{"id":1189,"date":"2026-08-02T10:40:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T10:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1189"},"modified":"2026-08-02T10:40:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T10:40:15","slug":"when-get-lucky-took-me-back-to-the-years-of-disco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1189","title":{"rendered":"When \u201cGet Lucky\u201d Took Me Back to the Years of Disco"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re reading Songs of Summer<\/strong>, a series on music and memory.<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

When I first heard \u201cGet Lucky,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Read more Antonio Banderas\u2019s Acts of Faith<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cGet Lucky\u201d sounded exactly like my memories, only more so. The first time I heard it I may have actually burst into tears\u2014I 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. \u201cGet Lucky\u201d\u2014with Nile Rodgers\u2019s backbone guitar and Pharrell Williams\u2019s silken vocals and the era-specific sound of analog keyboards\u2014was 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\u2014besides its sophisticated production, of course\u2014is that it is romantic in a way that no one would have allowed themselves to be then.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cFronting,\u201d 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\u2014it generally evaded the more complicated emotions, because those would be the antonym to fronting. But while musing thus I remembered \u201cThere but for the Grace of God Go I,\u201d by the New York disco band Machine, from the summer of 1979. I hadn\u2019t heard it in a few decades and thought it might be roughly the same b.p.m. as \u201cGet Lucky.\u201d Not so; it is so fast that you realize at once the intensity gap between the eras. \u201cGet Lucky\u201d (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.<\/p>\n

There was not a lot of social-realist disco, and certainly nothing else as powerful as \u201cThere but for the Grace of God Go I,\u201d a regional hit (it only made it to No. 77 on the national Billboard<\/em> 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 \u201csomewhere far away \/ With no Blacks, no Jews, and no gays.\u201d But their expectations are thwarted when the girl, like Lou Reed\u2019s Jenny in \u201cRock \u2019n\u2019 Roll,\u201d turns out to be \u201ca natural freak,\u201d alive to the sounds. When she finally gets back to the city, though, it doesn\u2019t go well. There\u2019s a guy involved; \u201ctoo much love is worse than none at all.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Read more The World Cup Is Not for Sale<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cThere but for the Grace of God Go I\u201d didn\u2019t 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. \u201cGet Lucky,\u201d 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\u2019s swoop from chuckling-conversational to soaring-passionate; they would have checked their emotions in some tighter range for protection. \u201cGet Lucky\u201d may be about taking romantic chances, but it is also triumphal: \u201cWe\u2019ve come too far to give up who we are \/ So let\u2019s raise the bar and our cups to the stars.\u201d Maybe we\u2019re now on the lip of a moment when we\u2019ll be able to say that again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Because today the struggle is back on, vividly, in New York City. Conditions everywhere are stupefyingly awful, but we\u2019ve got a serious momentum going on, locally. The city in the summer can always use an anthem; here are two models. \u201cThere but for the Grace of God Go I,\u201d 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\u2014and by implication numerous other peoples who weren\u2019t yet present in such numbers in 1979. In that way it is evergreen, and so is its irresistible forward momentum. But we need \u201cGet Lucky,\u201d 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\u2019t forget what we\u2019re ultimately fighting for.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Overheard in New York: O.K., Actually These Were in Newark Airport<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucy Sante on how Daft Punk\u2019s 2013 hit \u201cGet Lucky\u201d evokes the disco sounds of the late nineteen-seventies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-songs-of-summer"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen \u201cGet Lucky\u201d Took Me Back to the Years of Disco - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1189\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When \u201cGet Lucky\u201d Took Me Back to the Years of Disco - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Lucy Sante on how Daft Punk\u2019s 2013 hit \u201cGet Lucky\u201d evokes the disco sounds of the late nineteen-seventies.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1189\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-02T10:40:15+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1189#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1189\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"When \u201cGet Lucky\u201d Took Me Back to the Years of Disco\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-02T10:40:15+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1189\"},\"wordCount\":1080,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1189#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/2f183beaefd974f1729ccd5a8207f589.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Songs of Summer\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1189#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1189\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1189\",\"name\":\"When \u201cGet Lucky\u201d Took Me Back to the Years of Disco - 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