Douglas Wolk's article on disco-influenced rock explains to me why I like about half of The Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Bang". It's in the way that the rawk dynamics ever-so-subtly allude to disco moves rippling under the surface, not quite explicitly but in so many little touches. There's the opening - that impossibly clapped-out rauch guitar riff; the taut, twisting anti-funk rhythm pushed till it's brittle enough to snap - and the menacing hand-clap assisted tango-strut outro, and the unhinged singer murmuring "the bigger, the better" in a way that's just the right side of Peaches. The more anthemic full-throttle chorus is still fine, but in a matter of seconds I can feel the band moving away from what I want them to be (which is what? A groovier Boss Hog?) and back towards a perfectly pleasant pop-punk sense of 'dangerous' simplicity which I can appreciate but never treasure in my heart. Maybe it's a gender fantasy thing: the straightahead surge of rock is so committed and unequivocal, even inevitable, and inevitability often just invites a mental jump to the dying moments of the song - let's be
there already for god's sake, if where we're going is so important. In contrast, it's women who gots the funk that strike a chord with me, because their funk is one of pacing back and forth impatiently, an unclosed sense of uncertainty that makes the never-completed journey the point. The urgent insistent instability of their (who? ESG? The Slits?) grooves incites images of minds, hormones and hips swirling around with restless, rapacious discontent.
