In defense of The Bee Gees
Reaching out beyond the disco-stereotype
It is not by choice but by the urgent push of the general public’s ignorance that I feel myself called to demystify common misconceptions about music. And today we’re going to talk about them: the three (four?), the only, the Bee Gees. We’ll look beyond the chest hair and the crazy cool medallions to see what makes them so great.
All my life I’ve been running into people who are extremely dismissive of this band. At the mention of The Bee Gees they at best start falsetto-ing something from “Saturday Night Fever” and at worst just scoff and say they don’t like cheap disco. The latter reaction is usually reserved for those who consider themselves musicians or music conoisseurs.
Liking The Bee Gees is often considered bad taste, loving The Bee Gees - a scandal! But I live for scandals of the “cheap disco” kind so I will tell you proudly: I LOVE The Bee Gees!
My infatuation with the band has cycled through a good half of their albums and has its roots in my early teenage years. Back then - and I’m talking about the mid 2000s - music wasn’t even remotely as accessible as it is today. I was growing up with such concepts as listening to a CD I bought at the corner store two hundred times in a row, sprinting to the boombox to record a song off the radio onto a cassette with minimal loss of the intro, firmly believing a song I couldn’t catch the name of was lost for eternity.
In my childhood years, my family possessed at most ten instances of audio media - among them a Moody Blues CD, the “ABBA Gold” cassette, a cassette of Gregorian chant that someone had randomly recorded “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” over, a best-of CD of Phil Collins’s songs and a clearly pirated compilation of dance music with a copy-pasted booty-shaking lady all over it and an intentional typo in every artist name on the backside - as if that made it less pirated. I heard my first ever Beatles songs as a MIDI-instrumental played off of a floppy disk on a digital Yamaha synth my parents got me for music school lessons. I wonder to this day where my dad got that sort of thing from in 2001.
What I’m trying to get at is that there was no overabundance of music in my life as I was growing up… until one day my dad bought a carefully selected and later infinitely cherished Technics audio-system for our apartment. Soon after he brought home a collection of self-made MP3 discs with all of his favourite music burned onto them. The concept of MP3 discs positively blew my mind - can you imagine fitting over a hundred songs on what looked just like a normal CD? An easy calculation revealed that we now had over a thousand songs just lying there, on the shelf, waiting to be listened to.
These MP3s quickly became one of my family’s greatest possessions, one me and dad were extremely attached to. I remember us sharing countless listening sessions, sitting at his work laptop and compiling tiny pictures of album covers into wishy-washy collages in Microsoft Excel that we would later print and use as sleeves for the discs.
These MP3s were my gateway to The Bee Gees. I probably won’t be very mistaken if I say we had pretty much every Bee Gees record on them, including their solo work and the songwriting they had done for other artists.
As teenagerhood would have it, I started out by rejecting the band, moving strictly against my father’s recommendations. To me it was Evanescence or nothing. Heated arguments followed. And followed. And followed. Until gradually, I started realising I don’t quite hate what I’m hearing. In fact that song off of “Size Isn’t Everything” was quite funky. Yes, I could definitely get behind it. You know, it goes like:
“You know I’d do anything, hä-hä-hä-hä-nything for you”
(I didn’t know back then that I would end up living in Germany, but today I can say with certainty that this usage of “hä” is so professional it could rival an irritated tenth-generation German.)
But then, maybe I liked that other song - “Above and Beyond” - better? And what about “Experience is not enough to show you how to fall in love?”
At any rate, it was soon impossible to hide my growing infatuation with the Bee Gees from my dad. Our arguments then became friendly ones - Which song is better? Who is the better singer? What is the best album? It was endless and it was endlessly entertaining. I remember my dad saying - much to my disdain - that I would end up loving “Blue Island” most of all off the album it’s on when I grew up and “got smart”. I remember scoffing to his face and assuring him that would never happen. “Blue Island” is my favourite song off that album today. I hope that means I’m smart now!
Now that the cat was out of the bag and I embraced my fascination with The Bee Gees, it wasn’t long till they became my number one favourite band and I got into a nerd spiral. My dad soon printed out all the Bee Gees lyrics for me and bound them with that textured cardboard - plastic spiral - translucent cover set that they still use for corporate presentations today. Every day from then on, you could find me standing at the centre of the living room, facing the Technics audio-system, lyric book in hand, singing along to the Bee Gees songs.
