The baton passes from one manufactured disco band to another, but “Y.M.C.A.” is superior to “Mary’s Boy Child” in absolutely every respect – well, the dancing in the video is just as awful, but in “Y.M.C.A.”‘s case the wisdom of crowds soon provided a better alternative. A big part of this song’s success is Victor Willis, who gives his broad-chested lead vocal absolutely everything, starting stentorian and then going steadily more berserk (“PUT YOUR PRIDE ON THE SHELF!”) – gutbucket shouting put to the service of disco goodwill.
This remarkable year is the triumph of disco at the top of the charts, but more than that it’s the triumph of a particular effect of disco: the way the disco pulsebeat could work as an identity accelerator, its unobtrusive addictiveness pushing the spotlight onto performers and emotions and magnifying them, turning stars into icons, expressions into anthems. With a four-four backbone, cool would become cooler, resolve more resolute, cynicism more curdled. And “Y.M.C.A.” is an example of this, turning Willis into a kind of prophet of inclusiveness, and turning mainstream disco’s achilles heel – anyone could dance to this stuff – into a mission statement: everyone welcome. The gap between “it’s all the same” and “we’re all the same” is a thin one.
As a kid I loved this song – everybody did. It wasn’t just the dance, it was the dressing-up: five of the six VP costumes are standard kids’ birthday party fancy-dress – all that’s missing is a superhero, unless Leatherman qualifies. And this for me was an exotic record – vigorously, powerfully American: I remember my shock and disappointment at discovering a YMCA in Britain, an unglamorous blocky building on Great Russell Street. When it was a hit I was three or four years off even knowing what ‘gay’ meant, by which point “Y.M.C.A.” had become a great survivor of the disco era, entrenched in wedding disco playlists, its campness obvious but somehow hardly noticeable. In other words I feel utterly unqualified to even speculate on how it resonated at the time, within gay culture or in the mainstream. All I do know is that somehow, 30 years on, I’m still not sick of hearing that chorus.
Score: 8
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At the time, I disliked this song. Corny disco? Yup. On principle.
I was wrong.
Although, even I could see that Victor Willis was one hell of a soul voice.
So, how did it reverberate in the still largely homophobic mainstream culture? Actually, nobody cared! It was that good an ‘everybody join in’ song. Was this the first ‘gay’ song that celebrated, explicitly? Up to now, it had all been either ‘camp’ John Inman type things, or ‘sympathetic’ songs like “Under one roof” where someone dies in the end. A bit like how gay people were dealt with in movies in times past.
This was as much a turning point as “Anarchy” was, in it’s way.
Right, I’m off to make way for much longer and more incisive analysis from the likes of…….
(Oh, and by p^nk s request: Lytton watched the video and didn’t get bored but showed no great interest either and didn’t feel like dancing. A couple of smiles, no pointing – I’d say this is a 5, maybe borderline 6 from the under-2s jury.)
Before I get started, let’s celebrate 1979 getting started – in Popular terms totally and absolutely my favourite year, and with maybe only three exceptions I’d be inclined to give every entry in this year a 9 or a 10. There are undoubtedly “better” years in general but none reflects the greatness better or more accurately in terms of what got to number one.
In my opinion.
Right – “Y.M.C.A.” Imagine the young Jimmy Somerville we see in the video to “Smalltown Boy”; dejectedly leaving a Glasgow and a family which doesn’t, can’t and won’t understand the way he feels and the way he is, making his way down to London. He already knows that the transition will not be glamorous; he has to sign on, gets attacked in the street, but eventually comes into contact with new friends, new alliances are made, he joins and blends into a sympathetic community. But all the while, playing inside his head, is a glamorous MGM red carpet of a musical setpiece; singers and dancers welcoming him as he emerges from Euston Station, dressed in costumes representing every possible way of life.
The Village People may not have been Londoners – and their writer and producer Jacques Morali even less so – but that’s the vision I see in “Y.M.C.A.,” a tickertape parade embracing the young dispossessed, and the first unambiguously gay number one single. The key line “You can hang out with all the boys” may have been filed next to John Inman and Kenneth Williams by our parents, but there was no doubt about what it meant, nor the very palpable subtext of such lines as “young man, what do you want to be?” or “No man does it all by himself.”
