Band of the Week: Hercules and Love Affair

These days, if you want to enjoy dance music, the stakes couldn’t be any lower. Just listen, dance and repeat to your heart’s content. But that wasn’t always the case. In the late '70s, “disco sucks” wasn’t merely an expression of preference, but a rallying cry with some very problematic implications. On July 12, 1979, “Disco Demolition Derby” at Comiskey Park turned into a riot, and from that moment, disco could never be just another genre.

Now, almost 30 years later, the associations have vanished, while dancing along to one’s music of choice is easier than ever, even when said music isn't always obviously danceable. (See numbers 6, 22, 31, 46, 50, 61, 65, and 82 of Paste’s Signs of Life 2007 list.) But Andrew Butler doesn’t want to forget where disco came from, so he recruited his friends Nomi, Kim Ann Foxman and Antony (of the Johnsons), and created Hercules and Love Affair, a band and an album in love with disco, and deeply conscious of its history.

Hercules and Love Affair is at once exceedingly danceable and deeply soulful. The former is due to Butler’s many years as a DJ and to the production savvy of the DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy, while the latter is a result of emotional lyrics (“A lot of the lyrical content is personal and rooted in my experience as a gay guy growing up,” says Butler.) and Antony, whose odd, haunting voice is neither the first, second, nor third thing that comes to mind when you imagine a perfect disco vocalist. And yet, it’s an oddly perfect fit.

Butler started writing music as a nine-year-old, but started DJing at 16, and by the time he started at Sarah Lawrence, he had “caught the dancing bug.” Although he was not yet out of diapers in 1979, he became deeply interested in disco once he learned more. “I was fascinated that things fall in and out of favor so quickly,” he recalls. “With no other form did it happen so intensely and dramatically than with disco.”

So, is there an ideological dimension to the record? “I think there is,” Butler says. His references to voices of disco past, including such luminaries as Arthur Russell, are an attempt to deal with “this whole notion of taste and how we dismiss music as tacky,” a notion that Butler is not fond of, to say the least. It’s as if his lyrics on the hypnotic “Time Will” are not a plea to a lover, but a comment on the genre itself: “I cannot change you / But time will.”

It might sound like it’s hard to reconcile Butler’s cerebral ambitions with the inherent joy of dancing to something catchy, but his bandmates have kept him focused on the pleasure principle. Once, the notion of “smart disco” might have been treated as a joke, but for better or worse, history has allowed us to forget a whole lot.