Perhaps you've heard about this hypothetical disco renaissance happening in the abstract downtown of New York, New York. Evidence of some kind of scene includes a jumble of Year 2007 band names, DJs, parties, podcasts, labels, and venues both closed and yet-to-be-opened: Holy Ghost!, Hercules & Love Affair, Shit Robot, Lee Douglas, Metro Area, the Jersey-based label Italians Do It Better, Invisible Conga People, Babytalk, Baby Oliver, DFA, Environ, Justin Miller and Jacques Renault's Tuesdays at 205, Runaway, Santa's Party House, Santos Party House, Escort, Arcade Lover, Still Going, Rub-N-Tug, Juan Maclean’s “Happy House,” Studio B, No Ordinary Monkey, Prince Language, People Don't Dance No More, DJ Spun, APT, Rong Music, Tim Sweeney, 205 Club, My Cousin Roy––to say nothing of the thriving disco edit culture, and to say nothing of LCD Soundsystem's 45:33 or Sound of Silver or Fabriclive 36. Perhaps you've heard about some or all this stuff which yes, at the very least, has some semblance of simultaneity. In my mind then the question is this: Besides whether there is some actual to the hypothetical, for whom is disco making a comeback here? Why is it happening now? What does disco mean anymore anyway?

Disco is not back. Meaning two things. First: True disco culture, as it happened in NYC and San Francisco and elsewhere in the late 70s/early 80s, and as it remains romanticized and pined for by those absent, an uninhibited confluence of pre-HIV intercourse, psychotic drugss, disenfranchised gays and blacks and Hispanics in the midst of self-liberation, record houses flush with rock&roll cash to burn baby burn, kickass soundsystems and impossible dance moves, and (lest we forget) a soundtrack of well-played, well-produced, emotionally raw and utterly danceable positive force tunes we called, as a convenient catch-all, disco––this is not back. Maybe we have the music, and I saw two people make out at the bar once, but it's not like anybody's tripping the free bananas or spiking the punch. In a word, there are no more free bananas.

Second: At least in New York City, you'd be hard-pressed to say disco ever really left. Even when Larry Levan's Paradise Garage shuttered in 87 or something like the Saint in 88, David Mancuso was still finding space for his Loft parties downtown every couple months, and the ex-pats who weren't on his lists found refuge for their nostalgia in any number of smaller, often outer-borough spots that tried to reproduce the original vibe. Talk to people around for the New York 90s, like Danny Wang, DJ Harvey, Rub-N-Tug, Dan Selzer, Jason Drummond, Morgan Geist of Environ Records, or James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy of DFA Records, or dig up the risquee flyers advertising parties thrown by Hercules & Love Affair's Andy Butler, and you'd find out there was still a small but thriving disco subculture happening, with parties like Francois K and Danny Krivit's Body & Soul, Bang the Party at Frank's, and the list goes on. Plus it's worth remembering that first-wave disco music persisted through house and hip-hop samples, while disco's scientific edge, i.e. its interest in the physics of sound and the pursuit of pleasure via specific interactions of sound, light, and contraband, played out for worse or better in rave culture.