“Good Things Don’t Last Forever”: A Dalliance with Disco?

1 Finding Decadence in Disco

It is difficult to define decadence after its fin de siècle heyday. Decadent scholars Kate Hext and Alex Murray have written: “decadence after the fin de siècle is even more difficult to detect and ultimately define than it was at the fin de siècle. […] Decadence was not a movement as such after the imprisonment of Wilde” (2019], 11). Despite this difficulty of decadence after Wilde’s incarceration, both authors have argued that there were decadent influences in cultures that developed in early twentieth century America. Murray has found expressions of decadence in America’s roaring twenties through writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016], 389). Meanwhile, Hext’s Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies (2024]) finds decadence as an inspiration and practice in early Hollywood pictures. Likewise, Alice Condé has argued that the spirit of decadence transcends its Victorian origins as an art movement:

Every decadent moment of Western cultural anxiety is accompanied by a subculture of almost nihilistic hedonism encompassing sexual licence, self-obsession, and fascination with degeneration. […] The pleasure-seeking excess of the Roaring Twenties was a reaction to the economic prosperity and modernity after The Great War. (2019], 380)

The author of this article has explicitly linked decadence to seventies disco in a previous publication, “’Le Freak, c’est Chic’: Decadence and Disco” (Rees 2020, 126–42). This article further develops that publication’s argument that disco was a late twentieth century manifestation of decadence. It, however, focuses more specifically on how an understanding of decadence can help explain why liminality is such an important and empowering idea in disco culture, with an emphasis on living in the present.

The relationship between the artistic movements of fin de siècle decadence, roaring twenties jazz, and ‘me-decade’ seventies disco is less coincidental and more the development of culture over time. Discotheques like Studio 54, often through the attire worn, art deco marketing, and a return to big orchestral bands consciously harkened back to what Americans remembered as their own most recent era of glamourous decadence: the economic boom and crash, alongside illicit partying, of the prohibition era (1920–1933).^[1] The poet Ben Hecht wrote in this period of the “whiplike rhythms of the jazz band” (2015], 105). For him, the jazz era was most definitely comparable to any classical precursor of decadence: “This is the immemorial bacchanal lurching through the kaleidoscope of the centuries. Pan with a bootlegger’s grin and a checkered suit. Dionysius with a saxophone to his lips. And the dance of Paphos called now the shimmie” (Hecht 2015, 104). And a similar statement could easily be extended to seventies disco, only this time with Pan as a drag queen in glitter. Dionysius on the DJ decks, and the dance of Paphos being everything from doing ‘the hustle’ to more individualised, free form moves.^[2]

2 Disco Literature

While disco was once a genre derided for being commercialised and apolitical, in recent decades there has been a shift in scholarship and popular culture towards finding 1970s discotheques to have been areas of unifying partying in harsh inner-city environments. This shift can be seen in texts such as Anthony Haden-Guest’s The Last Party (1997), Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen’s Saturday Night Forever (1999), Mel Cheren’s autobiographical My Life and the Paradise Garage (2000), Tim Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day (2003), Peter Shapiro’s Turn the Beat Around (2005]), and Alice Echols’ Hot Stuff (2010]).

The interpretation of disco culture as multicultural and inclusive chimes with liberal perspectives in our own times. The culture in its late seventies mainstream form is acknowledged as having had commercial and often overlapping elements, such as the inclusivity of some clubs in opposition to the exclusive entry policy of others like Studio 54, but there is no doubt as to the importance of disco as a social movement. As the online magazine Szentek put it in a 2021 article: “the origins of disco reveal the genre as one which lowers boundaries, giving marginalized or oppressed in society a voice or a space to express themselves” (Newton 2021, n.pag.). In Hot Stuff, Alice Echols suggested that the implicit messages of mainstream disco covertly remolded American popular culture towards being more accepting of diverse identities (2010], 239). This progressive interpretation of 1970s disco is the current academic consensus. These histories have not, however, studied the relationship between decadence and disco. References to generalised partying decadence may be interwoven into narratives about the music and dancing, but it is not the focus of study (Lawrence 2003, 310).

