Its priceless clips from the disco era aside, “The Secret Disco Revolution” laughably fails to turn Barry White and Donna Summer into the Che Guevara and Emma Goldman of the dance floor.
Jamie Kastner’s documentary purports to take disco’s meaning seriously, but if so, why does it rely on campy interstitial segments in which three actors dressed in glittery silver outfits strut around New York? Kastner argues that disdain for “conservative” rock music (tell Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young that), dominated by straight white men, allowed a troika of gays, blacks and women to seize power over pop music through disco. Wrong. Blacks broke onto the pop charts more than a decade earlier, disco had little to do with women’s lib and the Village People weren’t actually gay icons: The audience wasn’t in on the joke. Nor was the arrest of Studio 54 owners on tax-evasion charges a “counterrevolutionary” act.
To Kastner’s credit, he includes clips of disco singers and producers scoffing at his weak attempts to politicize their party music: Robert “Kool” Bell (of the Gang) just laughs when told that some disco theorist called “Ladies Night” a feminist anthem. And the film scores a great segment by crosscutting interviews with the Village People (denying their lyrics were double entendres) and their surviving producer-songwriter (who fondly recalls his gay writing partner praising the cruising opportunities at the YMCA). For real insight into the music, though, consult “The Last Days of Disco” — written and directed by a conservative white man.