The album is overtly transgressive (and therefore memorable), while Saturday Night Fever has been framed as a prefab totem of a facile culture (and thus forgettable). For almost forty years, that’s been the overwhelming consensus. But I’ve noticed—just in the last four or five years—that this consensus is shifting. Why? Because the definition of “transgressive” is shifting. It’s no longer appropriate to dismiss disco as superficial. More and more, we recognize how disco latently pushed gay, urban culture into white suburbia, which is a more meaningful transgression than going on a British TV
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