Many of the paired dances of the twentieth century—the foxtrot, the waltz, the Lindy Hop—reflected the binary gender dynamics of the day: men led and women followed, on the dance floor as at home. There were exceptions, such as in the underground drag balls that developed out of Black culture and grew in popularity during the nineteen-twenties. But they were still seen as a niche movement for “perverts,” according to a moral-reform committee investigation from 1916. What finally disrupted the binary was disco. In 1970, in the aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, the d.j. David Mancuso began hosting invitation-only underground dance parties at a place that would come to be known as the Loft, at 647 Broadway. Around the same time, two gay entrepreneurs, Seymour and Shelley, purchased a failing venue called the Sanctuary, which had formerly been a church in Hell’s Kitchen. The following year, New York made it legal for same-sex couples to share the dance floor publicly, but what is legal and what is socially acceptable are often misaligned, and so these venues (and others) offered a space both physically and emotionally liberatory, in which a new imaginary could be built. At the end of the seventies, when disco faced an intense backlash, and its records were being burned in the streets, the cause wasn’t shifting musical tastes but reactionary instincts: disco was a subversive political act, a momentary utopia propelled by queer communities and Black communities and immigrant communities, and all of the people who existed at the intersections of each.
The new album “Cut & Rewind,” by the vocal group Say She She, is a disco record that seeks to extract the urgency from the genre’s heyday and map it onto a political moment plagued by many of the same concerns. The band, comprising the singers Piya Malik, Sabrina Mileo Cunningham, and Nya Gazelle Brown, self-identifies as a “discodelic soul” outfit, blending the soundscapes of disco with funk and psychedelia. Both of the group’s previous releases, “Prism” (2022) and “Silver” (2023), feature songs that would fit right in on a nineteen-seventies dance floor, but the albums also include ballads that would feel at home on the late-night R. & B. radio of the tail end of the decade. “Cut & Rewind,” released earlier this month, is the first that feels entirely disco—not as an act of homage, and not even entirely to update the sounds and aesthetics of disco for a “modern listening audience.” Rather, the album sounds and feels like it was made by thoughtful practitioners of a genre, not tourists attempting to tap into nostalgia, using disco as an incisive tool of commentary on the now.
“Cut & Rewind” doesn’t sprawl as much as its predecessor—“Silver” is an hour and six minutes long, while “C. & R.” clocks in at about forty-five minutes—and it has a tension, a pulse, that propels it. Genre conventions aside, Say She She is first and foremost a vocal band of exceptional skill and variety. The group’s members harmonize well, and each can carry a song on her own. But whereas on past albums the vocals have been front and center in the production, “Cut & Rewind” has fuller, more expansive instrumentation, and it is more sonically dense than the band’s past records. On the title track, a handful of bass licks grow outward into a waiting drum beat. Then the three voices emerge. This is as much a song as it is a mission statement, with the line “We’re through dealing in petty / now we’re getting good and ready” becoming a defining thesis for the full body of work. In “Disco Life,” the instrumentalists who play on the album (Dan Hastie, Sam Halterman, Sergio Rios, and Dale Jennings) create a dense and churning collision of bass and synth and drums that backs up an ode to the utopia of the disco, to the reclamation of a physical space. The track also smartly takes aim at the Disco Demolition Night that took place at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979. Instead of referring to it by name, though, the song’s lyrics develop an extended baseball metaphor, opening with “We’re taking back the major league / A playing field where all are free.”
“She Who Dares,” on the other hand, envisions a sort of anti-utopia. Despite an upbeat, bass-driven strut, it describes a not-so-distant world where all rights and autonomy are stripped from women, with the vocal trio embodying a sort of superhero opposition. The clash between the song’s jaunty sound and its dire imagery is part of what makes it propulsive and urgent. Like much of the album, “She Who Dares” churns forward, driven by bass and drums and a brief, sweeping guitar solo in the song’s final act. The sound telegraphs a message even beyond the lyrics: we have to keep moving; we have to keep dancing. “Under the Sun,” meanwhile, is a pro-labor track lamenting the everyday crisis of people having to give their time, energy, and spirit over to unsatisfying jobs that make someone else rich. The line “Power is a light source / if treated with respect” floats atop dreamy guitar.
