1 X P E H U 2 Q H V R Q g
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'I Will Survive' 235
throughout the latter half of that Comiskey summer, The Knack's 'My Sharona'
(arguably in C, though it spends much of its time on a G-blues riff signifying heavy
sexual tensionyf $ O L V W R I U H S U H V H Q W D W L Y H V R Q J V I U R P H D U O L H U L Q W K H G H F D G H F R X O G L Q F O X G e
Thin Lizzy's 'The Boys Are Back in Town' (No. 12,1976yf W K H 6 W R Q H V
, W
V 2 Q O \ 5 R F N
N
Roll' (No. 16, 1974yf D Q G * U D Q G ) X Q N
V
: H
U H D Q $ P H U L F D Q % D Q G
1 R \f, all
characteristic rock anthems in major.
Like Mahler's 'Resurrection', 'Survive' begins in the realm of minor-mode
tragedy. The change of tempo at the second stanza corresponds to a shift of tone in the
lyrics and a new direction in the narrative, leaving tragedy behind. The protagonist
has gone from abandonment and misery to Signifyin(gyf V D V V V L J Q D O O H G V W U D L J K W D Z D y
by the line 'And so you're back from outer space' (see below for further discussion of
Signifyin[g] practicesyf 7 K H U H V W R I W K H V R Q J Z L O O V W D \ L Q W K H X S W H P S R J U R R Y H Z L W K R X t
ever moving from the minor mode. In thus employing minor, this disco anthem
differs from contemporary rock anthems of comparable upbeat tempo and narrative
tone. Interestingly, disco anthems in general very often used the minor mode, even in
the most celebratory instances, like KC and the Sunshine Band's 'Shake Your Booty'
(No. 1, 1976yf 6 \ O Y H V W H U
V
< R X 0 D N H 0 H ) H H O 0 L J K W \ 5 H D O \f' (No. 36, 1979yf D Q G W K e
Weather Girls' 'It's Raining Men' (1982yf $ O O R I W K H V H V R Q J V G H S O R \ D Y H U V H F K R U X s
scheme in which the verses are in minor, and the euphoric choruses emphasise major
sonorities. Minor-ness in 'Survive', on the other hand, is unyielding. As such it
extends disco's preoccupation with minor mode, while offering narrative implica-
tions that the protagonist even in her triumph always carries some mark of her past,
formative tragedy. Overall, the frequent use of minor in upbeat disco anthems
including 'I Will Survive' was a marker of difference in relation to contemporary
AOR, and this difference registered syntactically as well as semantically - in the latter
instance, as a difference of affect, of feeling-tone.
Another crucial signifier here is vocalism. In her book Hole in Our Soul, Martha
Bayles (1994, p. 281yf Z U L W H V W K D W * O R U L D * D \ Q R U F D Q Q R W V L Q J D Q D V V H V V P H Q W V K e
elsewhere levels at Jimi Hendrix, among othersyf % D \ O H V F D O O V * D \ Q R U D
S D Q W L Q J ,
sighing, yelping, moaning amateur'. She may be simply confused in casting Gaynor's
lot among the 'Love to Love You' Babies - that is, with Donna Summer and other
climax queens of disco.12 For in fact Gaynor made no conspicuous entries into what
Bayles calls the 'orgasmic sound effects' genre. Still, it seems perfectly logical, and
somewhat telling, that Bayles wouldn't like her singing: It's not Aretha's, Chaka's, or
even Mariah's singing, and in songs like 'I Will Survive' it undoubtedly stands outside
the vocal traditions of R&B and gospel. Such vocalism has drawn fire from certain
R&B devotees including Bayles and Nelson George, who criticise disco in terms
of its alleged 'inflectionless vocals', 'metronomelike beat', and cold, passionless,
dehumanised affect (George 1988, p. 154yf .
Queer jouissance on the 'borderline'
Shoulder to shoulder with Bayles's and George's statements I will place those of
Richard Dyer and John Gill, both writing on queer experiences of disco. In his classic
essay 'In defence of disco', Dyer (1979, p. 413yf Z U R W H W K D W D Q
H V F D S H I U R P W K e
confines of popular song into ecstasy is very characteristic of disco'. And Gill (1995,
p. 134yf P R U H U H F H Q W O \ H [ D O W H G G L V F R G D Q F H P X V L F D V
W K H R Q H I R U P R I P X V L F Z K L F K L s
bound up in something that closely resembles Roland Barthes's notion of jouissance,
that is, rapture, bliss, or transcendence'.