The group had already scored heavily at club level with similar beefy cheerleading anthems such as “Macho Man” and “San Francisco” but the jauntily proud “Y.M.C.A.” was their breakthrough gesture. It’s probably no accident that lead singer Victor Willis was so vocally reminiscent of Levi Stubbs; for they restored an exuberance and brassy boldness that for the most part had been absent from the upmarket work of ‘70s Motown and Philly. The beat is upfront and solidly foursquare in a way which directly predicates Hi-NRG and House; the brass take no quarters in their high-C trumpet fanfares; and the whole spectacle is marvellously subversive, taking the model of the Young Men’s Christian Association and turning its intended morals against it… “You can do whatever you feel.” Yet the model of the Good Samaritan is preserved intact and brilliantly spruced up to fit the mood of its times; note the compassion and lightness inherent in the couplet “I felt no man cared if I were alive/I felt the whole world was so jive.” And then the quintuplets of brass blasts herald yet another handclapping, flag-waving chorus, and we realise what a major turning point “Y.M.C.A.” represents; no more shame or guilt, fuck the homophobia and racism which lay behind the wretched Disco Sucks “movement,” fuck even the gloomy pity of Aznavour’s “What Makes A Man?” (though never forget its message) – the record was not entitled “Say It Loud, We’re Gay And We’re Proud,” but that was surely what it said; the fact that millions of hen nights and provincial ‘70s clubs continue gladly to orbit their handbags around its friendly commandments emphasises its glorious subversiveness. After that, the Village People had no real option but to continue with minor variants on the same theme – “In The Navy,” “Go West” – and their time was necessarily brief. But consider the work of dual genius which is the Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 recording of “Go West,” a performance great because it works on two distinct and separate levels; firstly, as a satire on the post-Glasnost Americanisation of Russia, and secondly as something of a hymn of renewed pride and defiance for the post-Aids age. Yes, pride and defiance – I can go for that.
Like Tom, this says ‘childhood’ to me above anything else.
I always liked Richard Smith’s lines about this. That the Village People offered very sensible advice to young gay men (Go to the YMCA, join the Navy) and that an equivalent British group that featured a policeman, a squaddie and a construction worker would be likely to hold less sexual mystique.
I know that its a good record, an important one, but I respond to it on a rather more theoretical level than one of instinctive pleasure anymore. ‘In The Navy’ is the business, though!
Doing the semaphore YMCA dance with your arms isn’t as easy as you think it’s going to be, in my experience. The ‘C’ really hurts, and you have to remember that it goes from right to left, not left to right.
That B-side, ‘The Women’! How does that go, then? How does the Village People worldview represent these women? I’m intrigued.
Re #3 – yes, no spoilers but 1979 is an amazing year. Most of the records coming up will be 10s for somebody commenting, I’d guess. (There may be a short delay before the next entry, though, as I have a job interview tomorrow and need to be thinking about that).
I too am intrigued by “The Women”.
When – aged six – I saw the YMCA in Watford, I thought it must have been where the video was filmed. This is a gigantic tune, pointless to resist.
Re: #2 – playing records to kids and gauging their reactions? Whoda thunk it?
I think I’d have gone to 10 for this, certainly at least a 9. I still get the same kind of glee and dancing impetus I did at the time.
Disco had a few terrific singers who never seemed to get much recognition or fame – Jimmy Ellis of the Trammps was even better than Willis, for instance, but how often do you hear his name?
This hit #1 the weekend I moved in with my then-girlfriend, later-wife.
I was always very good at the dance! OK let’s see if I can remember them all without looking. Policeman, Native American, Leather dude, Cowboy, errrr Army dude I think, and one more? BUILDER, of course! *slaps forehead* They should have swapped Army dude for Spaceman I think.
I was almost exactly 6 months old when this became #1 in the UK, so I obviously don’t remember it from when it was new.
And while I have no reason to doubt the importance of this song for the gay community, which is certainly a worthy cause, as a *song* I just dont’t know what to make of it.
It’s been parodied and re-used and recycled and used in advertising and God-knows-what so many times that it has ceased being actual music, it’s just some sort of strange cultural artifact. I also get the feeling that its often used with an attitude that either says “Wow, those gay people sure are funny, aren’t they?” or “I really don’t have anything against gay people. Honestly, I really don’t. I mean, there’s nothing wrong about being deviant and abnormal. Really. But it is sort of funny when you think about it, isn’t it?” – neither of which is particularly attractive.
