He very deservedly fell on his arse over this.
Alas, Carl then got greedy and came up with a follow up, which was identical and quite frankly risible. A light bulb flashed above his head and that was it. The chorus, it is said, quotes verbatim from Douglas’ own comments having just seen a martial arts picture. End of.Īnd then Carl Douglas, a smiling moon-faced Jamaican steps in and boy, does he scoop the pot! KFF is, of course, pure gold. Basically, all the philosophy and enlightenment theory which the old bloke with ping pong balls for eyes had tried to instil in Caine has gone up the pictures big style. Caine, having been abused by redneck cowboys, who flobbed in his beans and coffee as he worked on the railroad or tripped him up and called him “Chinaman” and whatever else, finally loses his rag and kicks the Mother of God out of all of them in slow mo (especially that guy who was the spit of Roy Kinnear, who got shot by McCloud, Cannon, Rockford, Starsky, Kojak and uncle Tom Cobbly an’ all). The thing we all had in common, though, was that we were paying homage to the same show, although to be fair had video recorders been around then, many of us would have fast-forwarded through most of it. At my alma meta enormous black boys were kicking ass quite literally in the war zone which was the playground, whilst the more studious of us (those few of us who could spell “cat”) stayed in class, trying to snatch pebbles out of each other’s hands. In a few short months, the world had gone potty.
This soon after that sad basket case, David Carradine had debuted with the tv series. The kung fu craze swept this country and stateside like wildfire a year after the passing of the iconoclast who was The Bruce. If there was ever a stone-bonker chart topper, it was this thing. “Woh-oh-oh-oh-ho! Der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der!” Shorter the above: the established music industry adapted to the exploitation of punk much quicker than it adapted to the exploitation of "dance", and the panic and confusion of the mainstream over the latter was a lot longer-lasting **this analysis slightly depends on reading hiphop as an extension of disco - which of course it is - and fuzzies up the issue of "fear" even more (ie Disco "caused" the fear rap generates, by "causing" rap, but this isn't quite what you meant i suspect) *bcz quality in dance-culture depends on a much more distributed and social nexus of judgement, which entirely bypasses the usual print systems of commentary and winnowing and proto-historicist second-guessing (<- poncy way of saying "the rock press", which barely existed in the uk in 1974 anyway)
(uk) punk was explicitly “grown-up” political (as opposed to implicitly “escapist-sensualist” political, which disco was), and bcz punk was avowedly nihilistic, it seemed socially threatening in a very fractured and frightened time there was eg an actual political war for control of venue-licensing and such (which rock lost, hence the fkn awful state of live music in london to this day)ĭisco by contrast was MUCH more of a threat to established music-industry structures* - and middlebrow aesthetic values - than punk turned out to be, tho it’s sometimes quite hard (as here) to distinguish from this distance which bits of disco are the rising destabilising force and which the fightback (and the transformation of the structures didn’t begin in earnest till the late 80s and dance culture as a pretty-much distinct leisure-industry entity, with very difft protocols and processes of self-generation and exchange)** It depends a bit what you mean by “establishment”, really
« THE OSMONDS – “Love Me For A Reason” JOHN DENVER – “Annie’s Song” » Comments The balance has recently tipped back, of course – for my tastes there is not enough disco in the beauty-soaked Crouching Tiger school of Serious Fu, though as long as Stephen Chow films are finding an audience here the spirit of Carl Douglas lives on. “It’s an ancient Chinese art”, handwaves Douglas before getting down to boogie-ing business.
You could argue that “Kung Fu Fighting”, more than the Kung Fu series itself, set a long-term tone for Western reception of martial arts – less a mix of spirituality and violence, more the wide-eyed (though still enormously impressive) foolery of Jackie Chan. Of course Carl Douglas in his headband looks like a big jolly bear, and the track’s been long embraced as a beloved novelty, but it wouldn’t have got that far if there hadn’t been a genuine sense of wonder – and kinship – in the famous chorus. Lightning-fast moves, uncanny tricks, kids picking up on a craze hip-first and sparking a frisson of establishment fear – no surprise that the song cashing in on the Kung Fu fad was a disco one.