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236 Nadine Hubbs
By constructing a view that embraces both the adulations of Dyer and Gill and
the vitriol of Bayles and George, I find a coherent basis for interpretation of disco
language in 'I Will Survive'. I have to agree with Bayles (1994, p. 278yf W K D W G L V F o
'leached all the emotion out of the vocals', at least by the standards of gospel, blues,
and R&B styles, with their expressive pitch bending, melisma, and other vocal
inflections.13 Although many of disco's most celebrated vocalists - most of whom
were African-American women - came out of these traditions, and although disco's
musical language is rooted in the fundamentally African-American language of
pop, still it eschews the established rhetoric of emotionalism and expression in
African-American musics.
Bayles and George would end the story here, but the disco jouissance of Dyer and
Gill only begins at this point. Thus in my reading, the affect and passion that find such
brilliant expression in African-American popular idioms are not forsaken in 'Survive'.
Rather, these are relocated in the music, by means of a troping move that also
transforms the emotional palette. In place of the vocal (or vocally conceivedyf L Q I O H F -
tions and timbral shadings of African-American music, the song's construction of
sentiment instrumentally invokes timbres and gestures imported from European and
Latin music - specifically that of the cafe, street and carnival. In this regard we hear,
for instance, the Latin percussion in 'Survive' and likewise its trumpets and
saxophone, which invoke the bright, broadly vibrating timbre characteristic of both
Gallic torch singer and mariachi brass. The timbres of strings and harp are highbrow
Europeanisms and thus here, as in Motown and Philly Soul, bespeak upward
mobility, while the strings' particular idiom in 'Survive' further infuses them with a
tragic vernacular elegance redolent of cabaret and tango.
The affective sensibility that issues from this semiotic juncture is distinctly
foreign. Its musical symbols mark it as Latin-Mediterranean and Catholic, but it's the
Catholicism not so much of the Vatican as of Mardi Gras, less Sunday morning than
Saturday night: the Catholicism not of the Church but of the streets, the little people.
Musical affect here occupies the marked category of the sentimental - a sentimentality
further marked by virtue of its explicitly foreign flavour: adult, worldly and sensual,
as compared with the adolescent, naive, and sexually neurotic rock of the time;
indulgent, in-your-face and theatrical, compared with the stoical-else-childlike
Protestant sentimentality that's channelled through Disney to mainstream America.
The distinctive emotionalism emergent from this minor-mode trope is that of a frank
sentimentality at once tragic and richly celebratory, earthy and embodied, and ulti-
mately triumphant, transcendent - but on a human, not monumental, scale: That is,
triumph is tethered to a vulnerable humility and candid reckoning of la condition
humaine.14
Analysis of this musical trope in 'Survive' can suggest some of the ways in which
disco might have served the identification needs of its amalgamated audience in the
margins, and even become a vehicle for their rapture. Unpacking the language of
'Survive' reveals it as a commingling of high and low, art and life, that is neither one
nor another of these: Like Bakhtin's Rabelaisian carnival it 'belongs to the borderline
between art and life' - though while it lasts 'there is no other life outside it' (Bakhtin
1984, p. 7yf 7 K H D I I H F W L Y H D Q G V H P D Q W L F U L F K Q H V V D U L V L Q J I U R P V X F K F R P P L Q J O L Q g
distinguishes disco in its musical and other dimensions, as some commentators have
apprehended. Ken Tucker, for example, amidst other critics' mutually parroting
characterisations of disco as emotionally flat and essentially superficial, has
listened perceptively to songs and uncovered possibilities for coded meaning within
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'I Will Survive' 237
ostensibly shallow surfaces. In the flat, emotionless voices of Chic in 'Good Times' and
their endless repetition of the song's titular opening line, Tucker (1986, p. 531yf
recognises 'an achingly ironic anthem for the recession 1970s'. He hears the song, in
other words, in an integrated domain of musical form, vocalism and lyrics, as a
double-voiced discourse.
Comparably, various phrases throughout the lyrics of 'Survive' are readable as
figures of Signifyin(gyf D V W \ O H I R F X V H G W U R S L Q J G R X E O H Y R L F H G P R G H R I G L V F R X U V H W K D t
juxtaposes playful performativity and serious intent, and has functioned centrally in
African-American discursive culture (Gates 1998, pp. 44-124yf , Q Q R W L Q J W K H 6 L J Q L I \ -
in(gyf I O D Y R X U L Q
6 X U Y L Y H
Z H P L J K W X Q G H U O L Q H L \f its congruity with both the African-
American involvements in disco production and reception, and the troping and
multivalence I read in other, musical dimensions of 'Survive'; and (iiyf T X H H U F X O W X U H
s
long, admiring engagement with African-American Signifyin(gyf D Q G W H V W L I \ L Q
V S H H F K ,
which has fundamentally influenced camp expressive codes. Like Signifyin(gyf F D P p
speech is double voiced and trafficks in ambiguity, affording a surface meaning to
hostile outsiders and another, deeper meaning to attuned allies. Camp speech and
sensibility are distinguished, too, by piquant juxtaposition in the realms of style and
intention, characteristically through a Wildean convergence of grave seriousness
and transparent artifice.