I just cant separate the song in itself from all those associations, no matter how much I try – it’s simply too deeply bogged down in all that phony parody created by others than the Village People themselves.
I would probably have liked it quite a lot otherwise. I love the Pet Shop Boys version of “Go West” (which I heard long before the original Village People version), and I generally have a fondness for big, pompous, anthem-y stuff.
As a closeted and terrified gay 16-year old at the time, I wish I could say that “YMCA” opened the doors and showed me the way – but alas, that was far from the case. For even though I fancied the ripped jeans off the cowboy and the construction worker, all I saw were a bunch of new – if radically improved – archetypes to place alongside Messrs Inman and Grayson, with whom they shared a similar line in cheeky, saucy innuendo – “hang out with all the boys”, indeed!
But where Johnny and Larry remained mired in sexless self-mockery, the Village People exuded an unambigous sexuality – albeit a cartoonish version thereof, which somehow neutralised most of the threat. Except to the likes of me, who felt as alienated by their thrusting, moustachioed in-your-faceness as I had by Inman’s and Grayson’s mincing, neutered outrageousness. For if the gay world really was full of randy leathermen and horny cowboys, perpetually locked into an aggressively single-minded pursuit of instant sexual gratification – the very antithesis of the gentle soul-to-soul romanticism for which I yearned – then this merely confirmed my alienation and isolation. Oh, I might have been attracted to members of my own sex, but if the Village People were any sort of representative of gay people, then I most certainly wasn’t One Of Them.
So much for the angst. All that aside, I loved “YMCA” as a piece of clever, witty, original, infectious disco-pop, which broke with the formula and offered something sonically and rhythmically fresh to my ears (my favourite section being the five blaring brass stabs which precede the chorus, tailor-made for punching your right thumb behind your right shoulder like a camp hitch-hiker). And I loved the video, featuring the VPs lined up on the top of a NYC skyscraper like the Stylistics in 1975, whose unapologetically joyous, life-affirming exuberance smothered all mockery at birth.
As for That Dance, I don’t remember anyone doing the Y-M-C-A hand movements until well into the 1980s, and I certainly don’t remember the movements originating from within the VP camp. Where did it all spring from?
this is a terrific record that i never grow tired of. as tom says, a lot of it’s down to the heroic commitment of the vocalist and the way its universal populalrity perfectly embodies the message of absolute inclusion. the fantasy of 70’s new york disco as an eternal party where any old sad sack just has to pitch up at the doors to be embraced by this massive rainbow coalition is the thing i most love about disco, particularly in my absolute favourite disco record, which sadly won’t be discussed here, ‘native new yorker’.
as well as victor willis sounding like levi stubbs (djp #3) this has also always reminded my of the four tops because of the way those brass stabs mask an awkward transition from verse to chorus in the same way they do in ‘reach out i’ll be there’.
wow and to think this is probably one of the worst #1 singles this year too. i mean it’s great in it’s way but there’s that sense of ‘naffness’ which dogs it.
i once saw a good ‘video ma-shup’ by Shynola who dubbed YMCA over Sinbad-style model skellingtons jaw movements.
um, i hope that mashup wasn’t trying to make the point i fear it was….
you’ve lost me there i’m afraid
#11 – according to Wikipedia, the dance was current at the time. Now I come to think of it I didn’t know what the dance was until later either, though I’m sure I remember it having a dance at the time.
SteveM, it occured to me it might be some sort of nasty aids thing. but i’m probably just slandering the good name of mr shynola, so ignore this.
I loved this too, though now it’s so covered in layers of kitsch nostalgia it’s hard to enjoy as simply as before. To be honest, I didn’t get the gay subtext at all until “In the Navy”
I always thought of Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” as being incredibly sad, an elegy for the optimism and freedom of the pre-AIDS era of sexual liberation. But Neil Tennant makes everything sound sad anyway.
slice of life!
I was only vaguely aware of the “Disco Sucks” movement – I saw clips of the event in Chicago which always struck me as uncomfortably close to similar events burning Beatles records or even Jewish books – but I was generally of the opinion that disco sucked. There was nothing homophobic or particularly racist about my viewpoint – some of the worst disco was made by white people who for all I knew were straight, not that that was an issue to me – just that so much of it was tacky, repetitive and boring (as is a lot of dance music today). But there was always stuff that stood out as being simply great music, and this is a prime example.
