My husband and I do a bit of weight lifting together and afterwards turn on music and dance. Disco works best. We met on the disco floor 40 years ago. It’s nostalgia. Who would have thought?

I do like the Badham movie intro better. Of course, it’s fun, and the official video is not intended to be that.
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I’m sort of the opposite of huxley. The singers could be singing Oo La La, and I would judge the song about the same, at least initially.

I think it was some music documentary, but someone claimed that Frank Zappa was intensely interested in composing and didn’t really have an interest in lyrics, at least when he was younger. Then he realized that he didn’t want to be a starving composer and decided that he better have someone sing with some interesting lyrics so he could make some money too.

Sometimes surprising “facts” like that one, are just WRONG. Grain of salt.

I was once on a long long chair lift ride up a ski mountain with a good friend of mine during which he sang or spoke the entire weird and long lyric to a Zappa song. Word perfect of course. Ah, misspent youth. One of those indelible memories.

No, it was that bad.

Just speculating.

I made it quite clear I wasn’t saying that was some sort of cosmically wonderful poetry, or even wonderful poetry at all. I was using it to illustrate that the song’s SUBJECT MATTER is not light nor is it about love. The song’s subject matter is desperation in a city that’s falling apart, from someone who feels beaten down.

How you translate that into the idea that I’m saying that’s some sort of great lyric is beyond me.

What it is, though, is a great song, with a subject that is neither light nor about love.

neo:

Wow, that’s weak tea. That’s high school stuff. Completely trite. No images, no interesting sounds or language.

Just about any top-line rock group or singer-songwriter from the 60s and 70s had far better verses and more of them. I remember a few of the other songs and I’m not impressed either.

We’ll have to agree to disagree as we usually do.

Donna Summer – what a voice! Fabulous.

The Bee Gees oeuvre is 1000+ songs. They wrote on a wide variety of things. You probably are familiar with just a few. Their big topic was indeed love, but that’s true of a lot of songwriters and songs. But they also wrote philosophical songs, surreal songs, funny songs, all sorts of things. By the way, are you familiar with the actual words of “Stayin’ Alive”? Have you ever looked at the lyrics? They’re not about strutting (that’s the rhythm of it and the way it was used in the movie), they’re about being desperate and trying to survive in a city that’s falling apart. They wrote the song before they ever were asked to write for the movie, and they didn’t see it as a disco song, it was a survival song.

Life goin’ nowhere,
somebody help me,
yeah
I’m stayin’ alive…

Now, I’m not saying the Bee Gees were Leonard Cohen in the lyrics department. But a lot of their lyrics are good, and although they wrote a lot about love they wrote about a lot of other things too. You yourself remember “New York Mining Disaster,” but in that same era there was “I’ve Got to Get a Message to You” and tons of others that weren’t conventional love songs or disco music. To take a few other examples, some early and some later, there’s “World,” “Edge of the Universe,” “Blue Island,” “Close Another Door,” “I Started a Joke,” “Songbird,” “Winds of Change,” “Walking Back to Waterloo,” “Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You.” These are not necessarily my favorite songs (although I like some of them a lot) by the Bee Gees, but they show some of their range.

Griffin:

I think some of it is realizing how bad pop music has gotten of late. Similarly, 80s music sounds like a Golden Age to me now.

Although I never hated disco. I liked to dance and disco really livened up the Saturday night parties I went to back then. I bought the two-disc Donna Summer album and still have a soft spot for her.