Abstract of a forthcoming book chapter for Routledge publication on Music and Migration...
This chapter looks at how the camp sensibility of Italo disco is positioned in the narrative arc of its musical history and patterns of migration. While its legacy is interwoven with disco and the emergence of house music, the representation of gender is always considered secondary to its innovative use of technology and science fiction aesthetic. Here, I will argue that the contestable ‘straightwashing’ can be attributed to several things. First, is the ambiguous and elliptical nature of the genre. Secondly, the cultural hierarchies that position European pop music as inferior to Anglo-American cultural forms. And thirdly, the cultural context of Italo’s main markets in Southern Europe, Latin American, and Eastern Bloc countries. Emerging from this several further contradictions emerge. First, shining a light on the gay history of Italo is a function of 21st Century cultural privilege. Secondly, the mode of production and proliferation of lip-synching creates a disconnect between the voices heard and the faces performing, which undermines the political agency of subject positions. Thirdly, the camp aesthetics are decoded very differently in different markets, where it is often synonymous with materialism and capitalist freedom. Instead, loss emerges as a key motif: loss of voice, loss of identity, and loss of future. Homophobia and the cultural context of AIDS in the 1980s are also, therefore, part of that loss. The corollary, however, is that while the camp aesthetic can be interpreted as a cipher or code, it resonated greatly with the subterranean network of DJs playing and exchanging records across the gay clubs of Europe and North America. In this sense, the patterns of migration reveal a clandestine milieu of subcultures from a time before gay became mainstream: less straight washed perhaps and more hiding in plain sight.
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