God Respects Us When We Work, But Loves Us When We Dance

Warning: the CDs be snug in their new, shelf-y homes. Which means I've got them all at my fingertips. Which, in turn, means I'm listening to stuff I nearly forgot I had. And could possibly be posting about it in unseemly amounts in the days &/or weeks to come.

But I don't think anything else I own could possibly ever come close to the song I just rediscovered, from the Soul Jazz release The World of Arthur Russell:

Arthur Russell - "In the Light of the Miracle"

I have never struggled so fiercely for a material thing in my life as for this compilation. So I'm not sure how I failed to realize before this that "In the Light of the Miracle" is it. The song. The one for which my feet in their red shoes will dance off into the forest without me (in a somewhat sunnier take on the tale). And when I rejoin them, it will be the song playing in my eternal disco, along with MFSB's "Love is the Message" (the Tom Moulton mix, ideally). Now that's an idea for a mix CD: the songs to which I want to dance in the forever. Hmm.

If your toes don't generally get to tapping, it's still a lovely piece of work. But you cannot truly understand what I mean unless you dance with it.

My propensity for delivering complicated drunken monologues on the beauty of disco & its social implications inches ever closer to notorious. At the risk of skipping like a scratched record, just listen to this song & try then to tell me that disco isn't worlds more than white polyester kitsch.

(Mr. Russell is experiencing quite the posthumous renaissance: my quick google search revealed no less than a documentary & a biography (by Tim Lawrence, which makes it extra exciting), both due in 2008. As for that which is already published, it's all a bit prosaic in light of the music itself, but this New Yorker article by Sasha Frere-Jones isn't bad.)