My feet keep dancin'

Listening to Escort's "Starlight" for the first time after spending the weekend acquainting myself with Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story forced me to confront an adamantine truth: there can never be enough tracks with rhythm guitar scratchin' and squiggle-synths, with unforgettably anonymous vocalists atop for poignancy. Andy K's right: "The track ends up somewhere between "First Time Around" and "Here's to You" (Basement Jaxx's upcoming Crazy Itch Radio, the only album of theirs to which I've warmed sufficiently, is perhaps the culmination of this "organic-synthetic thing," accelerated and reconstituted into a spectacle of polyurethane frenzy).

The Levan comp -- as of now my album of the year -- features inexhaustible variations on the recipe cited above. I'm beginning to love this era of dance music: the demise of disco as an American commerical force caused its creators to return to the clubs, unchastened and hungry for new influences. In this context a classic like Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" (especially when it shares disc space with Five Special's "Why Leave Us Alone," whose synth-bass hook Eno, Byrne, Jerry Harrison, et al appropriated wholesale) is kin to disco raveups of quasi-gospel intensity like crucial tracks by Chaka Khan and Womack & Womack. Obscurities (well, to me) like David Joseph's "You Can't Hide (Your Love From Me)" meld Imagination and Tom Tom Club into a permutation that's subdued but no less tinged with hysteria; and when Yaz's "Situation" makes an appearance it represents a evolution, not a termination.