In 'Survive', at the second stanza, Gaynor sings, 'So you're back from outer
space / I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face'; and in the
sixth stanza, 'You see me - somebody new / I'm not that chained-up little person still
in love with you'. These lyrics foreground emotional ambiguity, juxtaposed tragedy
and flippancy, and pungent irony, all of which resonate simultaneously with gay
camp and African-American Signifyin(gyf 7 K H V H V X E F X O W X U D O H [ S U H V V L Y H F R G H V D U H D O V o
evoked by the heroine's insistent engagement with earthbound, trivial tangibles
('I shoulda changed that stupid lock, I shoulda made you leave your key'yf L Q W K H I D F e
of her existential crisis ('At first I was afraid, I was petrified / Kept thinkin' I could
never live without you by my side'yf .
A similarly shared sensibility is readable in disco's thematics of sophistication
- a sophistication peculiarly inflected by a sort of gritty candour. This species of
sophistication emanated from the racial and sexual margins, and was little repre-
sented in mainstream culture. Its representation in disco arose from the resourceful
troping of musical emblems of high Europeanism with emblems of the vernacular:
European, Latin, and African American - though the impulse seems less to access
the sophistication of privilege and entitlement than to assert a sophistication 'of
one's own', of difference.15 A bolder, more defiant assertion of difference in
'Survive' may be read in the song's lyrics, at the pivotal line, 'Oh, as long as I know
how to love I know I'll stay alive'. In this radically trans-valuative statement, the
(anti-yf K H U R L Q H L Q G L U H F W D G G U H V V W R K H U R Q F H R S S U H V V R U O R F D W H V W K H F R Q G L W L R Q I R U K H r
survival in her ability to love - thus in the very ability (or, vulnerabilityyf W K D W K D d
brought her to the brink of disaster. Having cast off her chains she does not ascend
but rather, digs more deeply into the patchy terrain of flesh-and-blood human
existence.
This story is not that of the winners and masters of the world: Indeed, her
narrative and its emphases reveal our protagonist as a sort of anti-Bill Gates, or
anti-Trump. One classic interpretive strategy would be to explain the song's pivotal
statement, in connection with the narrator's gender, in the familiar terms of Freudian
'female masochism', and thereby add it to the annals of status-quo misogynist
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238 Nadine Hubbs
knowledge. And perhaps that is how some listeners have interpreted 'Survive'; we
know that many people found much to despise in this music. But the song's multi-
dimensional assertion of difference militates against its relegation to the status quo.
Moreover, its singer, as a 'disco queen', occupied a special subject position, possessing
polygendrous, polyracial powers of voice. Iain Chambers (1985, p. 246, n. 8yf D O O X G H s
to this: 'Doubly emarginated by sex and race', he writes, 'the more "extreme"
accounts of sexual and social margins were widely deemed - by both white and black
audiences - to be the "natural" property of black women singers'.
I read the singer's statement - of openness to life and love despite her
suffering - as trans-valuative rather than normative, and as occupying a subject
position demarcated not by feminine gender, but by its cognate, otherness, embrac-
ing here various racial and sexual others of both genders. I further hear this textual
message of asserted difference and resilience echoed musically in the song's uncon-
ventional use of mode. 'Survive' modally constructs transcendence in the margins
of 'minor-ity', and so here too, musically as narratively, reverses the norms of
triumph and tragedy. Difference in 'Survive', as I have argued, is also conveyed
musically by the use of classical and other 'exotic' style markers; relatively un-
inflected vocalism; and salient (non-rockyf L Q V W U X P H Q W D O V Z K L F K F D U U \ P X F K R I W K e
expressive weight in this track and invoke (by timbre and idiomyf D
I R U H L J Q
,
carnivalesque sentimentality. The song's lyrics and narrative further link with dif-
ference and marginality in evoking African-American and queer discursive styles;
non-hegemonic, un-masterful values; and a distinctly mortal, non-epic transcend-
ence. Here, in such freighted, tropic intersections of textual and musical discourses,
we might well perceive the possibility of queer rapture and bliss, of Barthesian
jouissance in a disco song.
