Mutant Disco: the 1980s sound that captured a world unstuck
What is post-punk? We all know it’s ‘after punk’, but what exactly makes Devo’s jerky synth lines and Joy Division’s austere minimalism share the same ambiguous genre umbrella? Post-punk’s undefinable yet unmistakable vapours rose from punk’s smoking crater—an attitude and intrepid sonic adventurism which omit a particular whiff of broken barriers and new hinterlands only been made possible by 1977’s ‘year zero’. You know it when you hear it.
New York’s no wave was no different. Following punk’s initial catalyst striking CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, a cohort of avant-garde-minded provocateurs sought to push punk’s emancipatory DIY to infinitely more abrasive and atonal planes—Swans, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and Glenn Branca all heading down the noise path paved by the gristly synth pioneers Suicide.
Music’s former tribal lines began to melt away as the 1980s arrived. While never as implacably divided as the sub-cultures that emerged in the UK, punk had exploded as a grimy alternative to disco’s glitz radiating from Studio 54 and was dominating the dance scene. Just as the infamous nightclub’s exclusive velvet rope was hung up for the last time in 1980, the no wavers began to embrace disco’s unabashed grooves. But they did away with its chintzy elitism and brewed a new variant of dancefloor soundtrack that uniquely straddled pop accessibility with post-punk’s keen embrace of bristling sonic affrontery. Soaking up the emerging hip-hop pumped out of the South Bronx projects for good measure, mutant disco stirred Lower Manhattan’s vibrant cultural melting pot while reflecting the city’s rapid urban changes.
Early 1980s New York was a city slowly regaining its confidence. Hit hard by one of the worst fiscal crises in American history, the previous decade saw withering disinvestment, business exodus, and stubborn unemployment figures. While the “Fear City” pamphlets warning tourists were ridiculed by New Yorkers for their scaremongering embellishments, crime had certainly exploded across the 1970s—homicides more than doubled, and robberies were tenfold worse. Any idea of a federal bailout was roundly ruled out by Republican President Gerald Ford, blaming the liberal city’s reputation for robust welfare and high wages as causes behind its downfall.
Formerly enjoying the Loft Law’s protections before City Mayor Ed Koch’s fiscal shake-up, the arts community that had lived and been created in the SoHo neighbourhoods’ old manufacturing buildings found themselves squeezed out of the area as retail and corporate development sought to plant themselves in the cultural zenith. Flocking to the Lower East Side, the new crop of colourful post-punks brought their mutant disco with them to the working-class area of Manhattan’s southeast.
Mutant disco’s centre was ZE Records. Founded in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban, the label became a locus for the dance-punks scoring New York’s cultural flux. Esteban was romantically involved with art-funk Parisian Lizzy Mercier Descloux, establishing the Harry Cover music store together with their Rock News magazine. Releasing her debut album Press Color as the label’s first LP following a string of singles from James Chance and Rosa Yemen, the community’s spiky avant-pop began to flourish, prompting BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel to dub ZE “the best independent record label in the world” to Melody Maker.
Only a few years after Brian Eno’s curated No New York compilation, ZE unleashed 1981’s Mutant Disco: A Subtle Discolation Of The Norm, a benchmark release capturing the joyously spunky kaleidoscope of sounds spun from ZE HQ. Initially a six-track sampler, and later expanded on CD issues, ZE introduced the world to Was (Not Was), Material, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts—post-punk coated in tropical zest that perfectly captured the moment where underground edge and pop cheer got along just fine.
Closing the year with the festive A Christmas Record—notably featuring The Waitresses’ ‘Christmas Wrapping’—before shutting up shop in 1984, ZE Records and their mutant disco documented a slice of New York’s musical tapestry where former irreconcilable scenes were gloriously smushed together in ZE’s disjointed jigsaw. It left in its wake a body of work spectacularly misshapen but unmistakably pop. It’s useless to define—you just know mutant disco when you hear it.
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