It’s not just the sheer style and exuberance, not just the brass sound, not just a great lyric – it’s the joy on the faces of the performers, the espression particularly on Randy Jones (cowboy)’s face which says, oh my God I can’t believe we’re having so much fun and getting away with it. Irresistible. Mind you the dance – Mike, it must have been a British thing, there’s nothing like it on the video – is totally naff.
Five years later my then girlfriend was utterly dumbfounded to find out it was a gay anthem!
Mega whoops – could someone on the site delete #20 asap please!!
Done! I did wonder 🙂
i am intrigued by the b-side: what is the VP take on “the women”?
It’s been a while since I heard it but IIRC theirs is a far more palatable take than, say, Patrick Cargill’s song “Women.”
gotta love this tune – it’s irresistable in it’s lust for life – like Abba’s dancing Queen it addresses a younger version of the singer and urges them to revel in the opportunities available to them.
There’s a gospel feel to the structure of the lyric with a promise of redemption, fellowship and a better life to come.
DJP #3 – interesting idea about Jimmy Somerville or someone like him taking “YMCA” as an invite/welcome to London. Imagine if the message had been more like the Pogues’ “The Old Main Drag”.
Well, play “Smalltown Boy” at 16rpm…
i am intrigued by the b-side: what is the VP take on “the women”?
Will check my copy this evening, but I think the twist is that all the women they name-check are gay icons…
see also Morrissey’s sad twist on it in “Half A Person” – “I booked myself in at the Y….W.C.A.”. I dunno, there’s no liberating some people.
… amd the protagonist in the Jam’s “Strange Town” had just arrived in London and was trying to find the clubs and YMCAs at around the same time.
I wonder if he did the arm movements when he sang it live.
He’d have to be quick though!
Oddly enough, I see quite a few 8s and 9s coming up in 1979 but nothing that’s a 10 for me. I concur that it’s a great year, really the beginning of my last big fling with pop because starting this year and for the four years that follow it’s an exciting and interesting time for me. In many ways the best and worst years of my life.
I can also see a couple of things I loathe and I know I’m going to be out of step with others when we get there. Still, that is all part of life’s rich tapestry and I’m no teenager but an aging, harassed and careworn schoolteacher on the brink of disillusionment.
Oh, YMCA. Well, it’s a classic, innit. One that encompasses everybody and leaks across all kinds of cultural boundaries. Not breathtakingly original but a real feel-good sound. What’s not to like about it?
I don’t think I’ve ever listened to the B side of YMCA before this moment. When I did discos in the 80’s this was nearly always one of the last three songs played. Still goes down well in parties. The B side? To save Mike the time, the handful of women mentiond are indeed gay icons, Rita, Donna, Diana etc first name only.
‘I love the women who know they are women’. Is it about transexuals? Nope, just a pretty crap lyric. They love ‘pretty girls’. Having played this one a half times I can be pretty sure I’ll never play it again.
We should do more on B-sides!
(Yes, I am champing at the bit…)
I really hate ‘YMCA’. Partly it’s my eternal bugbear of clumsy/clunky naffness, as stevem says; plus a certain amount of my other eternal bugbear, enforced jollity. I really dislike how its become somehow representative of gayness though, how its various camp attributes automatically signify homosexuality, I don’t feel it’s in any way representative of me. It’s just too silly.
is there anything “coded gay” you do think is representative of you, lex? (if that’s not too cheeky a question)
i think the transformation over 40-odd years of pretty much the totality of gay life does mean that its signal moments further back along the arc seem much more dated than lots of other things of similar vintage — i wonder also if i don’t feel this way about a lot of punk stuff, which is that it meant everything to me then but now sometimes feels like it’s trying to hold me back in exactly the place it claimed to be setting me free from (or something like that)
(when was the last time anyone saw the “clone” look on the actual real street?)
Well, “bears” are essentially the new clones. God bless my generation for eroticising balding middle-aged flab, just in the nick of time! We are a pragmatic people.
The semaphore dance shows up in the YMCA sequence of Can’t Stop the Music, if I remember right.
haha well yes, “bear” is indeed subversively inclusive that way!
According to both Wikipedia and Pete Silverton’s detailed and well-researched 1998 Mojo feature on the band (God, I am loving my Rock’s Back Pages subscription), the YMCA dance originated with the band members themselves (i.e. in a rare moment of creative autonomy!), and was first seen on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in early 1979. So there you go.
