Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Disc 1:
1. Wheel Me Out [Remix Version] - Was (Not Was)
2. Bustin’ Out - Material (feat. Nona Hendryx)
3. Drive My Car - Cristina
4. Annie I’m Not Your Daddy [Remix Version] - Kid Creole & the Coconuts
5. Emile (Night Rate) - Aural Exciters
6. Contort Yourself - James White & the Blacks
7. Funky Stuff - Lizzy Mercier Descloux
8. French Boy - Garçons
9. Deputy of Love - Don Armando’s 2nd Avenue Rhumba Band
10. Cowboys & Gansters - Gichi Dan
11. Blame It on Disco - Cristina
12. Encore l’Amore [Italian Version][#] - Garçons
Disc 2:
1. Disco Clone - Cristina
2. Que Pasa/Me No Pop I - Coati Mundi
3. I’m a Wonderful Thing Baby [Remix Version] - Kid Creole & the Coconuts
4. Out Come the Freaks [Remix Version] - Was (Not Was)
5. Fire - Lizzy Mercier Descloux
6. Spooks in Space [Discomix] - Aural Exciters
7. Tell Me That I’m Dreaming - Was (Not Was)
8. Narcissique - Caroline Loeb
9. I Know What Boys Like - The Waitresses
10. Mission Impossible - Lizzy Mercier Descloux
11. Re Bop Electronic - Garçons
12. French Boy Disco Edit - Garçons
13. Faites le Proton - Casino Music
“Mutant disco” doesn’t accurately describe the genre that, in the early 80s, lunged out of ZE Records, hit the UK Top 10, and dissipated into respectable obscurity for fifteen years. Mutant disco was not a genetic fluke in the disco DNA. As the squadrons of recent reparative 80s NY compilations attest, it was exactly the opposite: a small clubhouse of brash intellectuals, avant-garde crackpots, and underground flotsam calculatedly engineering a disco insurrection. They (post-punk, no-wave, new wave, post-wave) brought the disco; the disco didn’t come to them.
The assumption here is that the only thing weirder than being weird is being partially weird. Going from the most outsider music possible to the most polished, mainstream sound smacks of an audacity we can barely comprehend. To list only a few of the credentials: James Chance was on the original No New York comp; Bill Laswell’s Material featured Sonny Sharrock and Fred Frith; and Was (Not Was) littered their early singles with stream-of-consciousness surreal rants. To bring things into the present, this would be an event equal to Jim O’Rourke being produced by The Matrix. By any account, this merger should clear the dancefloor faster than Shaq’s DJing skillz.
On this two-disc reissue of the original 1981 comp (effectively quadrupling the number of tracks), any hesitation is erased in the first moments of Was (Not Was)’s “Wheel Me Out”. The great surge of generic disco hi-hat releases a flittering confetti of tin-foil synths. Jagged god-rawk garage feedback bides its time in the recesses of the track until it’s propelled forward with punk rock slashes courtesy of the MC5’s Wayne Kramer and pistonsful of Latin jazz. Even the lyrics skip along the thin line between naked pleasure-party and obscure psychopathy: “No one’s discouraged by you who never push the wheels. You did it. And I’m next.” You can be a street urchin or a glam princess: This irrepressible beast of a song will, at the very least, make you the most popular person alive and may very well make for the sort of nights that, in appropriate temperatures, cause some people to become pregnant.
Material’s collaboration with ex-Labelle member Nona Hendryx stacks crepitating basslines with entire battalions of gradually digitized guitars lost in their own egomania. Kid Creole’s hit, “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy”, sticks five genres that would be sublime easy listening by themselves and networks them until they take on a sonic glory, busking cuicas and crashing cymbals. Paternity tests have never been quite this riotous before.
And never mind that James White’s “Contort Yourself” is to 80s NY compilations as “Happy Together” is to 60s Summer-of-Love ones. The rockabilly avant-jazz version of The Contortions’ version is here streamlined and put on dubs with a life-changing beat and enough reckless sax to let you know this band came to disco and can leave at will. The ZE supergroup, The Aural Exciters, begins “Spooks in Space” with the utterly unimpeachable line, “Mama say there’ll be days like this.. but she ain’t say nothin’ ‘bout SPOOKS!” and forms a song out of bubbling potions, banana pratfall sound effects, and haunted dancehall trepidation.
A personal favorite is Cristina, a neglected diva that’s alternately complacent and histrionic. Her version of “Drive My Car” renders the Hollywood dazzle of the lyrics even more playfully vacuous than the original. She sounds like a hollow shell of a ditzy bombshell in a car that refuses to conform to certain air pollution laws. “Blame It on Disco” has a lurching bass and a brass reggae pace, but for some reason there’s also gales of sleet and when the swelled strings and backup singers tell us to “blame it on disco with a fascinating sound/ That’s the talk of the town,” it’s somehow hard to not think of a coke-snorting Rogers & Hammerstein. “Disco Clone” is absolute mayhem: blaxploitating rumble and Bernard Hermann dagger thrusts with a refrain that’s pitched so high my windows broke because the dogs ran into them. Also, it’s a disco song with the word “sauntering” in it. I can die happy.
This is the tip of the iceberg. For a genre that often encompasses some of the most flagrantly irritating music this side of ragtime, there is such diversity here, from hewn guitar pyrotechnics to lilting bossa nova, two hours isn’t hardly enough. We have hit the day when disco made a better double album than Pink Floyd. It just goes to show that two (or more) genres don’t need any similarities except hedonism, narcissism, and drug abuse. Tell the hardcore punks it’s time to go home.
— Alex Linhardt, December 7, 2003
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2028-mutant-disco/