And indeed, the disco revellers in Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the
Dance live for the next song that will leave them 'on the dance floor with heads back,
eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata'. Some, on drugs,
'enter the discotheque with the radiant faces of the Magi coming to the Christ child'
(Holleran 1978, pp. 38, 115yf ) R U + R O O H U D Q
V J D \ G L V F R W K H T X H L V D V L W H R I F R Q V H F U D W L R Q ,
and his central characters Malone and Sutherland are, ultimately, martyrs to its cause:
the pursuit of male beauty and the ecstatic pleasures of dancing. Throughout the
novel these pursuits are figured (albeit amidst a gay society depicted as ethnically
and religiously diverseyf L Q W H U P V R I D & D W K R O L F U H O L J L R V L W \ Z K L F K D O V R J U R X Q G V a
sacralisation of the abject:
What can you say about a success? Nothing! But the failures - that tiny subspecies of homo- sexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff! That fascinates me. The fags who consider themselves worthless because they are queer, and who fall into
degradation and sordidness! It was those Christ befriended, not the assholes in the ad agencies uptown who go to St. Kitts in February!16 (Holleran 1978, p. 18yf
In passages like this one Holleran articulates a particular camp thematics - a senti-
mentalised trans-valuation of failure and success that resonates sympathetically with
the central, defiantly 'un-masterful' message of 'I Will Survive' (in what I have
labelled the song's pivotal lineyf , Q G R L Q J V R K H D O V R H [ S U H V V H V D & D W K R O L F L V W S U H R F F X -
pation that surfaces frequently in camp imagery and, I have argued, imbues the
musical rhetoric of 'Survive'. 17
Holleran's queer disco scene further makes vivid, in visual and social realms, the
carnivalesque note that I remark in the music of 'Survive'. His 1970s discotheque is
painted in expressly carnivalesque tones, and parallels in multiple dimensions the
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'I Will Survive' 239
Medieval-Renaissance European carnival anatomised by Bakhtin (1984, p. 10yf 7 K L s
latter celebrated in chaotic, colourful and sensuous fashion a 'temporary liberation
from the prevailing truth and from the established order ... [and] suspension of all
hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions'. It is thus indistinguishable
from Holleran's Manhattan gay disco:
They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other's desire, in a strange democracy whose only ticket of admission was physical beauty - and not even that sometimes. All else was strictly classless. ... It was a democracy such as the world ... never permits, but which flourished in the little room on the twelfth floor of a factory building on West Thirty-third Street, because its
central principle was the most anarchic of all: erotic love.
What a carnival of people. (Holleran 1978, pp. 40-1yf
We might note that this gay disco is further indistinguishable from the gay nightclub
of pre-disco and pre-Stonewall times. Indeed, queer bars and clubs had long served to
reproduce the carnival's collapsings and reversals of social norms, hierarchies and
castes. I would suggest that one factor in disco's extraordinary power over queer
listeners was its abstract encoding of the gay bar's carnivalesque ecstasies, including
high-low collapsings, into musical language - whose decoding (however uncon-
sciousyf E \ L W V D X G L H Q F H Z D V F X H G E \ G L V F R
V F R Q F U H W H L Q Y R F D W L R Q R I P X V L F D O H P E O H P V R f
the carnival via Latin-Mediterranean popular idioms.
Survival signs
Since its original appearance, the polysemic richness and queer resonances readable
in 'Survive' have helped to inspire multiple applications and reincarnations of the
song. Its textual message of defiant and enduring presence was already well tailored
to queer identification needs, but this message and the song's titular statement took on
even deeper meaning with the dawn of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. As Wayne
Studer (1994, p. 269yf Q R W H V
, W
V Q R D F F L G H Q W W K D W W K L V 1 X P E H U 2 Q H V P D V K E H F D P H D n
anthem for the gay community in 1979 and remained so for several years thereafter.
Given all that's happened since then, it resonated more than ever'. Thus, from the
1980s until now Gloria Gaynor's rendition has survived as a gay anthem. It has also
inspired cover versions, often non-disco and non-queer-attuned in style, by Billie Jo
Spears (country, 1979yf & K D Q W D \ 6 D Y D J H K R X V H G D Q F H \f, Diana Ross (dance,
1995yf & D N H D O W H U Q D W L Y H U R F N \f, and others.
But the paradigmatic status of 'I Will Survive' as gay anthem is also vividly
illustrated in a pair of discursive and performative sites in which the song does not
appear literally. Close listening reveals the presence of 'Survive' as musical and
text-thematic basis for highly queer-inflected singles by two of the most queer-
identified acts in popular music: Pet Shop Boys' 'It's a Sin' (No. 9, 1987yf D Q G ( U D V X U H
s
'Love to Hate You' (1991yf ( D F K V R Q J X V H V
6 X U Y L Y H V I D O O L Q J I L I W K V K D U P R Q L F R V W L Q D W o
as its own harmonic structure and sets this to an upbeat dance groove. Erasure also
cops the distinctive string riff from 'Survive', unveiling it as the climactic foreground
event (not mere counter-melodyyf L Q
/ R Y H W R + D W H < R X
F D U U L H G K H U H R Q W K H Y R L F H R I a
colossal swirling string synth. Moreover, both duos made their homages explicit in
1990s concert tours featuring medley renditions that segued or morphed their own
songs into excerpts from 'I Will Survive'.1s
Particularly noteworthy is Pet Shop Boys's use of 'Survive' in their stunning,
highly theatrical exit number, 'It's a Sin / I Will Survive'. Again Catholicism
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240 Nadine Hubbs
surfaces vividly, at once fetishised and repudiated here: vocalist Neil Tennant
personifies a decadently gilded and red-sequined pope (or perhaps cardinalyf D Q d
the onstage dancers monk-acolytes. The performance begins with Tennant's
black female co-singer intoning on the darkened stage, in all-white nun's garb, the
slow intro of 'I Will Survive'. Then Tennant enters in papal procession to sing
'It's a Sin', an inexorable dance groove whose lyrics and onstage drama create a
battle between good and evil in the form of religiosity and sensuality, accompanied
throughout by strange and beautiful video (projected behind the live performersyf
created by the late gay film-maker Derek Jarman. Ultimately the performance
presents a reversal of the warring terms' conventional values, with a polymor-
phously queer sensuality winning out over Church authority at the climactic
moment: The nun rips off her wimple and habit to reveal a sultry sequined
gown, and reclaims the soloist's role with a florid, full-throated, a tempo return to
'Survive'.
