Happy Birthday Giorgio Moroder

Love it or hate it, Disco had a huge impact on music, especially when it morphed into House (Chicago), Techno (Detroit), Electro-industrial (Canada), and more.

Giorgio Moroder is the father of Disco. Born in Urtijëi, South Tyrol, Italy, in 1940, he is 84 today.

Disco was created in the discotheques of West Germany during the Cold War. We all lived under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation, as we still do, but in the '60s and '70s it was very real. And the West Germans, and in particular the people in West Berlin, dealt with the Cold War in very tangible ways. Checkpoint Charlie. The Berlin Wall. etc. My understanding is that the club scene was intense at least through the 1980s. Maybe it still is.

Disco in the US had become soulless by the mid to late 1970s, when it was firmly in the hands of the suits that ran the American music industry. They had tiny minds that could only reproduce what they had heard 10 minutes before. It was easy to hate it by then. House, Techno, etc. wasn't on the radio because it wasn't what the suits liked, and it hadn't been on the radio 10 minutes before. The music industry (and the tiny minds running it) inevitably take a genre of music and squeeze the life out of it. Things haven't changed in 50 years. Think modern Pop of today. All the same. Over-produced. Nothing real, or very little anyway.

Giorgio Moroder started producing music in the German music scene in Berlin and Munich in the 1960s. His most recognizable hit is probably "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" featuring vocals by David Bowie, from the 1982 film Cat People. He wrote that song, and the entire soundtrack for that movie and produced the soundtrack.

This song is "Giorgio by Moroder" by Daft Punk from their 2013 album Random Access Memories. I include it because of the narration at the opening in which Giorgio describes what he came to do to start Disco.