3 1970s American Declinism

As in Europe’s fin de siècle, there was a similar sense in 1970s America that citizens were living through a period of uncertainty, possibly to result in decline from their position as a global superpower. The nation experienced its bicentennial in 1976 and the nostalgic celebrations could be contrasted with the worries of the present. The sixties had been a tumultuous decade, ending in countercultural unrest, domestic terrorism, and race riots. The seventies also saw stagflation, an OPEC oil embargo, and a general sense of economic uncertainty that the nation had not experienced since the Great Depression (1929–1939). Towards the end of 1979, The Philadelphia Tribune wrote: “America is entering, for the first time in its history, an era of decline […] The fact is that we, as a nation, are going to have less and less of the good things in life. The 1980s, by all indications, will be a decade of unprecedented scarcity” (1979], 6). By contrast, the Japanese and West German economies seemed to only ever grow and it seemed that they might eventually overtake that of America. The seventies also saw elite corruption with Watergate and other political scandals, rising crime rates, dilapidating industrial infrastructure, and a messy withdrawal from Vietnam, only for the American-defended south to be quickly invaded afterwards and made communist. The brutality of the fighting in Vietnam, which at the time was the US military’s longest conflict, had brought the nation’s sense of self-proclaimed moral leadership to the world into question. Furthermore, it was the first decisive defeat of their military that many Americans could remember. In retrospect, the USSR would unravel in the following decade, but before the ill-fated Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, it could seem as though it was the USA that was the declining superpower.

There was also, within some narratives of the period, an explicit sense of a decadent ‘rise and fall’ interpretation of history. In dubbing his era the “me-decade” in a 1976 New York Magazine story, journalist Tom Wolfe argued that the prosperity of post-war America had created a morally weakened society.^[3] Similarly to fin de siècle decadents, he saw American power as leading to degenerating luxury; of rise leading to fall. The prosperity of mass consumerism was thought to have resulted in a general population that was now materially and idly capable of a selfishness once reserved to the richest:

This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else. (Wolfe 1976, n.pag.)

In Wolfe’s view, declinism was no longer confined to an enfeebled decadent aristocracy, but infiltrated every class within society. Young people, as he saw it, were the epitome of this new culture: “once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing — they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do — they discovered and started doting on Me!” (Wolfe 1976, n.pag.).

In a derogative sense, disco, when it emerged as a mainstream commercial phenomenon after the 1977 release of Saturday Night Fever, could be envisioned by those who hated it as embodying these ill-disciplined excesses. A 1980 article from Call and Post claimed: “Discoing is a religious form in American society. It is, indeed, a way to find a false sense of individualized meaning. Meaning comes from internalized self-transformation, i.e., from learning how to manage ‘SELF’. Individuals and/or families must give meaning to society, not vice versa” (Mills 1980, 8).

But disco, as an underground clubbing culture, predated Saturday Night Fever. Rather than a moment of precipice, or at least alongside any economic precipice, disco was, for many of its adherents, a culture of liberation. The ‘new woman’ of the seventies was increasingly pursuing professional jobs, and the recent Enovid pill, or as it was better know, ‘the pill,’ gave her greater control over childbirth. The discotheque was a space in which she, now with greater independence, could party unchaperoned with friends, have a casual sexual relationship, and spend her own earnt money. Disco was also post-civil rights, with racial integration on dancefloors. And sexual liberation for women, alongside the example of civil rights, inspired a politics of sexual liberation amongst LGBTQ+ peoples, for whom discotheques could be focal meeting points within their communities.

For these diverse peoples, disco could seem a unique moment towards a positive, if not totally guaranteed future of greater equality. In that envisioned future, the decline would be of an older, more socially conservative and prohibitive society. But whether imagined as the epitome of seventies decline, or of the decade’s socially progressive potential, disco was commonly perceived as a permissive partying culture which ignored previous social taboos. With its emphasis on post-Vietnam war and post-civil rights peace, sexual ‘free love,’ and generally doing as one felt, it was commonly understood by social commentators as a boogieing response to a period of change and uncertainty.

4 The Idea of Studio 54 as a Decadent Space

No discotheque better captured a sense of the American elite engaging in ancient Rome-like partying amidst a crisis than the glitzy Studio 54. For dance culture, it was an atypically celebrity driven club, which departed from the more egalitarian and inclusive principles of the underground clubs earlier in the decade. Whilst Studio 54 was globally publicised through photographs of its glitterati, most discotheques were much more secretive, and often with good reason. Many constituents, especially LGBTQ+ ones, would not appreciate their rowdy, sexual, and illegal partying being recorded (Fletcher 2009, 394). But in the collective American cultural memory, Studio 54 has been envisioned as the epitome of seventies decadence. As recently as 2018, a documentary about the club advertised itself with a tagline suitable for the writings of a Victorian classicist: “Nothing This Fabulous Could Last Forever” (Studio 54, 2018]).

