(A posting inspired by a random iTunes playlist. There will be more.)
What came by was the “Megamix” track from Gay Happening — a mix of five Boney M. songs: Rivers of Babylon, Sunny, Ma Baker, Daddy Cool, Rasputin. Boney M. is a disco band that originated in Germany (with West Indian members) in 1975; “Rivers of Babylon” was their greatest hit.
Gay Happening is also German. It stages “die groesste Party fuer Schwule und Lesben in Deutschland” (according to its website) and also puts out, through Dance Street Records, (re)mix albums, lots of them, from these events, suitable for home use with a few hundred of your sweatiest, most sexed-up friends (or for recollecting, or imagining, the pleasures of gay dance parties in the privacy of your own home). In the U.S., other sources put out collection after collection from gay Circuit Parties (more on the Circuit below). Although I’ve never been to a Circuit Party or a Gay Happening (but put in my disco dancing time in gay clubs in the late 70s), I have a rather large collection of these recordings, most of them freebies from gay magazines and gay porn distributors.
So one of the versions of Boney M.’s “Rivers of Babylon” — there are many — came my way. And though I’ve of course been aware, ever since the Boney M. recording came out in 1978, that there was such a thing, I had somehow never reflected on just how peculiar a disco version of this song is: the song is, after all, a Rastafarian lament for the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, scarcely consonant, I would have thought, with the sex-drenched context of gay disco dancing. It’s like dirty dancing to the pulsing beat of the Ave Maria.
