Following the commercial failure of Disco, and Punk attempts to further their agendas, a number of trends that appeared in New York during the early 1980s came together as mutant disco. It combined disco with elements of Funk, Post-Punk, and a spirit of experimentation and blending different sounds from Jazz, Hispanic American Music, and Dub, as well as Hip Hop.
While mutant disco artists created left-field music that consciously resisted generic constraint
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Following the commercial failure of Disco, and Punk attempts to further their agendas, a number of trends that appeared in New York during the early 1980s came together as mutant disco. It combined disco with elements of Funk, Post-Punk, and a spirit of experimentation and blending different sounds from Jazz, Hispanic American Music, and Dub, as well as Hip Hop.
While mutant disco artists created left-field music that consciously resisted generic constraint, the sound coalesced around a core of funky basslines, syncopated grooves, and angular, sometimes abrasive guitar riffs. Its integration of post-punk aesthetics into a beat-driven framework would situate mutant disco in parallel to early New Wave. When present, the vocals are often quirky, ironic, or subversive, may include rapping, screaming, and weird vocal sounds.
Key to mutant disco’s development was major label withdrawal from New York’s party scene in the 1980s, shifting club play toward local independent music and reconnecting artists to the DJ-dancefloor nexus against which radio was favored during disco’s peak. While majors had marketed disco and punk as discrete, opposing entities, a new crop of independent labels such as 99, Celluloid, and ZE Records–who in 1981 compiled the sound’s eponymous release, Mutant Disco: A Subtle Discolation of the Norm–embraced an openness which was reflected in the eagerness of artists, DJs, and clubgoers to explore new sounds and variety beyond the basic formulas of disco and Punk Rock.
Fostering social integration across backgrounds, clubs began to function as the center of a pluralistic creative economy fertile for collaboration, risk-taking, and boundary-crossing. In this context, ZE signed artists coming out of No Wave, such as James Chance, while August Darnell boasted a disco background and Material drew its lineup from both wings. No wavers progressed from dissonance, anti-structure, and noise to the incorporation of disco and funk sounds into a post-punk context, as evidenced by the single "Fire / Mission Impossible" by Lizzy Mercier Descloux. and the work of Arthur Russell, whose Dinosaur L and Loose Joints reconnected disco with a raw dancefloor energy. These sounds found a common home on the dancefloor as they were embraced by DJs such as Larry Levan, François K., and Anita Sarko. The scene would come to be understood under the auspices of mutant disco, and eventually also "disco-not-disco," after a 2000 compilation Disco Not Disco: Leftfield Disco Classics From the New York Underground reinvigorated interest in the sound.
Though the New York scene disintegrated as the 1980s roared on toward increased inequality, commercialism, the crack cocaine and AIDS crises, and a retreat to divided cultural camps and segmented tastes, mutant disco would be influential among funk-infused UK post-punk and Dance-Punk groups throughout the decade.
