Escort’s Disco Fever Breaks Out in the Yahoo Music Studio
“‘Disco’ now has a very different connotation than even five years ago,” says Eugene Cho, founder of the Brooklyn indie-dance collective Escort, sitting with his bandmates Dave Sharma (drums) and French-born style icon Adeline Michele (vocals, bass) after bringing their block-rocking beats to the Yahoo Music studio. “It seems to be a much more universally accepted term – as something that’s actually cool again. But it’s always been cool for us.”
Escort – whose lineup features anywhere from seven to 17 members, depending on the live setting – have been making effervescent, alternative, analog dance music for a decade now. And over the past few years, they’ve noticed how the pop-culture climate has changed to embrace their rump-shaking sound – even as what they do runs totally counter to the processed samples of the superstar-DJ-dominated EDM scene. In many ways, actually, Escort’s music now serves as a bridge between the rock, dance, and R&B worlds.
“The whole ‘disco sucks’ thing was the rock ‘n’ roll monolithic establishment… but even now, Fall Out Boy has a dance record out now,” Sharma points out, jokingly comparing today’s dance/rock crossover hits to the one-off disco singles that the Rolling Stones, KISS, and Rod Stewart released back in the day. “And much cooler than that, the whole DFA world, LCD Soundsystem – come on, they’re rock bands, but they’re essentially playing 90 percent disco.”
Suffice to say, thanks to bands like Escort, no one thinks disco sucks nowadays. Michele (a major Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Chaka Khan, and Donna Summer fan) recalls with a proud grin a recent Escort concert in Boston, which illustrated how young music fans are earnestly grooving to Escort’s sound. “We don’t claim to be super-throwback or disco, but during our song ‘My Life,’ [the audience] kind of went into a Soul Train line! It was like, ‘Whoa, something is happening here’ – where they’re kind of naturally feeling like they want to bring back that vibe of just the culture of dancing and letting go.”
Escort point out that it was the runaway 2013 success of Daft Punk’s Grammy-winning Random Access Memories, which featured contributions from dance music legends Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder, that helped set the scene for a modern-day disco revival. “It does sort of feel like a movement, in a way – especially after ‘Get Lucky’ came out,” says Michele. “I guess to the mass audience, it was like, ‘Oh, disco is coming back!’ And it was kind of a good feeling for us. We were interviewed a lot at the time, and people asked us, ‘Are you guys OK with that? Because you were doing it before!’ And we were like, ‘You know what? We were doing it before, but because [Daft Punk] have a bigger voice, they’re paving the way… It’s just making it easier for us.
“But just remember – that we did it first!”