The medley closes with the singers trading title lines from each song and so
recapping the drama's outcome - 'It's a sin ... I will survive' having come to
convey: 'Though condemned and maligned, I will survive'. Pet Shop Boys' troping
of 'Survive' mines it for gay emblematisation and for a dramatic-narrative progres-
sion from tragedy to transcendence, thus staging the queer significance that had
undoubtedly attached to the song for many fans. Enacting scenes from a queer
imaginary, their performance reveals rich identificatory affordances - of the song as
a sort of queer Bildungsroman, modelling a triumphant queer subjectivity that has
been idealised in prescriptive and descriptive, individual and collective queer
realms; and of disco as queer religion.19 Pet Shop Boys' use of religious imagery in
such a queer context is also suggestive vis-a-vis the Catholicism that surfaces in
Holleran's gay-disco novel and in my reading of disco's musical semiotics: In all
these instances the Church is rendered as Ur-source of fetishised theatricality, and
of passionate sensuality. And all three instances manage to invoke a Catholic
religiosity while ultimately averting and even inverting Christian condemnations of
extra-marital and homo-configured sexuality - though, notably, without ever
deglamourising the Church. These Catholiphilic moments are not, in my reading,
merely religious kitsch. Camp, however - in which juxtaposition of artifice and
seriousness is of the essence - is surely a factor. For the uses of religious imagery
here spotlight the ritual, visual and sensual splendour of Catholicism - that is,
reveal and revel in its elaborate artifice - while implicitly undercutting the
associated doctrine by bracketing its (nowyf H Y L G H Q W V H O I V H U L R X V Q H V V .
A somewhat different invocation of 'Survive' as gay anthem surfaced in the
mid-1990s, as the song began to appear as an audible indicator of queerness in media
products targeted to mainstream audiences. These included movies like Adventures of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994yf D Q G , Q D Q G 2 X W \f, and the TV sitcom Will and
Grace (in a 1999 episodeyf 7 K H
6 X U Y L Y H
X V D J H R I , Q D Q G 2 X W W \ S L I L H V W K H J H Q U H , Q W K L s
comedy Kevin Kline, playing the sexually ambivalent main character, is forcibly
outed by a disco song. The pivotal scene shows Kline's usually reserved character
rendered helpless, compelled wildly and with abandon to move his feet and shake his
booty when a disco record comes on. Thus at last, according to the (comedicyf O R J L F R f
the narrative, are Kline's true essence and sexuality revealed to himself and the
audience: as irrepressible disco fool, and (formerlyyf U H S U H V V H G J D \ P D Q , Q W K L s
mass-release moment, the song that functions as gay/straight acid test is Gloria
Gaynor's 'I Will Survive'.20
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'I Will Survive' 241
Conclusion: sounds of queer social space
All these references to 'Survive' draw on its singular semiotic potency as gay-
disco emblem. But the foregoing analysis of signification in 'Survive' may also
have relevance for other, less emblematic disco anthems. One might infer as much
from Ken Barnes's liner notes for Rhino Records' Disco Years collection: Comment-
ing on Vicki Sue Robinson's 'Turn the Beat Around', Barnes (1990yf Q R W H V W K D W
P R V t
exceptional disco songs ... are in minor keys', and wonders as to 'the significance of
this phenomenon'. I have argued here that its significance is one of difference,
created and played out in disco within a rich web of signifying elements,
musical, textual and social. The difference thus articulated registered with disco's
worshippers and enemies alike, engendering 'the most self-contained genre in the
history of pop, the most clearly defined, and the most despised' (Tucker 1986,
p. 524yf .
