American Heretic: The Vast Legacy of Disco's Unsung Hero

“The days may not be ours / but we own the night”— Sparque, “Let's Go Dancin’,” West End Records, 1981

Flamboyant and urban, socially promiscuous and sexually deviant, anonymous and androgynous: Disco had to go. It threatened rock’s masculinity and a music industry that couldn’t cope with the paradigm shift disco demanded. No wonder the rock establishment thought disco sucked: Disco was about records, not artists; experimentation on the dance floor, not the concert stage; deejays, not rock stars. In other words, disco embodied the central tensions of pop music’s last quarter-century. No one understood disco’s ramifications better than Mel Cheren. One of the great innovators in that era’s record biz, and a co-founder of the Paradise Garage (often considered the greatest club in dance-music history), the “Godfather of Disco” helped create the great cultural heresy. And as one of its long-standing proponents, until his death last December, Cheren watched his beloved scene go from dancefloor utopia to punchline to conqueror of the music world. As a label executive in the early ’70s, Cheren saw club deejays as the tastemakers that labels should cater to. For them, the future Godfather released the first-ever 12-inch single—a far superior format for club use—and the first record with its instrumental on the B-side, an immediate deejay essential. Cheren co-founded West End Records, whose first release, “Sessomatto,” was a favorite with New York’s proto-rappers. Cheren helped his former partner Michael Brody open the Paradise Garage, and aided in the ascendancy of its legendary deejay, the late Larry Levan. Through the sound the Godfather helped shepherd at the Garage and the music-biz practices he pioneered, Mel Cheren and disco have had their revenge.

Bring that beat back Hip-hop began as a direct extension of disco, reworking its hits and borrowing its drum breaks. New Wave found a punk-like power in disco’s rhythmic anonymity, as evidenced by Blondie and Gang of Four. And today’s most critically acclaimed dance artists—like LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy—have simply updated Cheren and Levan’s work from the Garage. Mel Cheren knew that serious disco fans used channels beyond radio and charts to discover music. While the record industry’s response to disco was to rock-ify it, creating disco “bands” and disco “albums” culminating in Saturday Night Fever, Cheren embraced the new paradigm and promoted music through deejay and club channels. Similarly, he knew that the remixer could be as influential as the artist, and released Disco Gold, a seminal compilation mixed by Tom Moulton. Today, Cheren’s legacy transcends house music, disco’s most obvious heir. It’s also there when Franz Ferdinand taps disco fanatic Morgan Geist to remix its music for dance-floor consumption. Electroclash and its now-mainstream descendents—from DFA Records to Kanye West sampling Daft Punk—all bear the stamp of Cheren and the Garage. Disco’s influence also appears when Rilo Kiley boosts its indie-pop sound with 4/4 handclaps on “Silver Lining,” or when Madonna—once dismissed as mere disco—enters the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (albeit at the expense of her forebears, Donna Summer and Chic). Most of all, Cheren’s ideas are present whenever artists and labels seek ways to present their music outside the album/radio/tour milieu. Beyond the boundaries of America’s major-label system, disco’s conventions are the standard. From Bollywood to London dubstep to the most commercial Scandinavian pop, the world understands the primacy of the deejay, the track and the remix. The same is true in American hip-hop and electronic music, where—especially in the downloadable age—the importance of the single far exceeds that of the album, and that of the remixer outweighs radio airplay. Yet today, as in disco’s heyday, the American pop-music industry remains beholden to the album and the rock star. Disco oΩers plenty of lessons that a Luddite music business, still relying on its catalog warhorses for yet one more dollar-squeezing release, would do well to learn from. Too bad Mel Cheren won’t be around to teach them.