By admin 
When I first heard “Get Lucky,” by Daft Punk, in the summer of 2013, I was completely, pleasantly disoriented by it. It was new and shiny, but at the same time it instantly threw me back to the late nineteen-seventies, when I was young and dancing was my creed, my drug, my exercise program, and my major means of self-expression. Unlike the other kinds of music I was taking in at that time, disco was the sound of the whole city. It was what all the hot radio stations were playing, what was pumping from boom boxes and car radios. It joined me to all five boroughs, to the people I saw on the subway and on the street. It was the soundtrack to fall, winter, and spring, but summer was its peak season. It gave a pulse to the hottest, most listless summer days and propelled sweat-soaked nights in smoke-filled, underventilated clubs.
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“Get Lucky” sounded exactly like my memories, only more so. The first time I heard it I may have actually burst into tears—I know I did that at least once, because the song brought back so vividly that promise of love, the thing that got me out the door nearly every night in those days. I was a sadly deluded romantic; I was up all night to get lucky, although I seldom succeeded because I was shy and confused and thought I had to be someone other than who I was. “Get Lucky”—with Nile Rodgers’s backbone guitar and Pharrell Williams’s silken vocals and the era-specific sound of analog keyboards—was uncannily evocative, somehow more than a pastiche. I was there, on tenement rooftops and in cellar clubs, in unimproved lofts and in the back rooms of bars. The way you can tell that the song came out about thirty-five years later than that—besides its sophisticated production, of course—is that it is romantic in a way that no one would have allowed themselves to be then.
New York City during the Carter Administration was a tough place that was all about fronting. Hip-hop was just getting going then, and fronting appeared to be its principal subject matter and style. “Fronting,” in music, meant the verbal application of all the layers of psychic armor the urban citizen needs to face the world. A great deal of disco was instructional, some was soft-core, much was nearly wordless—it generally evaded the more complicated emotions, because those would be the antonym to fronting. But while musing thus I remembered “There but for the Grace of God Go I,” by the New York disco band Machine, from the summer of 1979. I hadn’t heard it in a few decades and thought it might be roughly the same b.p.m. as “Get Lucky.” Not so; it is so fast that you realize at once the intensity gap between the eras. “Get Lucky” (a hundred and sixteen b.p.m.) is loose-jointed; the Machine single (around a hundred and thirty) is a tightly coiled spring. Also, it is blazing with fury.
There was not a lot of social-realist disco, and certainly nothing else as powerful as “There but for the Grace of God Go I,” a regional hit (it only made it to No. 77 on the national Billboard Hot 100 chart), co-written by August Darnell, who would go on to lead Kid Creole and the Coconuts. The story concerns upwardly mobile Carlo and Carmen Vidal, who for the sake of their newborn daughter relocate from the Bronx to “somewhere far away / With no Blacks, no Jews, and no gays.” But their expectations are thwarted when the girl, like Lou Reed’s Jenny in “Rock ’n’ Roll,” turns out to be “a natural freak,” alive to the sounds. When she finally gets back to the city, though, it doesn’t go well. There’s a guy involved; “too much love is worse than none at all.” But we elided that punitive ending. What we heard instead was an angry denunciation of suburbia, our collective nemesis, where all the money seemed to be at the time and where some of us had come from. It was a proud urban anthem, with a steady aerobic pulse, announcing to the world that New York City was all about its Blacks, its Jews, and its gays.
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“There but for the Grace of God Go I” didn’t have many peers at the time, but it sounds utterly like 1979. Its righteousness and defiance; its relentless forward motion; its assumption of a common social struggle are all native to that last year before Ronald Reagan. “Get Lucky,” by contrast, is a product of the Obama years, and it is almost shockingly relaxed and self-confident. The people of 1979 would not have been capable of Williams’s swoop from chuckling-conversational to soaring-passionate; they would have checked their emotions in some tighter range for protection. “Get Lucky” may be about taking romantic chances, but it is also triumphal: “We’ve come too far to give up who we are / So let’s raise the bar and our cups to the stars.” Maybe we’re now on the lip of a moment when we’ll be able to say that again.
Because today the struggle is back on, vividly, in New York City. Conditions everywhere are stupefyingly awful, but we’ve got a serious momentum going on, locally. The city in the summer can always use an anthem; here are two models. “There but for the Grace of God Go I,” a song that condemns white flight, may no longer quite apply to social conditions. On the other hand, it speaks as the voice of Blacks, Jews, gays—and by implication numerous other peoples who weren’t yet present in such numbers in 1979. In that way it is evergreen, and so is its irresistible forward momentum. But we need “Get Lucky,” too, because we need romance, or at least hope. The struggle we face is not just political but existential, and while we need to fight, we also need to dance, and to love, so that we don’t forget what we’re ultimately fighting for. ♦
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