During the pre-dawn hours of nearly any given night in the early 1970s, a group of young men who would change the face of the music industry could be found eating omelets and talking about records at a Manhattan restaurant called David\u2019s Pot Belly. The names in this rotating group of friends are unfamiliar to most: David Mancuso, David Rodriguez, Michael Cappello and Nicky Siano. They were not musicans but DJs at dance clubs like The Gallery, The Loft and Le Jardin, and through their taste in music and their obsessive search for new material, they would collectively bring a thing called \u201cDisco\u201d into existence. Their power to shape popular culture would first become evident on this day in 1973, when a song called \u201cSoul Makossa\u201d entered the Billboard Top 40 as the first-ever chart hit definitively launched by the infant disco scene.<\/p>\n
\u201cSoul Makossa\u201d was a 1972 recording by the Paris-based Cameroonian artist Emmanual \u201cManu\u201d Dibango, and it is now best remembered as the source of the rhythmic chant\u2014\u201dMama-ko, mama-sa, maka-mako-sa\u201c\u2014that appears in Michael Jackson\u2019s \u201cWanna Be Startin\u2019 Somethin\u201d\u201d (1982) and Rihanna\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Stop The Music\u201d (2006).\u00a0 Issued on the French label Fiesta, \u201cSoul Makossa\u201d might never have been heard on this side of the Atlantic had David Mancuso not pulled it from a shelf in a Jamaican record shop in Brooklyn one day in the spring of 1973 and, after hearing it, immediately recognized its percussion-heavy, Afro-Latin sound and repetitive chorus as absolutely perfect for the dance floor.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While DJs like Mancuso scoured every corner of New York City for new dance records to spin, the record industry paid absolutely no attention to the club scene, never having considered that it might offer a way to \u201cbreak\u201d a new record. \u201cSoul Makossa\u201d would change all that. As soon as Mancuso began spinning it at The Loft, his fellow DJs had to have their own copies, and so did their fans. Rolling Stone and Billboard magazine noted that the street price of the rare import had shot through the roof in New York City as devotees of the largely black, gay and Hispanic club scene tried to get their hands on Manu Dibango\u2019s surprise hit. \u201cPeople went wild trying to find that record,\u201d Nicky Siano recalled in Love Saves The Day (2003), Tim Lawrence\u2019s history of American dance culture in the 1970s. \u201cNo one had \u2018Soul Makossa.’\u201d<\/p>\n
Taking note of its underground success, Atlantic Records licensed \u201cSoul Makossa\u201d from Dibango\u2019s French label and released a domestic version of the single. When it entered the Top 40 on this day in 1973, it awakened the music industry to an important new cultural and commercial phenomenon, laying the groundwork for the disco explosion to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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