The Middle East Connection

Tau Gamma Phi is Triskelion Grand Fraternity, My Fraternity is the Supreme Fraternity

History
Chapters
Seal

Filipino Community in Dubai, U.A.E.



  Traveler's Guide:
Philippines
U. A. E.

Jokes

Quotes
words of wisdom, and inspiration

Funny Thoughts



TXTing
getting the most out of your mobile



Ring Tones

 

Tattoos
Think before you Ink

Music Guide
music history from the 50s to 90s

 You are Guest No. 

 Since April 15, 2001

Rate Our Site

Send an Internet Greeting Card
Enter Card ID Number to Pickup Your Greeting Card

HITS4PAY!
Earn extra money for reading Emails

     1960s                                             1980s

DISCO
Disco, the dance fad, which dominated the pop charts for the second half of the 1970s, was not so much about music as it was about lifestyle. Disco is a form of dance music popular during the 1970s in which the melodic content was generally considered to be subservient to the beat. Although it had grown out of the vibrant black dance culture of the soulful 1960s, by the time it had filtered through the white gay club scene it was not a genuine musical movement but more of a fashion statement. The gay clubs that sprang up in every city in Europe and the US in the early 1970s as a result of a more liberal society. They were not so hot on the music as the black dance DJs and they still needed to feed their turntables as they couldn't afford to hire live bands to play through the night. So their demand created a market for formula white funk.

Many of the disco artists were anonymous session musicians or failed soul singers who knew just enough to get a good groove going but could offer little in the way of melody or lyrics to make their tracks distinctive. For that reason, one could be forgiven for thinking that all disco music sounded the same and that it was only the critical bpm (beat-per-minute) rating that enabled the dancers to differentiate between the records. In fact, it quickly got to the point where disco records had the number of beats per minute printed on the label so that DJs could segue from one to another without the dancers noticing that the record had changed!

Disco was strictly for dancing. No one actually listened to it as music because it had a minimal musical merit. Until the film Saturday Night Fever (1977) brought disco to the mainstream record buyers, the main customers for disco records had been the club DJs. The club goers were just happy to have something that kept a steady pulse for as long as their legs would last.

REGGAE / SKA
Reggae, the popular music of Jamaica, was the only non-American music form to have a significant and lasting impact on post-war popular music. It began in the 1950s when the island's youth adapted the boogie piano style of American R&B artists such as Fats Domino to the electric guitar. But in doing so, they accentuated the second and fourth beats to arrive at the "offbeat chop", that is the main characteristic of reggae. Initially, it wasn't called reggae but "Ska", an onomatopoeic name, which was intended to convey the distinctive clipped rhythm.

The pioneers of the new sound were the record producers and label owners such as Leslie Kong and dance-hall DJs like Clement Seymour "Sir Coxsone" Dodd. The DJs soon became producers themselves as they were desperate to have exclusive sides for their sound systems. The DJs were in fierce competition with each other to the extent where one would instinctively draw a gun on a rival. This gun-toting, ganja (cannabis) smoking outlaw culture was reflected in the lyrics, as was the island's volatile political scene about which the artists and producers philosophized with passion.

In the early years, the market was exclusively for singles. It was only when the records were exported in quantity in the early 1970s and started to impact on the European pop charts that the labels could afford to make the major investment needed to manufacture and ship LPs. Kong discovered reggae's first international star Jimmy Cliff, while Dodd's label, Studio One, had a varied roster which include such influential artists as Alton Ellis, Marcia Griffiths, Ken Boothe, John Holt, Burning Spear, the Maytals and the wailers.

By the time the Wailers had become a backing band for Bob Marley, Jamaica's first and only superstar, Dodd was facing fierce competition from this one-time apprentice Lee "Scratch" Perry. It was Perry who prepared Bob Marley for the fame he would find with Island Records, an English label who were largely responsible for introducing reggae to the rest of the world. Incidentally, Island's first international hit was with Willie Small's innocuous "My Boy Lollipop" in 1964 on which a young Rod Stewart blows a mean harmonica. It was to be another 4 years before reggae made a real impact with Desmond Dekker's international hit single "Israelites", which saw the style accepted as more than a mere novelty dance style.

