155: Village People parody

Saturday Night Live 14 April 1979
(transcript from http://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78qrock.phtml)

[Pop music impresario Don Kirshner (Paul Shaffer) sits in a TV control room, woodenly reading off cue cards, addressing the camera.]

Don Kirshner:
I'm Don Kirshner and welcome to Rock Concert. I first met the Village Persons two years ago when their lead singer, Lyle Manning, provided the floral arrangements for my daughter Karen's bas mitzvah. Today, thanks to the brilliant disco production of Giorgio Morali and to their manager Maury Mineo, they have become a vibrant force in the music industry. Now, to introduce them from the perspective of a young person who can enjoy their music without understanding its homosexual connotations, here is my daughter, Karen Kirshner.

[Applause for Karen Kirshner (Gilda Radner) who enters and sits next to Don -- she, too, reads the cue cards woodenly, sounding exactly like her father.]

Karen Kirshner:
I first saw the Village Persons perform at L.A.'s famed Roxy Theater where they debuted their hit single "Health Club Man." Tonight, thanks to my good friend Herb Karp at Polysutra Records, they're here to perform their new hit, "Bend Over, Chuck Berry." Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome The Village Persons.

[Applause. Disco music begins. Dissolve to a mirrored chandelier and pan down to reveal a glittering disco set where the Village Persons gyrate to the beat: a native American Indian in full tribal regalia (John Belushi), a construction worker (Bill Murray), a biker in leather with a thick mustache (Dan Aykroyd), a sailor, a cowboy and the wildly intense, energetic lead singer, a uniformed cop (Garrett Morris).]

The Village Persons:
Bend over ... Bend over and over
Bend over and over and over
Bend over and over and over

Cop:
I went down to the disco to make it with my local deejay
Well, he looks so good in leather and he knows which records to play
Well, I walked right up to him but I didn't know what to say
Uh huh!
Well, he told me he was macho and he worked out down at the gym
Ha ha! Yeah!

The Village Persons:
Bend over, over and over

Cop:
I said, hey, look, you're the boss and the turntable started to spin

The Village Persons:
Bend over, over and over

Cop:
And before too long I was really gettin' in to him

The Village Persons:
Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!
Bend over, Chuck Berry
Put your guitar away
'Cause they're playin' disco music
From New York to L.A.

Cop:
Not to mention Philadelphia, P-A.

The Village Persons:
Take a look around you
There's no more rock and roll today
So bend over, Chuck Berry
Disco is here to stay

The Village Persons: [posing provocatively]
Bend over ... Bend over and over
Bend over and over and over

Cop:
... Yeah!
So the next time you're lonely and you're crawling on your hands and knees

The Village Persons:
Bend over, over and over

Cop:
And you're checkin' out each young man to find out where he wears his keys

The Village Persons:
Bend over, over and over

Cop:
Come on down to the disco where the deejays aim to please

The Village Persons:
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
Bend over, Chuck Berry
Put your guitar away
'Cause they're playin' disco music
From New York to L.A.

Cop:
The places goin' down in 'Frisco Bay.

The Village Persons:
Take a look around you
There's no more rock and roll today

Cop:
Do you hear me, man? Bend over!

The Village Persons:
So bend over, Chuck Berry

Cop:
What would Little Richard say?

The Village Persons:
Hey!

[Song ends. Dancers stop. Applause.]

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Saturday Night Live has always parodied new trends, and so from its heyday, here’s a pastiche of the Village people. The Village People have been the ubiquitous, maybe even archetypal out-gay stereotype (the leather cop in particular) for clueless sods for almost the last 30 years. See how it’s taken just 10 years for gays to go from being weird unsexual transvestites to growling hairy clones. That straights keep dragging up the leather cop image for comedy reasons gives you some idea as to how hard this hits a nerve about homosexual sex. But anyway, here we have a parody of the Village People from when they first fresh and new.

However, given the background of these performers and writers this sketch is acting out some fundamental assumptions about the importance of popular music in the lives of this particular generation. The careers of these writers and performers take in either the early ‘70s Woodstock parody “Lemmings” or else “The Blues Brothers”. If these people lived a rock n’roll lifestyle, then it was because rock n’roll was part of their cultural DNA. The promotion of rock n’ roll was a crowning part of their generation’s cultural achievements. Furthermore, rock n’roll is unremittingly heterosexual, and had become a young person’s music of choice to get laid to. Disgust about disco being “fag music” is really petulant irritation from a lot of straights who are suddenly find they’re not where the sexual action is. That the Village People seemed to be promoting and attracting a particular gay aesthetic only confirms that the order the heterosexual baby-boomers had made for themselves over the last 10-20 years was not the only story. For those who were a little older it means that they’ve got a sudden glimpse as to their irrelevance. For younger mainstream blue-collar music fans disco is an affront to their heterosexual hopes and assumptions. Watching documentary footage of rock fans torching disco records in “Last Days of Disco” can give you some idea as to the extent of their outrage.

So therefore in this parody, you not only have the performers ridiculing disco, but also heralding the possible death of straight music. If Chuck Berry introduced rock n’roll with “Roll over Beethoven” then here the SNL stars can lament the death of rock n’roll with the image of Chuck Berry being sodomised by disco, as the Village Persons also sing about the easy availability of gay sex. That disco music was about gay men and sex can’t be denied. But the typical straight boy trick of deriding something they don’t like as “gay” or “faggy” is suddenly undermined by the fact that the matter under scrutiny unabashedly proclaims its gayness. All that these satirists can do is outrageously emphasise the homosexual overtones, demonstrating how this music can never hope to appeal to the bland tastes of mainstream music-buying America, hence the intro by the unhip Kershners. All they can do is try to make homosexual expression and need for sex funny. And it is the fact that it has been a taboo until recently but is now broadcast on national television that makes it outrageously funny to most of the audience. These are fag jokes that your uncle would never make, so be hip with us is the invitation of SNL.

The sudden final reference to Little Richard is because he has always been surrounded by gay rumours.