There’s a simile, beloved by the British and Australians in particular, which likes to view certain things as ‘as camp as Christmas’. Of all the things that might refer to – Liberace, Ferrero Rocher TV adverts, The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat – one musical style finds itself up there more often than others: disco. Yet although Christmas, as soundtrack to the cold time of the year, was surprisingly adept at welcoming ‘hot’ genres like swing and rock ‘n’ roll, it experienced more friction adapting to disco.
Back in the mid-70s, early attempts to couple disco and Christmas resulted in The Salsoul Orchestra’s Christmas Jollies becoming the best-selling holiday album in both 1976 and 1977. This success would prove to be a one-off. Subsequent copycatting by pop-up disco acts like The Montreal Sound (in 1977) and the Mistletoe Disco Band (1978) fared less well and were quickly consigned to post-Christmas bargain bins. Now, festive disco playlists are generally the preserve of those with a refined appreciation of kitsch.
By the time The Weather Girls’ single “Dear Santa (Bring Me a Man This Christmas)” came late to the party in 1983, disco itself had long been torpedoed from the mainstream by the ‘Disco Sucks!’ movement. Launched in 1979 by Detroit rock radio DJ, Steve Dahl, this anti-disco movement culminated in Disco Demolition Night, when Dahl encouraged his listeners to send in disco records which were then burned at Comiskey Park after a Chicago White Sox home game. Fans stormed the pitch to share their hated of the genre – one both beloved and created by the Black and gay communities – hurling disco vinyl into the flames.
It subsequently beat a retreat into gay subcultures, where the female duo, Martha Wash and Izora Armstead, had originally forged their act as Sylvester’s back-up singers, Two Tons O’ Fun. Keeping the flame burning, gay men morphed disco into harder and more hyper-sexualised subgenres like Hi-NRG, where the songwriting gave even more expression to gay men’s sexual lifestyles in songs like Hazell Dean’s “Searchin’” and The Boystown Gang’s “Cruisin’ The Streets”. These were invariably given to women – particularly black women – to sing, enabling club hits to occasionally cross over into the charts during the brief window between disco’s retreat underground, and the community being forced to face up to the consequences of the AIDS epidemic. Gluttonous odes to slut-dom like Miquel Brown’s “So Many Men, So Little Time” and “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls, which hit the Billboard Top 50 towards the tail end of 1982, went even further.
“It’s Raining Men” had been cooked up by Paul Jabara, a disco veteran whose speciality was the genre at its most over-the-top. “It’s Raining Men” was first rejected by an enviable contact book of female vocalists, including Donna Summer, Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross. In desperation, Jabara turned to Wash and Armstead, hoodwinking them into laying down a vocal at his house.
Despite their reluctance, the song turned out to be a perfect fit for the act. It connected dots between the sexual insatiability beloved of the gay audience and the plus-plus-sized ladies’ own abundantly evident appetites, which would become a central theme of The Weather Girls debut album Success. The record’s Christmas song, “Dear Santa (Bring Me a Man This Christmas)”, continued the man-hungry theme and extended the formula of epic, high-drama disco to almost six minutes.
How Christmassy is it though? Well, there are peals of glockenspiel, the occasional bell and a snowy gust of wind, although the ubiquitous sleigh bells were thankfully left off the production. Lyrically, the tone stays largely in the “Santa Baby” lane of festive innuendo, with the main hook “let it snow!!” in keeping with the “weather report” theme of their debut hit (where “It’s Raining Men” got the girls absolutely soaking wet, in “Dear Santa” they got absolutely inundated in something much whiter).
Although two follow-up singles from Success had already tanked, somebody at Columbia believed in the Christmas single enough to fund a low-budget music video. Taking place in a cozy-ish Christmas interior, the video is memorable for its chorus of preening female dancers. Hairsprayed-to-the-max in sheer metallic dresses, they take to the parquet floor for some quintessentially 80s choreography. Later, when seven sexy carol singers appear outside the window with hymn books, it turns out they have a dance routine of their own. Coming in from the cold, they twirl their hooded capes around, revealing the hot-orange lining within.
Curiously, despite the title, and abundance of male dancing studs in “It’s Raining Men”, not a single man appears in the video for a song subtitled “Bring Me a Man This Christmas”. Martha and Izora had to be content with enacting a whirling dervish around the living room in a fake snow flurry towards the song’s end. Santa does make an eventual appearance in voice only, comin’ down the chimney to save the day with a “ho, ho…whooooaaah!”.
The song was another flop, seemingly confirming The Weather Girls as a one-hit wonder (despite Martha Wash’s powerhouse vocals later underpinning smashes for Black Box and C&C Music Factory). It has, however, gone on to become a minor cult classic, attested to by several remakes and parodies on YouTube. Disco at Christmas would receive a later spin by Kylie Minogue, who recorded “100 Degrees”, a Philly-style duet with sister Dannii for her 2015 album, Christmas. Conjuring the prawn feasts and blistering Boxing Day barbecues of the Australian festive season, for the majority of her audience, located in the northern hemisphere, the scene may have represented a cognitive dissonance. Perhaps The Weather Girls did too. We might like our Christmases camp, but… they still have to be at relatable temperatures.
Alex Jeffery is the author of Donna Summer's Once Upon a Time in the 33 1/3 series, and lectures on popular music in several institutions in London, including City, University of London BIMM London and the University of Cambridge. He has also worked as associate editor at the long-running music review site MusicOMH, and runs the YouTube channel DocPopterTV, which posts audiovisual essays on his research and other audiovisual creative work.
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