Art & Creativity Quote by Martha Reeves

Disco, in Martha Reeves's telling, wasn't just a sound; it was an instruction manual for temporary escape. The phrasing "call to go wild" frames the genre as a summons, almost a civic duty of the dance floor, where restraint is treated like bad manners. And when she stacks "no thought or conscience or regard for tomorrow", she's not simply dunking on hedonism. She's naming disco's central bargain: surrender the moral bookkeeping, mute the future, and let the bassline handle the meaning.

Reeves comes from an earlier soul tradition where the groove often carried a message - romance, struggle, uplift, community. Her distance here reads like generational whiplash. By the mid-to-late '70s, disco had industrialized joy: extended mixes, mirror balls, DJs as priests, clubs as sanctuary. The "tomorrow" she mentions isn't abstract. It's the hangover of recession-era anxiety, post-Watergate disillusionment, urban decline, and the creeping sense that the good times required deliberate engineering. Disco offered an instant present tense.

There's also a sly acknowledgment of why it threatened people. A music that asks for "no conscience" can sound like a culture slipping its leash - especially when that culture is Black, queer, and city-born, rewriting who's allowed to be ecstatic in public. Reeves captures disco's power by criticizing it: not shallow, but strategically forgetful, built for nights when the future felt unreliable anyway.