From her Salon.com article on Madonna...
Madonna described her forthcoming CD as "future disco" -- which raised the hopes of all die-hard disco fans that "Confessions on a Dance Floor" would be a masterpiece, a return to roots but also a visionary breakthrough.
That's not what we got -- though you'd never know it from the gushing reviews, which applauded the CD for achieving Madonna's purported aim of making people dance. My blood boiled at this insulting reduction of dance music to gymnastics -- mere recreational aerobics. I for one do not dance to dance music; disco for me is a lofty metaphysical mode that induces contemplation. (Of course, this may partly descend from my Agnes Gooch marginalization in the old bar scene, where I was -- as Nora Ephron would say -- a wallflower at the orgy.) Giorgio Moroder's albums, which I listened to obsessively on headphones, were an enormous inspiration to me throughout the writing of "Sexual Personae" in the 1970s and '80s. Disco at its best is a neurological event, a shamanistic vehicle of space-time travel.
It's apparently quite difficult
to shake one's groove thang when one has a long pointy stick jabbed firmly
up it.
