- Claire Greenway/Getty Images
- Frankie Knuckles in 2007—RIP.
At its best, disco music combines the extremes of opulence and brute force. It flaunts the ostentatiousness of classical music, some of the musical interplay of jazz, the warmth of soul-music singing, and the rhythmic directness of early R&B and rock; it borrows the best of everything without wearing its complexity or musicianship on its sleeve. Frankie Knuckles emerged out of the New York disco scene of the early-to-mid 70s, but his genius came from his ability to see past disco’s ornamentation and pinpoint its essence—namely, rhythm. Like James Brown, he was able to envision how each component of a piece of music had its own rhythmic role, what the writer Frank Kogan describes as, “no instrumental part replicating another, each tumbling over the others in a perpetual-motion machine.” And like George Clinton, he placed music within both a worldly and otherworldly context—you could hear the Detroit of Parliament-Funkadelic’s space-funk, the Germany of Kraftwerk‘s robodance, and the warps and cranks of a spaceship’s engine.
Frankie Knuckles Live @ The Warehouse – 28-08-1981 by R_Co on Mixcloud
