this post was initially written in response to kbnet's musings about italo disco and DJ crazy times: https://cohost.org/kbnet/post/2565187-in-case-you-don-t-kn

italo disco as I understand it is something of a retconned genre, but it’s still a fascinating example to examine how music operates overwhelmingly as a global game of telephone. a bunch of italians listened to a lot of british synthpop, attempted to imitate that sound, and instead developed it into a uniquely different signature of simple synth riffs and quirky english phrases. british dance pop in the 80s from artists like rick astley and bananarama continued to forge ahead into more complex arrangements and faster tempos, at which point italian artists splintering off of italo disco also pushed their tempos up until we got what you could reasonably begin to call early eurobeat. it wasn’t really contextualized as eurobeat until it found a market in japan, though, where the super eurobeat series has now managed to release 250 volumes. tracks from sources like super eurobeat were then repackaged into cultural exports like DDR and a certain japanese cartoon about street racing tofu delivery, and now eurobeat is codified as a distinctly japanese genre to a lot of the world. wild stuff!

righeira was my entry point into italo disco, which is especially funny for me to think about in a global context considering you might miss that they’re even italian when two of their biggest hits were instead in spanish. vamos a la playa presents a hilariously catchy promise of summer fun when beneath that thin mask it’s also cheerfully “post-atomic” with mentions of radioactive contamination and neon blue beaches. no tengo dinero is class warfare at its simplest, yet it also manages to slip in “neopsychic is a synthetic eden” as a serious phrase against a backdrop of groovy rotoscoping. sometimes they manage to sound like an italian sparks on tracks like disco volante, yet even that might be a poor comparison to forge when sparks was there for italo disco too. of course they were, though. when an american group like sparks can latch on to the sound of “kraftwerk caught between radio frequencies on european borders”, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that we can also find ourselves talking about a eurodance revival being led by a comedian DJ. from space, probably.