I’m also very dubious about claiming “YMCA” as any kind of “gay anthem”, and the VP’s success as any kind of breathrough for authentic representations of gay culture. Essentially, this was a cartoonised theme-park version of gay culture, pitched squarely to a mainstream straight audience. Indeed, Red Indian Felipe Rose was the group’s only gay member, and composer/producer Jacques Morali provided the only other gay creative input (his co-composer Henri Belolo also being straight, as was occasional lyricist and lead singer Victor Willis).
If you’re looking for a true gay anthem, performed by an openly gay performer to a specifically gay audience, and celebrating a triumphal breakthrough for post-Stonewall gay culture, than might I direct you thisaway?
I remember B.A. Robertson’s comment when guest presenting “Top of the Pops” and the Village People video was shown. As it ended he claimed “I’m glad I don’t live in their village” . I was only 13 at the time so don’t really relate it to anything gay and when I bought the record, nobody at school made any comment. I guess we were just too young to understand.
“Maybe masked man he a poofter, try it on with sturdy Tonto..”
Originally released in 1976 so YMCA didn’t feature the first gay red… sorry Native American Indian.
Tom #30:
Actually, I have a completely different theory about the Morrissey’s YWCA allusion in “Half a Person.” He could be making a sardonic reference to the Village People (after all, most of us queers know what it means to be regarded as half-human and he’s just seeing the downside of the VP’s celebratory gestures).
But even if this is the case, I’ve always figured that the Moz, an incurable Rita Tushingham fan, was filtering this through RT’s character Nancy in The Knack (which is, arguably, A Hard Day’s Night without the Beatles but with sex to compensate for the absence of the former). Nancy, a naive provincial girl newly arrived in London, runs into any number of adventures in her quest to find the YWCA. She never finds the Y but she finds a lot of other things all the same.
Mike–
As far as I’m concerned, the queerest ever (almost) number one has to be the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty’s “What Have I Done to Deserve This.” Some might find the sexuality angle quite ambiguous–but it’s always been pretty clear to me.
Mark S @ 40 –
Maybe the Pet Shop Boys? I don’t have much history of feeling ‘represented’ by gay men in pop music (other walks of public life, more so; but in music, I tend to code gay via diva-appreciation, which I also think is more unpackable as to why loving Madonna, Mariah, Tori et al codes gay; whether this counts as feeling ‘represented’ I don’t really know). Though I should note that I’ve never really required pop music to represent me, I feel I can represent myself perfectly adequately; but I do feel aggrieved when something which has very little to it beyond its intention (or effect) of representing gayness actively doesn’t represent me. I agree with Mike that it feels like theme-park gayness. And also, I love Sylvester.
(Another reason I’ve never appreciated the Village People strain of gayness = it is just NOT SEXY to me in the slightest)
Re 43: Another of those lyrics that passed me by at the time – so, Lone Ranger pre-dates YMCA as a gay hit that doesn’t end in tears.
Must say I thought this was well naff at the time. After all the effusive praise I feel quite apologetic. Undeniably jolly, but so is Winchester Cathedral.
While resisting the urge to discuss the Pet Shop Boys further at this stage, I will just quote Neil Tennant on “YMCA”, as I find that we are, at least in some respects, ad idem:
“At the time I wasn’t involved in the gay scene, I had a girl friend. I found clones positively terrifying. And the Village People themselves all looked like they were fist-f**king. They probably delayed my coming out for several years. But I also remember ‘Y.M.C.A.’ as a great song. I liked the fact that it was so obviously gay — while everybody denied that fact. It became de-sexed. There was almost a conspiracy to not realise it was about having sex with men in the Y.M.C.A showers. It was too good a record to admit that.”
Lex at #46: “I tend to code gay via diva-appreciation”
…as indeed did most of the visible urban gay community in the late 1970s (and forever thereafter of course, but it’s a phenomenon which arguably peaked during the disco boom, and again to a lesser extent during the circuit party era of the early-to-mid 1990s).
I often think that The Village People’s “appearance” on Top of the Pops on Boxing Day 1979, when at the end of their routine they ripped off their moustaches revealing themselves to be… Legs & Co! – a ruse that could only have fooled an unobservant 7 year old such as myself – may have had some lasting imprint upon my expectations of adult sexuality. Though quite what it meant, I still can’t puzzle out.