The club’s story has been remembered as though emblematic of the excesses within the period. Legal counsel to the owners of Studio 54, Roy M. Cohn, told journalists following a 1978 Internal Revenue Service raid of the club: “There is no link between Studio 54 and organized, unorganized or disorganized crime… There are no hidden interests. They [the Internal Revenue Service] can investigate from here to doomsday, and they will find nothing” (Kihss 1978, 1). This was despite the club’s co-owner, Stephen Rubell, having stated in a 1977 interview with New York Magazine: “The profits are astronomical. Only the Mafia does better […] [When asked about exact profits] It’s a cash business and you have to worry about the IRS […] I don’t want them to know everything” (Dorfman 1977, 14).

Studio 54 was a flashpoint in the news reporting of late-1970s disco and it is not difficult to see why. Alongside the celebrities and politicians who frequented the discotheque, its story has, as the quotes above demonstrate, a quality of Icarus flying too close to the sun. Its glitter and excesses on the dancefloor, as well as the hubris of its owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, is reminiscent of how we remember speakeasies of the 1920s where elites themselves broke prohibition law, just with disco music playing rather than jazz. They were perhaps overconfident that powerful attendees of the club they had befriended made them untouchable. Among other scandals, the club’s original owners were brought down by tax evasion. Studio 54’s walls and ceiling were found to be stuffed with undeclared money (Shapiro 2005, 207).

No piece of nostalgic Studio 54 media captures the perception of disco as a uniquely decadent moment between rise and fall better than the 1998 comedy drama film The Last Days of Disco, which was loosely based on the Manhattan clubbing experiences of its writer and director, Whit Stillman. Disco uniquely serves the film’s coming of age narrative, with dancing, hook-ups, and friends experiencing their last days of youth, innocence, and carefree fun. Its title alone captures that decadent preoccupation with lastness, of being unrepeatable, of tragedy and change. It plays upon the historical descriptor of ‘the last days of Rome,’ suggesting that the empire’s fall had a brief period before a cataclysmic event. Disco is similarly perceived in the public memory to have had a suddenness to its mainstream demise, with the music industry quickly losing faith in its commercial prospects after the 1979 ‘disco sucks’ campaign in which rock radio DJ, Steve Dahl, mocked the genre on air for weeks. It culminated in Disco Demolition Night, a bonfire of the vanities style event in which he blew up records at the halftime show of a Chicago baseball game, resulting in a riotous, disco record destroying atmosphere.

The perception that this killed disco, however, overlooks that many clubs remained open, because people who particularly enjoyed dancing still danced. Disco was no longer popular in mainstream culture, but it continued to develop in more grassroots clubs in the eighties, with ‘disco’ records simply rebranded as ‘dance’ records. Similarly, Rome did not fall in a day. The empire persisted after numerous invasions of the old capital. But the narrative of partying before the fall, and of the excesses of this partying being a reason for why the fall happened, is thematically a much more romantic story.

5 Momentum and Disco

The best club night is intensely energy consuming, but strangely makes a person feel like they have more energy when they leave the discotheque than when they entered. Decadence offers a theory for understanding why clubbers pursue this nocturnal lifestyle. In his artistic history Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater was concerned with the societal conditions which generate and regenerate outstanding art (Shuter 1997, 2). Central to this, for Pater, was human energy and how it is or is not expended. In his conclusion, he forwarded momentous energy as essential to living a meaningful human existence. “Every moment […] some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, - for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end” (Pater 2010, 119).

For decadent artists that followed Pater, living without momentum, being (tut) conventional, was death by another name. As Pater famously penned it: “to burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (2010], 120). Meanwhile, “failure is to form habits,” to become repetitive, uncreative and decelerate (Pater 2010, 120). Sensations, induced by human culture, would blast energy: “art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake” (Pater 2010, 121). Indeed, decadence had art for art’s sake, but a century later, disco had dancing for dancing’s sake. Disco’s nocturnal response to the tedium and constraints of daytime life was an energetic momentum: “to burn always with this hard gem-like flame” (Pater 2010, 120). Or as the Trammps commanded it, to “burn baby burn” to the “disco inferno” (1976]).

