Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes - Get Dancin’ (1993)

If one had to define Western culture in the mid-'70s in any sort of fashion, one could do worse than to pick The Rocky Horror Picture Show and this insane, ridiculously entertaining album. As calculated, stagy, and utterly bizarre an attempt at rocketing someone to fame as humanly possible, Get Dancin' sounds like what would happen if a Broadway production squad with no ideas of their own found themselves at a prime Parliament/Funkadelic show and decided to see what they could do with it. The result beggars description, thanks in large part to the putative ringmaster of the whole thing, Disco Tex, aka Monti Rock III, himself. Whether hairdresser, failed actor, or more or less or all combined, his screaming queen MC rants never fail to raise a smile -- the question is whether he realized the humor was unintentional or not. The title track provides some of his most memorable moments, screaming things during the instrumental breaks like "America needs you! We need you to go dance! We need you to get together, and boogie woogie woogie woogie! RADAR LOVE IS HERE! THE STAR OF STARS! THIS IS YOUR NIGHT! THIS IS YOUR LIFE!" He only seems to appear on the album irregularly, while the Sex-O-Lettes, whoever or whatever they might be, create a fake but hysterical concert recording with functional yet unavoidably hamhanded funk/disco leading the way, with lame hooks, bad horn charts, terrible backing singers, clear ripoffs of "The Hustle," and more. It all works in spite of itself, a cliché of a cliché, so beyond seriousness, parody, or irony that the only thing to do is enjoy it without guilt. Terrible sexual innuendoes crop up everywhere, bad homages to music from the early 20th century appear, and that's just the start. A bargain-bin classic, and thousands of times more entertaining than nearly all the prog rock recorded during the decade.