But as I noted at the outset, disco was despised not simply as a music, but as a
social and cultural phenomenon. It has been called 'the most truly interracial popular
music since early rock 'n' roll' (Hamm 1995, p. 205yf : K L O H L W P D \ E H W U X H W K L s
statement, constructing a coalition across racial difference, omits the further relevant
subject inflections, of gender and sexuality, by which disco constituted a coalition
around shared experiences of difference, including stigmatisation, marginalisation
and invisibilisation. This point was not lost on everyone, however. As Comiskey Park
suggests, some saw in disco not just blacks, Latino/as and queers, but blacks,
Latino/as and queers coming together in ecstasy.21
Disco has been accused of brazen commercialism and criticised in its
function as fodder for the global glitterati at exclusive venues like Studio 54
(though Dyer [1979] has argued that disco was simply more transparent in its
materialism than rock, and thus the authentic/inauthentic opposition typically
assumed here is falseyf % X W G L V F R V H U Y H G W R R D V V R X Q G W U D F N I R U D E L J S D U W y
among various little people, a ritual of radical embodiment enacted by radically
stigmatised bodies. As a musical discourse, disco's power 'both to describe and to
induce rapture' (Gill 1995, p. 134yf K D G P X F K W R G R Z L W K L W V U H Y H U E H U D Q W W U R S L Q g
of other, also othered, musical and verbal discourses.22 As such, its beat pulsed
with the revels of sinners and pleasures of the scorned. And its ecstasies were
the improbable, transcendent ecstasies of persons against whose ecstasy sanctions
were drawn and punishments exacted, but who proclaimed nevertheless, 'I Will
Survive'.
Acknowledgements
The first incarnation of this essay was a paper presented at Feminist Theory
and Music 4 in June 1997 at the University of Virginia. I am grateful to
Suzanne Cusick and Fred Maus for organising that conference, and to my session
audience for their enthusiastic and embodied input. I am grateful also to two
anonymous Popular Music reviewers for their helpful critical input; to Andy Mead
for invaluable dialogue and support; to the late Philip Brett for his generous
attention; and to the students in my classes who have read and responded to this
material, particularly Kimberly D. Robertson and Michelle T. Lin, who launched
related projects that have extended my thinking about disco culture and its
reverberations.
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242 Nadine Hubbs
Endnotes
1. We might also note that in 1979 'disco sucks' constituted more aggressive, obscene phraseology. Photos and clippings from the 1979 Comiskey rally are viewable at WLUP's 25th anniversary 'Disco Demolition' website: www.discodemolition.com/pr.htm (viewed 16 December 2005yf 7 K L V V L W H L Q F O X G H V W K H 0 crowd-estimate figure (also variously cited else- whereyf D Q G L W O L Q N V W R ' D K O
V U D G L R V K R Z S D J H : now silver haired, he is still a popular DJ in
Chicago. 2. Qiana was a 'luxury fabric' created by DuPont Corporation, a silky, shiny polyester weave that was the stuff of disco-era elegance in Travolta/ Manero's shirts, Donna Summer's dresses, and
more.
3. The term had made its print debut seven years earlier in Weinberg (1972yf , D P J U D W H I X O W R W K e late Philip Brett for this reference. 4. Among such insiders the phrase was still recog- nisable as an arch appropriation of the 'coming out' that constitutes the debutante's shining hour. Since its 'outing' in the 1980s, the expres- sion has lost this semantic sparkle not only for the larger culture, but for queers themselves: It is now a commonplace, understood as abbrevia- tion for 'coming out of the closet', whose puri- tanical, decidedly un-celebratory overtones are applied to all manner of formerly-hidden-now- exposed activity: drinking, talk show viewing, junk food indulgence. Interestingly, according to Sedgwick (1990, pp. 72-3yf V X F K X E L T X L W R X s usage of the 'closet' figure attests to the semantic centrality of homo/heterosexual definition, rather than any amnesia around its queer- specific meaning. Billboard rankings throughout this essay indicate the highest chart positions attained by a given song. All are from Whitburn (1996yf . 5. Relatedly, a contemporary lyric by Mark Knopfler provides this description of an audi- ence for a bar-band gig: 'They don't give a damn for any trumpet-playing band / That ain't what they call rock and roll'. The source-song, 'Sultans of Swing', was a number four (non-discoyf K L W L n 1979 for Knopfler's band Dire Straits. 6. My statement suggests that singerly incompe- tency can contribute to a performance of manly competency. The claim finds corroboration in Suzanne Cusick's theorisation of song as a field of embodiment and performance that serves, in our time, to delineate sharp gender differen- tials. She reads the cultural script for puberty as engendering a change of vocal register for boys but not girls (though such change, in both cases, is physically possible but not inevitableyf D Q d notes that youths/men rarely relearn their envoicement so as to continue singing after this mandated change. Thus, in contemporary Euro-American culture, girls sing, boys sing, and women sing, but men normatively do not sing, and these facts shape the embodied per- formance of sex and gender difference. Cusick
(1999, pp. 31-3yf I X U W K H U V S H F X O D W H V W K D W S R V W - pubescent males' relearning of envoicement in speech but not song (which involves more deeply one's 'interior spaces'yf P L J K W U H I O H F W W K e cultural anxiety about penetration of the male body, in conjunction with 'the prevailing idea that masculinity is about being fully individu- ated, body and soul'.