Energetic intensity pervades disco. Everything, from sex, to drugs, to the most important things, the music and the dancing, are intended to invigorate one towards momentum. As Grace Jones put it in a 1978 interview: “I consider myself one of the true disco people and not one of those who just wants to show off clothes or get high. I used to go and just dance and dance until my clothes were falling off… I know what the disco people want. I know what energy is. There’s been a lot of energy put into disco. I really get off on energy” (Plutzik 1978, 21). The idea, as Walter Pater observed it, was to ignore or escape a feeling of dread about the future by embracing what interesting things could be made of the now:

The sudden act, the rapid transition of thought, the passing expression […] it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps – some brief and wholly concrete moment – into which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long history have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future into an intense consciousness of the present. (Pater 2010, 133)

As professor of decadence, Kate Hext has observed, for the scholarly Pater, that meant an appreciation of fine art, or satiating his own desires through the aromas of rose petals on his desk and fresh orange peel on his window sill (2013], 85). Pater may not have meant for people to go wild in Epicurean excesses, with more of a call to appreciate beauty than for sensuality for its own sake, but that is not how many artists interpreted his conclusion (Hext 2013, 86). A 1933 university thesis observed: “the decadents translated this into terms of a life that should be a succession of exquisite moments to be enjoyed without restraint” (Healy 1933, 36). Certainly, many artists used decadence as a thin veil to explore sexuality and other vices of the Victorian mindset. A society perceived to be failing anyway could be viewed as lacking the moral authority to discipline them. This was essentially the same inherited message that disco, with its racially integrated and queer dancefloors would have. Luther Vandross sang in 1976, in as good a summary of the disco ethos as any: “If it feels good (do it). Cause if it’s good for the body, it’s good for the soul” (1976]). Moral authority in his own time was being called into question by cover ups like Watergate or The Pentagon Papers, which leaked information suggesting that the government had misled the American public over Vietnam. If decadence eschewed Victorian morality to justify the pursuit of pleasure, disco went a step further with that inversion and claimed pleasure as a kind of morality. It was an inversion of a puritanical Christian ethos of denying sinful urges toward a perfect afterlife and instead celebrated life itself as having the capacity for a dancefloor heaven.

This emphasis on instinctive pleasures in disco, manifesting in the felt rhythm of the music itself, was interrelated to cultural shifts in American attitudes towards the most present-orientated of activities – sex. If anything, as it became disentangled from associations of childbirth and fatal diseases, it seemed to have more momentum than ever. Disco was one expression of a slow-burning sexual revolution. Enovid, the female contraceptive pill released in 1960, had given women greater control over childbirth, the ability to priortise careers, and increasingly, the ability to choose multiple casual sexual partners (Bailey 2006, 295). Furthermore, during the Second World War, penicillin was found to be an effective treatment for that most longstanding worry of decadent artists – syphilis. Between 1947 and 1957, its incidence rate fell by 95 % and its death rate fell by 75 % (Bailey 2006, 295). It went from being a societal paranoia of the Victorian age to something most people did not think much about. Furthermore, disco’s mainstream heyday was before the AIDS pandemic devastated dancefloors, and particularly queer dancefloors, in the early eighties. Consequently, in retrospect, narratives of disco can have a liminal, in-between ‘age of innocence’ feel to them, of ‘free love’ sex without future consequence. For women on the pill, or an LGBTQ+ community, sex without childbirth could be reimagined in the American psyche as a purely pleasurable pursuit, existing entirely within its own moment, rather than as something with later results.

Disco music was uniquely suited towards artistically expressing this sense of pleasurable nowness. Whilst there is a logic to musical structure, rhythmic dance music is best appreciated instinctually by how it makes one feel, or how it intensifies how one feels. The repetitiveness of a disco beat, so much hated by rock critics, could provide a vital function to those engaging in yet another time forgetting pleasure: tripping out on drugs. Those tripping needed a safe, steady, and uplifting sound to navigate their prolonged high. DJs also added to this sense of nowness by reading the crowd and unpredictably choosing records rather than following a predetermined list of songs as jukeboxes had done in previous decades. All this spontaneity created a disco experience that seemed outside of regular time. A nocturnal moment outside the daytime rules of past and future, in which creative self-expression was permitted without fear of being shunned.

6 Dreamscapes

Charles Baudelaire once described his late Victorian fin de siècle era as a kind of beautiful apocalypse:

This sun, which a few hours ago crushed all things with its straight and white light, will soon flood the western horizon with various colours. In the games of this dying sun, some poetic spirits will find new delights; they will discover dazzling colonnades, waterfalls of molten metal, paradises of fire, a sad splendour, the voluptuousness of regret, all the magic of the dream, all the memories of opium. And the sunset will indeed appear to them as the wonderful allegory of a soul charged with life, which descends behind the horizon with a magnificent supply of thoughts and dreams. (Baudelaire 1852, n.pag.)

