Vulture - Devouring Culture

If you reacted to news of Donna Summer’s death (at 63, of cancer) by revisiting her early discography, you’ll have already been reminded of the breadth and poignancy she brought to mainstream ­disco—the way her records could span throbbing dance classics to musical theater to misty sentimentality. If, soon after, you reacted to news of Robin Gibb’s death (62, also cancer) by revisiting the Bee Gees’ late-seventies work, you got a double dose of the “misty sentimentality” part. This is not a side of pop that critics have always praised: For years, the party line seemed to be that the seventies and eighties were eras of goopy, glitzy dreck and lumbering, pompous rock, all in dire need of rescuing by punks with battered guitars. At times, even disco’s defenders accepted those terms. Forget the soft-­focus glamour that crossed over to a vast American mainstream; they’d praise the genre by pointing out how much of it was underground, radically inventive, avant-garde, and steeped in gay subculture—which is to say, punker than punk.