Masterpieces of Disco with Lister Sinclair
Ahhh disco. 'Disco sucks' might have been a popular phrase at the tail end of the craze, but for several years in the late 70s and into the early 80s glitz ruled supreme and John Travolta's moves owned the dance floor. By the early 80s the rawer sound of punk music were the new sensation. But as with most trends, disco has came back as nostalgia. In the last few years, several songs on the charts had a disco beat.
Disco was born in the small clubs of New York, Philadelphia and Miami as a musical response to the more complex, heavier rock sound of bands like Yes, Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd. Disco was meant to get people up and moving, a spectacle with everyone on the dance floor a star. As it picked up steam through the 70's, disco moved into the mainstream, crossing boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexuality. From Studio 54 to Saturday Night Fever, by the late 1970's, disco was everywhere.
Carolyn Krasnow from the University of Minnesota, reminded us that disco came out of a period when rock was white, serious and over the top. The lyrics were almost more important than the music. Disco was all about the beat and the dance, not to mention the glitz. The words were rather beside the point, which was to get it on and shake your booty. She talked to Geoff Pevere in 1993.
Lister Sinclair began his career at CBC in 1944. Over his many years here he wrote dozens of radio and television plays. He spent time as the host of CBC-TV's The Nature of Things and Front Page Challenge, Telescope, Wayne and Shuster and Morningside. But he was perhaps known best as the host of CBC Radio's Ideas. One of Lister's achievements was a series called "A is for Aardvark," a sort of personal anthology of notes, ideas and music, based on the letters of the alphabet. It was a nod to that work that led to "Masterpieces of Disco." In 2005 CBC Radio'sGo asked Lister to listen carefully to several disco hits and find what meaning he could. The result was witty, thoughtful and as erudite as the man himself.
"The vacuity of the lyrics of disco songs is itself part of the medium's message. Language is subjugated to the beat and drained of its pretensions to meaning. This emptying out of language parallels the refusal of narrative structure in the song overall. There is rarely an identifiable direction, progression, or climax in disco music. The prolongation of its own continuity is its only end."
---Walter Hughes, author of "In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco"
Lister had already officially retired from the CBC, but this disco hour became something of a hit. It was one of Lister's last radio creations before he died the following year at age 85. Joining Lister on that program was Brent Bambury, then the host of Go, now of Day 6.
Geoff Pervere, Brent Bambury, and Lister Sinclair aren't the only CBC Radio hosts who caught disco fever. Listen here to Morningside's Peter Gzowski learning how to dance.