In his decadent metaphor of a “dying sun” there was some relief (Baudelaire 1852, n.pag.). In writing of opportunities for “new delights” in its “paradises of fire”, there was an emphasis on the unreality of the moment (Baudelaire 1852, n.pag.). Baudelaire describes the moment as having “all the magic of the dream, all the memories of opium,” and “a magnificent supply of thoughts and dreams” (1852], n.pag.). The sunset that Baudelaire conjured is a powerful metaphor for the opportunities that decadents saw in the liminal moment. Decadence is a chance to experiment and innovate, precisely because in decadent thinking, the moment before the precipice of civilization is a moment in which regular rules do not apply. It is a liminal space, between rise and fall, with no sense of moral purpose in itself, but the opportunity to experience its strange, beautiful nowness.

Seventies discotheques similarly had a liminality to their physical structure. The venues, situated in large, old buildings such as factories, were often relics from the rapid ascension of American economic power in the early twentieth century, and were re-envisioned as spaces where nothing of long-term purpose was produced. Only a kind of art, the labour of dance moves, was produced, created for the sake of their own timespan alone. Clubbers were dancing through a transitionary, twilight moment between America’s more industrialised past and an emerging service economy future.

In an interview with this author, disco clubber Dino Calvao described disco culture in this period as “like a dream,” and perhaps this is because disco, as with Baudelaire’s metaphor for decadence, and the feeling that decadent art more generally tried to capture, is exactly like a dream (Author’s interview with Dino Calvao). It is about timeless spaces between, of semiconsciousness, where regular morality and rationality are upended. Dreams or trance-like states, and unstructured sequences of events and writing, abound in decadent literature.^[4] Decadence is fixated on this fluctuating state of being, neither at beginning or end, but inhabiting this dreamscape which has the capacity for a surreal reimagining of reality. One speculative reason for this emphasis on dream states could be a wider foreshadowing across decadent literature, because the collapse of civilization itself will, like a dream, see the rules and seemingly solid reality of the old order completely upturned.

In The Forest of Symbols (1967]), cultural anthropologist Victor Turner articulated such a sense of liminality when he talked about transitions between states of being. By “state,” he was talking about “a relatively fixed or stable condition” (Turner 1967, 93). For Turner, transition was “a process, a becoming,” which he likened to “water in process of being heated to boiling point, or a pupa changing from grub to moth” (1967], 94). A rite of passage was defined by three phases: separation, margin (or limen), and aggregation. He elaborated:

The first phase of separation comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or a set of cultural conditions (a ‘state’); during the intervening liminal period, the state of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) is ambiguous; he passes through a realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state; in the third phase the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a stable state once more and, by virtue of this, has rights and obligations of a clearly defined and ‘structural’ type, and is expected to behave in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards. (Turner 1967, 94)

Decadence and disco are less interested in the third stage, where “certain customary norms and ethical standards” become standardised again, preferring instead to revel in the freedoms of the uncertain liminal phase (Turner 1967, 94). This is why they create their timeless dream-like states for the experiencing dancer or the aesthete embracing beauty. They are concerned with momentum which is sustained by the feeling of an ever-changing, unsettled society. This embrace of change is what made them feel so liberating to their adherents.

Arguably in this, is why some people hated disco, and also why others embraced it, who had more to enjoy in a period of ethical liminality, or as it might be better put, societal change. Unlike anxious, pro-segregation ultra-conservatives, the racial and sexual minorities of society had less to lose from the previous state of American inequality. The creative energies of the disco present were a product of the relaxing of old ethical boundaries, resulting in the intermixing of peoples on dancefloors, and with it, the combining of danceable musical styles which had traditionally been segregated in America’s musical sales charts between black ‘race records,’ or by the 1960s black ‘soul,” and white ‘pop.’ If decadence celebrates the doomed present as an artistic opportunity for something interesting to happen, musically, the removal of old social taboos that divided peoples and genres certainly led to a period of rapid musical innovations in seventies America, such as the development of disco, punk, and hip-hop.

Disco was a cultural manifestation of a society that felt as though it was falling, but instead of despairing, it insisted on partying. In doing that, it found optimism through the moment of human togetherness on the dancefloor. After all, life itself is the ultimate liminal space, between birth and death. It is often in moments where one is not consciously thinking about being alive, but simply embracing the partying moment that one most appreciates life. This idea, mass-marketed throughout society, in a strangely optimistic way, is a manifestation of a much older decadent idea about self-expression rather than conformity. If society and individual lives are understood as a fleeting experience, soon to end or change, strictly conservative social constraints can seem trivial by contrast.

