Monkey Magic 1979
Julia Dodoo
Strange how potent cheap music can be. Like a whiff of Blue Stratos on the night air, all it takes is a few bars of a chirpy novelty hit and there we are, forty years ago, dripping extruded ice cream product on the vinyl seats of a Morris Marina while the rain falls on a pebbled beach. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.
I bought my first single in 1979, and it was not a disco record. I did not like disco in 1979. If I had heard about the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago in July of that year I would probably have approved (but I suspect John Craven did not mention it). Organised by shock jock Steve Dahl, the night - supposedly a promotion for the White Sox baseball team - involved disco records being thrown onto the pitch and blown up with actual explosives. The audience later had to be dispersed by riot police.
Another thing I liked in 1979 was a Japanese TV adaptation of the sixteenth century Chinese novel Journey to the West. Which sounds terribly erudite until you realise I am describing Monkey, a goofy adventure show featuring a monkey-man with Noddy Holder sideburns, dubbed into English by a cast including Manuel from Fawlty Towers. Monkey was blessed with one of the all-time great theme tunes, a piece of disco-rock (by the Japanese band Godiego) that summarises the myth of Sun Wukong - Monkey King and spirit of anarchy - in inventive broken English:
Ever seen Detroit Rock City? I called someone a "greasy disco ball" the other day (jokingly? maybe?) and remembered that I had gotten this perfect specimen of an insult from that movie. Anyway, the rock-vs.-disco thread throughout the film makes it feel relevant to this conversation.
Dahl had been a DJ at a station that had fired him when it decided to veer away from rock towards disco, and he consequently held a grudge against the whole genre. I can see the event now for what it largely was - an adolescent, vindictive spasm with nasty undertones of racism and misogyny - but at 10 years old, I was not the target audience for disco. I was not down Studio 54 with a head full of cocaine and trousers full of urge, strutting to a 4/4 beat with the Manhattan demi-monde. I lived in the Home Counties, and was usually to be found in the school library arguing about how many hit points a goblin had. I liked precisely Dahl\u2019s kind of music: that first single I bought was Queen\u2019s \u2018Don\u2019t Stop Me Now\u2019, a pristine piece of middle-of-the-road album-oriented rock. Although also, to be fair, a banger.
(It's hard to describe how happy the end of the second verse makes me. It\u2019s the incredibly awkward addition of the word \u2018west\u2019 at the end of the line: the lyrics and tune make the \u2018kindly priest\u2019 and \u2018pilgrimage\u2019 a perfectly scannable and almost acceptable rhyme, but then \u2018west\u2019 is squeezed in an tremendous hurry before the chorus crashes upon us, causing the whole thing to jolt and stumble before it takes off again. Amazing work.)
So here we have a small boy who thought he didn\u2019t like disco while loving the disco-inflected Monkey theme. This apparent paradox is explained by one critical fact: disco was everywhere in 1979, and I was already internalising the hipster imperative of sneering in the presence of the popular. (For the same reason, I would shortly ditch Rainbow and AC/DC for Adam and The Ants and The Tubeway Army.)
Disco was simply too ubiquitous, too popular to be liked. In 1979 it was the global standard for pop music, the world\u2019s default soundtrack in background muzak that no one was actually listening to. It was everywhere, and consequently felt as though it was from nowhere: international and interchangeable, an indistinguishable parade of floor-filling one-hit wonders.
It grew over other music like syncopated knotweed. It was the pulsing undergrowth in Blondie\u2019s \u2018Heart of Glass\u2019 and Sugarhill Gang\u2019s \u2018Rapper\u2019s Delight\u2019: punk and hip-hop, new genres that (like disco) emerged in the late \u201870s from the developmentally moribund, financially bankrupt and culturally febrile New York City. The big hit of 1978 had been Grease, a musical about \u201850s rocker culture that inexplicably sported a disco-inflected theme tune. In 1979 the art-pop outfit that was about to become my favourite band ever - Japan - teamed up with disco legend Giorgio Moroder to make the throbbing \u2018Life in Tokyo\u2019.