7. A number of writers have revealed the inad-
equacies and omissions of homosexual (and in- versionyf P R G H O V R I L G H Q W L W \ K L Q W H G D W K H U H , including Chauncey (1989yf + D O S H U L Q D Q d 2000yf D Q G 6 H G J Z L F N S S ,
etc.yf . 8. The phrase is Sedgwick's. She presents some of
the work I summarise here in Between Men
(1985yf E X W P \ S D V V D J H L V G U D Z Q H [ F O X V L Y H O y from Epistemology (1990, pp. 184-6yf S D U W V R f which recap the argument advanced in Between
Men.
9. A pivotal cultural medium for queer effacement ca 1930-1968 is illumined in Vito Russo's (1987yf analysis of Hollywood movies from the era of Hays Code censorship. The individual effects and costs of invisibilisation and denial of queer existence in post-war American culture are drawn lucidly in the autobiography of the late gay novelist Paul Monette (1992yf . 10. That is, the song appeared within six months' proximity to the Comiskey Park rally: Billboard records 20 January 1979 as the date when 'Survive' charted (Whitburn 1996yf . 11. The ostinato shown in the Figure is from my aural transcription of 'I Will Survive' (the 7:56 mixyf D V D U H D O O V R Q J O \ U L F V J L Y H Q E H O R Z . 12. I refer to the climactic performance in Summer's 1975 hit 'Love to Love You Baby'. Bayles's apparent confusion here (1994, p. 281yf F R Q V W L - tutes one instance, among others throughout her book, that raises questions about the extent of her familiarity with some of the material on which she registers her contentious opinions. 13. Melisma is the classical European term for a musical device wherein a single syllable of text is set melodically by multiple pitches, usually to expressive effect. In pop-rock contexts the term gospel run, or simply run, is sometimes used. 14. I refer to a complex sensibility that can be ex- pressed simply, via Gallic shrug and the dictum, 'Je suis comme je suis' (I am as I amyf , Q W H U H V W - ingly, the latter phrase would translate (liter- allyyf L Q W R D Q R W K H U * O R U L D * D \ Q R U J D \ F O X b classic and quintessential pride anthem: her
1983 disco cover of 'I Am What I Am' - however
innocent many US gay-club patrons must have been to the phrase's prior existence and conno- tative richness as Frenchformule. This phenom- enon suggests possibilities for extra-linguistic sympathy- and sensibility-sharing between
Mediterranean folk wisdom and American
queer subculture - possibilities, in other words,
of the kinds of cross-cultural resonance I sketch
herein. Undoubtedly the song's origin in the
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'I Will Survive' 243
queer context of La Cage aux folles is also rel- evant, although it reached iconic status (as 'The great gay pride song of the American musical theatre', according to Studer [1994, p. 270]yf Q R t in George Hearn's show-tune rendition but in Gaynor's disco remake. 15. The 'playa' and 'pimp' culture of 1990s and current hip-hop seems a later relative of this strain of sophistication. And one could argue that its unabashed emphasis on 'bling' also links it to disco, which has long been identified with conspicuous materialism. 16. The novel's Christian imagery is explicitly Catholic in various passages, though not the one
quoted here.
17. Elsewhere, crucial connections between Ca-
tholicism and homosexuality have been drawn by Michel Foucault (1978, pp. 37-41yf Z K R U H - veals the Catholic confessional (in conjunction with the courtsyf D V W K H O R F X V R I F R Q F H S W L R Q I R r homosexuality, among other 'sexual perver-
sions'. By Foucault's account, a Western eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explosion of discourses on sex, motivated by the Christian pastoral, sharpened surveillance of sexual prac- tices and produced discursive 'sexual hetero- geneities' of which the homo/heterosexual binarism would emerge, from later nineteenth- century medico-juridical discourses, as most consequential.
See Ellis Hanson's Decadence and Catholicism
(1997yf I R U H [ S O R U D W L R Q R I F U R V V O L Q N D J H V E H - tween the queer and the Catholic in late- nineteenth-century symbolist, or decadent, literature. For a discussion of linkages among these former two categories and twentieth- century US concert music, see my book The Queer Composition of America's Sound (Hubbs 2004yf H V S H F L D O O \ F K D S W H U
0 R G H U Q L V W $ E V W U D F -
tion and the Abstract Art: Four Saints and the
Queer Composition of America's Sound'. 18. Pet Shop Boys and Erasure are both British synth-pop duos formed in the 1980s and com- prising a (now-outyf J D \ Y R F D O L V W D V W K H D W U L F D l front-man in partnership with a (comparatively back-groundedyf N H \ E R D U G V \ Q W K Z L ] , W K D Q k Fred Maus for pointing out the resonances
between 'I Will Survive' and 'It's a Sin', for our conversations on these, and for lending me the Pet Shop Boys 1994 tour video Discovery: Live in Rio. My discussion of 'It's a Sin / I Will Survive' is based on the performance included on this
video.
