D.C. LaRue - 'Disco Lives' EP [Only Good Vibes Music]

AFTER A LIFETIME on the dance floor, you realize that escaping with a beat wasn't the only thing you found there. Sometimes, and surprisingly early, you can find self-awareness, defiance, enlightenment. Therein lies an essential truth about the timelessness of music, and in particular the music of D.C. LaRue. After two years of art school studying graphic design, LaRue joined the music industry recording two top 40 pop records, influenced by the teen idol era. In his youth, he began writing songs about the rapidly growing club and bar subculture he frequented, where the most marginalized in society could safely congregate after being rejected at work, church, school, and often family. In this relatively short selection of LaRue classics, contemporary remixes bring out the timelessness of his songs, in tone, message, and musicality.

"Indiscreet" alone, from LaRue's 1976 concept album, "The Tea Dance," tells much of the story about how disco had already given rise to its more popular and influential successor, hip-hop, by the time it was declared dead by the superseded establishments of radio, media, and record labels. Released in a highly limited, personally inscribed, 12-inch, 45 rpm edition for a select list of the best disco DJs, its complex and elastic polyrhythm made it as irresistible to young black DJs and breakdancing teens as any other major street hit of the year, such as Ralph MacDonald's "Jam on the Groove." Or for a teenage collector, anything by the R&B band Rufus. The remixes here, clean and uncluttered, with their steady, unfrantic four-on-the-floor pulse, focus on the overlap between the top-tier studio musicians on LaRue's albums and the star-studded studio session lineups of East and West Coast Gregg Diamond, Ashford and Simpson, Barry White, Stuff, and other diverse creative disco-Latin and soul-jazz fusion.

But wait, there's more! "Let Them Dance," received in its time as one of the groundbreaking moments of new musical technology, is reinterpreted mainly with its live acoustic tracks, while also maintaining brilliant rhythmic synth hooks with results that remain true to its intentionally oblique lyrics, a novelistic depiction of drug dealers, the underground LGBTQ+ community, and the powerful upper-class elite who comprised the multiracial and socially integrated crowds on the dance floors at the height of disco. "Do You Want the Real Thing," also "updated" in the style of the lush but sharp Motown and Philadelphia productions that originally inspired the arrangement, still resonates as a late-night internal dialogue or negotiation, another of LaRue's literary signatures.

Go ahead, watch a Fleetwood Mac documentary if you want to see industry executives and commentators say, "Huh? How did that happen?" discussing a timeless and universal work that bravely confronted the songwriters' inner feelings and vulnerabilities. Play this record and you will feel exactly how disco provided refuge, healing, and community to the most marginalized, and immediately embraced absolutely everyone else, even the ruling class, thus proving once again that in art, national cuisine, fashion, and every cultural and creative endeavor, it is the most marginalized of each nationality and generation who feed, clothe, entertain, and inspire the broader society that rejected them in the first place.