It's the time to Disco: Contexts of Disco across Cultures

 By Himanshu Verma

A look at the semiotics of Disco music in Western and Eastern popular culture (9207 words).

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Outline of Contents

1. Introduction (see extract below)
2. The Contexts of Disco in the West
3. Contexts of Disco in the Indian Popular Imagination
4. Disco in Indian Popular Cultural Forms
5. Semiotic Hijacking: Adoption and Adaptation of Disco
6. It's the Time to Disco: Reading a Recent Bollywood Disco Song

Extract from the Introduction

"In this paper, I am interested in looking at the way in which Disco, a popular musical genre widely associated with gay culture in the context of western cultures; has been adopted and adapted in Bollywood songs, the mainstream cinema of India.

I am not musically competent enough to comment on the musical specificities of the Disco genre, neither am I excessively familiar with its history. While this might be seen as a confounding factor in my ‘musical’ understanding of Disco and how it is musically negotiated in the Indian context; this paper is more concerned with the semiotics of Disco in Indian popular culture, which I will argue, are significantly different from the contexts in which Disco emerged and evolved in the West. The chief concerns in this paper are not musical but extra-musical; notably the association of Disco music with gay culture.

The paper will attempt to explore how Bollywood Disco songs have addressed the issue of representing this significant extra-musical element of Disco music. I will point out that with the exception of one recent song, Bollywood Disco songs have ignored this association and not represented it, or even alluded to it. The one song that at least does some justice to this association is the popular hit It’s the Time to Disco (2003). The paper will then dwell on a detailed analysis of the song in question, attempting to understand the modes in which the song represents gayness, indirectly and obliquely. The main intention here is to decode clues that Disco songs over the years can offer on Indian modernity, globalisation and popular culture."