Perhaps there is evidence of some subliminal effect from 'Survive"s embedded presence in Wayne Studer's (1994, pp. 166-7yf Q R W L F e towards 'pronounced gay overtones' in Pet Shop Boys' 'trenchant, marvellously overblown "It's a Sin"', even while giving no hint of any connection between this song and 'Survive'. 19. The Bildungsroman, a novelistic genre modelling (most characteristically: white middle-class maleyf F R P L Q J R I D J H K D V D O U H D G \ E H H Q U H U H D G L n terms of homoeroticism by Michael Moon
(1987yf .
20. Also of interest is Victor Navone's 45-second
digital animation 'Alien Song', a word-of- Internet phenomenon since its 1999 appearance. It depicts a drag-queen-like performance of Gaynor's 'Survive' by a green, one-eyed alien, vaguely male in form but unmistakably African-American-diva in gesture. The creature thus exemplifies the 'polygendrous, polyracial' disco-queen qualities discussed above, and its sudden demise, when crushed rudely under its own mirror ball, poignantly mirrors disco's fate. See http://www.scores.de/movie/alien.shtml (viewed 16 December 2005yf . 21. In connection with my earlier discussion of markers of queerness (or, in the above, 'faggot- ries'yf L Q W K H F R Q W H [ W R I K R P R V H [ X D O S D Q L F W K e word queers here should be taken to include not only known homosexual persons but others marked in various ways as 'queerly suspicious'. Saturday Night Fever also provides at least subtle allusion to black-queer solidarity, as Russo (1987, p. 230yf Q R W H G 7 U D Y R O W D
V 7 R Q y Manero at one point yells, 'Attica, Attica!' echo- ing his hero Al Pacino in his role as a gay bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon (a poster from which hangs on Tony's bedroom wallyf Z K H U e the line served to link gay and black oppression. 22. Gill's reference is to dance music in general, subsuming disco.
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244 Nadine Hubbs
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Discography
Aerosmith, 'Dream On', Aerosmith. Sony 57360. 1973 Cheap Trick, 'I Want You to Want Me', In Color. 34884. 1977 Chic, 'Good Times', Risqud. Atlantic 3584. 1979 Diana Ross, 'I'm Coming Out', Diana. Motown M8-936 M1. 1980 Dire Straits, 'Sultans of Swing', Dire Straits. Warner Bros. BSK-3266. 1978 D.O.A., 'Disco Sucks' (1979yf 7 K H ' D Z Q L Q J R I D 1 H Z ( U U R U $ O W H U Q D W L Y H 7 H Q W D F O H 2 Donna Summer, 'Love to Love You Baby', Love to Love You Baby. Oasis OCLP-5003. 1975 Erasure, 'Love to Hate You', Chorus. Sire/Reprise 9 26668-2. 1991 Gloria Gaynor, 'I Will Survive' (1978yf * O R U L D * D \ Q R U * U H D W H V W + L W V 3 R O \ G R U 8 'I Am What I Am' (1983yf = < ; 5 H F R U G V * ' & 6 Grand Funk, 'We're an American Band', We're an American Band. Capitol B000071WY2. 1973 KC and the Sunshine Band, '(Shake Shake Shakeyf 6 K D N H < R X U % R R W \
\f, The Disco Box, disc 2. Rhino R2
75595. 1999
The Knack, 'My Sharona', Get the Knack. Capitol B000065CXQ. 1979 Led Zeppelin, 'Stairway to Heaven', Led Zeppelin IV. Atlantic 82638. 1971 Mott the Hoople, 'All the Young Dudes', All the Young Dudes. Sony 31750. 1972 Pet Shop Boys, 'It's a Sin', Actually. EMI 46972. 1987 Rolling Stones, 'Angie', Goats Head Soup. Virgin 39519. 1973 'It's Only Rock 'n' Roll', It's Only Rock 'n' Roll. Virgin 39522. 1974 Sylvester, 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Realyf
\f, The Disco Box, disc 3. Rhino R2 75595. 1999 Thin Lizzy, 'The Boys Are Back in Town', Jailbreak. Universal/Polygram B0000074 FG. 1976. Vicki Sue Robinson, 'Turn the Beat Around' (1976yf 7 K H ' L V F R < H D U V Y R O
7 X U Q W K H % H D W $ U R X Q G
.
Rhino R2 70984. 1990
Weather Girls, 'It's Raining Men' (1982yf 7 K H ' L V F R % R [ G L V F 5 K L Q R 5 9
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