The utility of disco - that it is available and useful to everyone, from mainstream musical theatre to hipster synth tweakers - is one of the things that is so loveable about it: at core it\u2019s musically pretty simple, and inherently democratic. Almost anyone with access to a drum machine can make it, and almost everyone enjoys it. Andy Warhol described Studio 54 as \u2018dictatorship on the door, democracy on the dancefloor\u2019 and that mixture of exclusive nightlife and communal celebration is key. Punk and hip-hop might have better articulated the difficulty and pressure of urban life, but disco was release, a few sweaty hours of bliss. It insists that anyone can have a good time, and that everyone deserves one.
Meanwhile, the way disco spread internationally, like a novel virus (resulting in an inferno temperature and a severe Saturday Night Fever), gave it a sense of exoticism; it was the music of New York, of Mediterranean islands and European discotheques, and of Japanese kung-fu TV shows. By the mid-\u201970s Benidorm had the largest number of skyscrapers per head in the world, and all of them full of bright pink British tourists with digestive issues and Aimii Stewart\u2019s disco version of \u2018Light My Fire\u2019 going round and round their heads. Disco gave everyone symbolic access to the glamour of the jetset, gently frugging to Chic in the fur-lined bar of a custom 747 on their way to Macau. It is the sound of the smoked glass and velour \u201870s, a music composed of orange nylon and glitter balls, dark brown sports cars, cigarettes on aeroplanes and LED watches with multiple time zones, all those cheesy little geegaws that seemed to promise a peculiarly \u201870s kind of sophistication.
This ubiquity - not the Demolition Night - killed disco. Punk claimed the \u201880s and hip-hop claimed the future; disco didn\u2019t survive the \u201870s. But that is also why \u201870s punk and hip-hop don\u2019t spark nostalgia in the way that disco does. Album-oriented rock (like Queen) was long ago sanctified by Q magazine; Grandmaster Flash still sounds startling and I\u2019ve never stopped listening to Talking Heads. But Chic. Chic and the Bee Gees and Gloria Gaynor: that is the sound of the \u201870s, the sound of my childhood, a sound the nature of which is irrepressible, the sound of\u2026 Monkey.
Monkey eats many of the peaches, which have taken millennia to ripen, becomes immortal and runs amok. Having earned the ire of Heaven and being beaten in a challenge by an omniscient, mighty, but benevolent, cloud-dwelling Buddha (釈迦如来, Shakanyorai), Monkey is imprisoned for 500 years under a mountain in order to learn patience.
A dragon, Yu Lung (玉龍, Gyokuryū), who was set free by Guanyin after being sentenced to death, eats Tripitaka's horse. On discovering that the horse was tasked with carrying Tripitaka, it assumes the horse's shape to carry the monk on his journey. Later in the story he occasionally assumes human form to assist his new master, although he is still always referred to as "Horse".
Monkey can also change form, for instance into a hornet. In Episode 3, The Great Journey Begins, Monkey transforms into a girl to trick Pigsy. Monkey's other magic powers include: summoning a cloud upon which he can fly; his use of the magic wishing staff which he can shrink and grow at will and from time to time, when shrunk, store in his ear, and which he uses as a weapon; and the ability to conjure monkey warriors by blowing on hairs plucked from his chest.
The pilgrims face many perils and antagonists both human, such as Emperor Taizong of Tang (太宗皇帝, Taisōkōtei) and supernatural. Monkey, Sandy, and Pigsy are often called upon to battle demons, monsters, and bandits, despite Tripitaka's constant call for peace. Many episodes also feature some moral lesson, usually based upon Buddhist and/or Confucianist, Taoist philosophies, which are elucidated by the narrator at the end of various scenes.
Two 26-episode seasons ran in Japan: the first season ran from October 1978 to April 1979, and the second one from November 1979 to May 1980, with screenwriters including Mamoru Sasaki, Isao Okishima, Tetsurō Abe, Kei Tasaka, James Miki, Motomu Furuta, Hiroichi Fuse, Yū Tagami, and Fumio Ishimori.
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