My sister who was then merely four years old at the time soon caught on to the trend and started obsessing over the band in her own four-year-old way. I specifically remember one tradition of ours: whenever someone put on the song “Irresistible Force”, and it was approaching it’s culmination, ending in “…you must spread your wings and fly”, we had to drop everything we were doing, run to the living room carpet, fall onto it and spread out our arms, snow-angel style. I invite you to stop for a second and imagine the comedy of the moment - an almost full-sized human and a tiny human synchronously dropping to the floor because The Bee Gees said they must spread their wings and fly.
As is becoming apparent from all I said above, it was the general consensus in our family that The Bee Gees are great - an opinion I still stand by today. Imagine my surprise when I found out a lot of people considered liking them unfashionable if not a marker of a bad taste! It is especially true of many modern musicians. They tend to see The Bee Gees as this one-dimensional, primitive disco outfit that never made anything beyond “Stayin’ Alive” and even if they did, it’s probably more of the same and not worth their attention.
It is absolutely valid to dislike a music artist, but sometimes the dislike is based on a mental shortcut that has little to do with reality. And that is exactly the case with The Bee Gees. Even as a fan I don’t know just how many albums they’ve released - I’d say easily over twenty - and you know how many of them are disco? Maybe about one and a half.
If you follow the band’s journey from their earliest work onward, you will find everything from Beatles-inspired ballads, over country songs, soft pop, pneumatic dance songs that aren’t disco, R’n’B (?), to - yes, indeed - disco. But first and foremost, The Bee Gees are unrivalled masters of pop song. The sheer amount of brilliant pop music they have pumped out in their active years is beyond most people’s imagination - including the entirety of the group that’s shouting they’re all about disco.
What’s more - I find it an extremely uneducated take to call the Bee Gees’ songs primitive. As far as pop music goes, their work couldn’t get any more complex without moving beyond pop. Forget even the super detailed multi-voice vocal harmonies that sound like a magical breath of fresh air. Forget the mind-boggling falsetto passages. Instead, look at the chords. Look at the key changes.
I would argue The Bee Gees was the only straight up pop-band that could shove five key changes into a single song and still have you sing along with zero trouble. Their harmonic instinct is hard to beat and their melodic prowess is off the charts. Check out songs like “Secret Love” or “Spirits (Having Flown)” and you will know exactly what I mean.
Granted, the band does have one weak spot - and that is the lyrics. I’ve always felt like they were kind of an afterthought and missing imagination. This sudden lack of lyrical depth was generally characteristic of pop-music in the 70s and the 80s but given The Bee Gees’ wildly prolific output they’ve bred quite a bunch of wistful “leave me as I love you still”-s, “love is in motion”-s, and “I could not love you more”-s.
Just to scandalise you a little bit, here are some of the golden examples of what they’ve delivered in the years that saw the rise of blatant sexual undertones in song lyrics:
“I don't care, take me there on the street, freedom in the city
Gotta ride, goin' down underground, watch me slide, loving in the city”
- “Subway”, 1976
“She'll read your mind, she's smart as a whip
She'll suck you dry, but look at how much I drip
At the point of ecstasy I write a symphony
Of poetry in motion…”
- “Closer Than Close”, 1997
“I'm gonna hit you from all sides, lay your fortress open wide
Nobody stops this body from taking you” (WHAT?!)
- “You Win Again”, 1987
Even still, these songs are a blast to listen to. They are a celebration of musical adventure, a prime example of melodic genius and! - not all disco.
I’m happy to say a lot of my musician friends who I’ve “forcefully” exposed to some of The Bee Gees’ more deep-cut work were left speechless, admitting they never thought the band’s music was so versatile and masterfully crafted.
So, having converted my fair share of non-believers, let me ask you one thing: if you haven’t already, just give The Bee Gees a chance, will you?
send this to every anti poptimist immediately (not that it will convince them to like modern pop, but still!)
Grew up hearing their songs over radios/movies/friends place at West coast it was a normality here.
I wonder friend circle, the region you live in, and accessibility to music played a role.
If people put half of the energy that artists/musicians debating/fixing art/music on world problems I think we would live in a much better world altogether 😂