Dinner Music #190: The weekly lineup

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This week we’re listening to funk, boogie, and disco, with international and experimental flair. Summer has started (in the Northern Hemisphere). The heat waves are coming. We’ve got to have some music to dance to.

We start with Dancing for Mental Health by Will Powers, a disco album styled with matter-of-fact self-help affirmations, spoken with cheekiness. Will Powers was the stage name for celebrity and rock-n-roll photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who photographed any and all major celebrity or rock star in the 70s and 80s, like Patti Smith, Carly Simon, the B-52s, Talking Heads, and more.

“My point as Will Powers is that it doesn’t matter what I mean or who I am. It matters who you are. If you want to think this is serious advise, go for it, if you want to think it’s just funny, then laugh your ass off. If it helps you in any way what so ever, if that comes through to you with Will Powers, then it was a successful for me,” said Goldsmith.

The music video for “Adventures in Success” was one of the first to use computer-generated graphics:

Next, we’ve got Uncle Louie’s Here by Uncle Louie, a dancefloor funk record from brother duo Frank and Eddie Dillard with production help from Walter Murphy. This album is for boogie-lovers everywhere. We move into Dime Quién Es Esa by Las Deblas, a mostly disco, occasionally Balearic, album from a female Spanish duo in the early 80s, whose music The Mixtape Club calls “emotionally loaded gypsy business.” Their sound takes on Arabic influence, as well as afro-cuban and traditional latin sounds, like flamenco and rumba, so that the album is something of a streamy-dreamy disco album that I could see DJ Harvey playing in Ibiza (maybe he has?).

Next, we have Marti Caine’s Point of View, not a “chart-topping-radio-smash-hit disco, but the left of center kind with varied elements: Dub, darkness and a slow-paced comfort that has no desire to rush.”1 Before it was repressed, original copies would go for hundreds of dollars, and after you listen to it, you’ll see why. It’s a great record, top-to-bottom. We end with Press Color by Lizzy Mercier Descloux, which was called “an ambitious and stylistically diverse [album] that merged cool dance grooves with harsh, minimal guitar runs and unusual harmonies.”2 Which is to say, it’s a weird album, one of those that defies genres, while still being recognizably something like new wave and disco, which is also to say, that it’s dance-able record, the only thing that truly matters to me.

Enjoy.