By the late twentieth century, society might have been readier for self-expressive aspects of decadent philosophies, with two world wars and authoritarian regimes making it seem as though unquestioning conformity rather than self-expression was dangerous to society. And disco, as one manifestation of those ideas, presented them in a far glitterier and, by extension, publicly digestible way than decadence ever had. Perhaps giving decadent ideas mass appeal required an emphasis on dancing bodies rather than dead and decaying ones. And a catchily accessible beat rather than the clunky sentence translations of French literature, even if decadence and la discothèque both (uncoincidentally?) originated from France.

7 Conclusions

The most decadently named of disco bands, Ecstasy, Passion and Pain, mused at the joyous temporality of a good time in their song, “Good Things Don’t Last Forever” (Ecstasy, Passion and Pain 1974]). But in the aftermath of the 1979 ‘disco sucks’ moment in which rock radio stations campaigned to drive disco out of mainstream fashion, one of club culture’s foremost champions, the diva Sylvester, made it known to a journalist that he felt that reports of disco’s death had been greatly exaggerated: “Disco hasn’t been officially buried yet […] so I really can’t comment on its death. It’s not dead. It’s just changing. People are dramatic” (Darling 1980, 47). In the film The Last Days of Disco, one character similarly contradicts the film’s title in remarking why he believes disco partying to be eternal:

Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die. Oh for a few years, maybe many years it will be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented, caricatured and sneered at, or worse, completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton John, white polyester suits and platform shoes and going like this! [Does John Travolta’s iconic dance pose in Saturday Night Fever] But we had nothing to do with those things and still loved disco. Those who didn’t understand will never understand. Disco was much more, and much better than all that. Disco was too great and too much fun to be gone forever. It has got to come back someday. I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes. (The Last Days of Disco, 1998])

And the character was right. Gone are the days of the eighties when people would joke that a passing trend was ‘deader than disco.’ Disco, even more so now than in the nineties when the film was produced, is popular. Some of the most famous artists of the 2020s, such as Dua Lipa and Beyoncé, continue to draw influence from its sound, aesthetics, and inclusive dancefloor philosophy. ABBA, once the epitome of vanilla pop-disco, are arguably now cool retro. As it turned out, disco, as a culture, was resilient enough to reject any declaration from outside journalists that it was over. And it has even, in the long-term, turned out to be a far less liminal state than it seemed to its core advocates, as it has made a lasting impact on American and world cultures. The disco era might be imagined as an unrepeatable period of innocence or less consequential excesses, as though it was momentarily outside of regular history, but disco happened, and on dancefloors every night, it continues to do so. There is continued liminality to the experience of each night and an ever changing society, but an adapting disco culture has persevered.

Decadence revolves around the acknowledgement and embrace of an inconvenient truth of individual lives and seemingly invincible empires – that they will wither and end. But a culture such as decadence or disco is a meme.^[5] It is something that can be passed down from generation to generation in a way that does not neatly die in the same way as a physical body. And even if envisioned in a physical way, a dead body fertilises the soil for what comes after it. Disco as a commercial explosion of the seventies grew within the soil of an older decadent culture and philosophy, albeit in a far more optimistic and peace loving context of the late twentieth century. It reworked decadent ideas, seeded within western cultures in new ways that made them relevant to a time of recession, civil rights, sexual revolution, antiwar protest, and mass consumer democracy. In times of uncertainty and shaken leadership, people have continued to look to themselves and each other through decadent pleasures, despite feelings of looming crisis. As Chic sang in a 2018 disco single: “we keep dancing till’ the world falls” (2018]). Whereas the future can seem uncertain, a decadent outlook offers, then as now, to exert some control over a finite life, or at least an appreciation of it through momentum and beauty in the present.

People talk about disco ‘revivals,’ but really, there has been a continuing momentum of dance culture as it has innovated into new forms, like San Francisco’s Hi-NRG or Detroit’s techno scenes. Disco defied death, and ironically, for all its obsession with living on the precipice of disaster, so did decadence. Whether it was the ‘new and beautiful and interesting disease’ of Symons’ description or the contagion of ‘Saturday night fever,’ the recessive, ever-mutating illness of decadence seems to have become a condition which we have long since learnt to live with.