When Madonna raided gay underground styles for last year’s “Vogue” extravaganza, she drew a new model for pop success. Instead of playing down vogueing’s eccentricities for the mainstream, she played them up. And it worked. Madonna got a No. 1 hit, and vogueing moved from Harlem drag balls to middle America–a little late, maybe, but with most of its gewgaws intact.
Two new groups, Deee-Lite and C+C Music Factory, take this model to heart. Both come out of New York’s underground dance-club culture, and both celebrate their roots rather than gentrify them. Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart,” a loopy dance song dressed in kitschy psychedelic flares, moved from the clubs into the pop Top 5. C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” a digital collage of rap, rock and soul, went to No. 1. Two years ago you couldn’t have heard these sounds outside of a generous handful of dance clubs. Now they’re more common than the bleats of boys with electric guitars. This smells like the return of disco in its early, untarnished glory: a shot of rhythm and sensual extravagance into a pop world that can use the lift.
Both acts build their sales pitches right into the music. Deee-Lite calls its album “World Clique” and announces, at the start, “From the global village, in the age of communication…Deee-Lite!” Hokey pop philosophy and all, this is a cult fetish targeted at the global mass market. C+C Music Factory is more brazen. Printed on its album cover, and scrawling across its first video, is the pitch, “Rock+Soul+Funk+Pop+Techno=C+C Music Factory.”
C+C has taken heat because, on the video to “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” group member Zelma Davis’s lips move while session singer Martha Wash’s big voice booms out. But the group is more complex than this suggests; C+C is explicitly about the technology that made this sort of trickery inevitable. David Cole and Robert Clivilles, the C’s in C+C, first worked together at the gay dance club Better Days, where Clivilles spun records and Cole added sounds on his synthesizer. In C+C, the two work more like dee-jays than musicians, layering disparate sounds, borrowing fillips from other records where it feels right. A diva wails here, a rapper rhymes there, all over a machine-gun beat, while Cole and Clivilles remain largely anonymous.
Deee-Lite cherishes no such anonymity. Singer Lady Miss Kier Kirby is a ready-made cult icon. In her five-inch platform shoes, froufrou cat suit and flip hairdo, she looks most like a woman impersonating a drag queen. Deee-Lite’s songs, like C+C Music Factory’s, mix and match styles: psychedelia, old disco and steady thumping electronic beats, all filtered through the aural equivalent of the group’s chaotic fashion sense. The band runs out of good songs early, and Kirby’s voice can stray from its chosen path. But Deee-Lite runs on concept, and the concept holds firm.
The road from gay subculture to pop mainstream is one disco walked only at its peril; exposed to the light, disco opened itself to gross self-parody. Disco started as a way of life, a soundtrack to love and adventure. Only later did it become “Disco Duck.” Deee-Lite and C+C have reached the mainstream with their underground integrity intact. But the latest act to follow is Enigma, whose gimmicky hit, “Sadeness Part I,” is a Gregorian chant set to a dance beat. It’s a pretty good record, but self-parody doesn’t seem too far behind.