But before the music could be marketed to predominantly white mainstream music buyers abroad, it had to have the rough edges buffed to a sophisticated sheen. Between 1964 and 1967 Ska became less frantic and adopted the heavier rock sound from the American groups. It also changed it's name to "Rude Boy" music after the street gangsters whose exploits with the law were often portrayed in the lyrics. Prime examples of this style were Prince Buster's "Judge Dread" and the Slickers' "Johnny Too Bad" and "Rudy, A Message To You. The last named mentioned became a staple sound of the English Skinhead subculture of the early 1970s and a decade later provided a hit for Coventry band The Specials who recorded it during the 1980s Ska revival - one of the most inexplicable fads in pop history.

When the violence that was endemic in Jamaica's shanty towns died down in the late 1960s, Reggae slowed to a more sensual shuffle beat and was given a descriptive title "Rock Steady". When it speed up again in the early 1970s, it retained the emphasis on the offbeat, but acquired a lilt and a bass-heavy sound. This version was termed reggae to reflect the regular rhythm (reggae means regular). In time it became the voice of the Rastafarians, a peaceful religious sect who worshipped the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as God on Earth and who became a moderating influence on Jamaican life. Part of Bob Marley's appeal was the quiet dignity and sincerity underlying his music, which was an expression of his Rasta beliefs.

From the late 1970s, reggae was in danger of becoming simply another strand in the diverse fabric of pop as white acts such as The Police, Culture Club and even The Clash assimilated reggae rhythms into their own music. The acquisition of electronic keyboards and even drum machines by some of the groups in a vain effort to make the music more fashionable put a dampener on the once incendiary spark and rendered it less vital.

PUNK ROCK 
Punk rock, the often crude expression of a young, inarticulate and disaffected working class, was born kicking and screaming in the back room of CBGB OMFUG's, a fashionable hangout in the run-down Bowery district of New York in 1976. The club's name was an abbreviation of Country, Bluegrass and Blues Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers, although there was not a trace of any of these prehistoric forms in the violent nihilistic three-chord thrash, perpetuated by the likes of The Ramones, Patti Smith and the aptly named Richard Hell. Punk was a phenomenon of the late 1970s, although it did have a tenuous link to the garage bands in the mid-1960s, in which any song had more than three chords or ran for more than three minutes. It's credo was "Don't bore us, get to the chorus", which had been the motto of the New York Dolls, a band of "also runs" at the fag end of glam rock, who can now be seen as the broken link between the garage bands and the punks. Punk was a reaction to what its creators and fans saw as the monopolization of popular music by multi-national corporations and the mass media. By the mid-1970s, rock music was big business and as such record companies tended to sign only those acts, which they thought would have international appeal. Boredom and "no Future" became the key slogans of punk, although there was a very lucrative future to be had for those bands who had good tunes and were prepared to compromise as punk was inevitably absorbed into the mainstream at the end of the decade. It's anti-establishment statements (spiky and colored haircuts, ripped T-shirts held together by safety pins, tie-dyed and ripped jeans, 12-holes Dr. Marten's Boots and slogans printed from clipped-out newsprint in the style of ransom demands), became fashion items to be purchased off-the-peg from the high-street chain stores, rather than motifs of a genuine musical movement. 

Punk might have remained a cult in New York City had it not been for an enterprising businessman with an eye for the main chance. Malcolm Mclaren had at one time been the manager of the New York Dolls and when they split in 1976, he returned to London to run a bizarre bondage clothes boutique in the fashionable King's Road which he named Sex with his usual characteristic subtlety. Still burning to manage a rock band, he encourage four of the most sullen adolescents that he could find to form a group which he dubbed the Sex Pistols.

  About Me   |    Interest   |   Photo Gallery    |   Cool Links   |   Classified Ads   |   Chat    
Forum   |   Links for All   |   Guest Book   |   What's New   |   Disclaimer   |   Site Map