Village People: "5 O'Clock In The Morning" (1980)

“5 O’Clock in the Morning” was the Village People’s first music video as a new wave band, rather than a disco band, and the transition is somewhat startling. Gone are the flamboyant, extroverted dance moves – there is almost no dancing at all, unthinkable for a Village People music video from even a year before – and gone, too, is the collective sense of curiosity that made it feel as the band were cruising any and every space they encountered. Instead, New York comes off as a cold, synthetic vortex, funelling the band into movements more than moves, and streamlining them into a sleek, slinking singularity that makes them feel more like a perfectly polished unit than the catch-all community of their disco days. No longer really differentiated by their costumes, their uniformity seems to intensify as the clip goes on, as if enforced by the empty streets and smoky vents that smother and spit them out as new wave automata, androgynous androids in the vein of David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s personae of the late 1970s. Yet, unlike Bowie and Pop, there’s no real conviction here, no sense that the Village People have embraced their role as a new development or mutation. Instead, it feels like a diminution, a sustained retreat that often conceals itself quite well as a frontal attack, but is finally debilitated beneath the cavernous, panoptic crane shots that anchor us. Released the same year as William Friedkin’s Cruising, it seems to offer another version of the 70s giving way to the 80s, as the flexible, provisional, cruisey rhythms that made the Village People such a quintessential mouthpiece for post-Stonewall New York start to tighten into something more rigid, paranoid, panic-stricken – the apprehension that some apocalypse is imminent, something that will render even the most flamboyant bodies and outfits as uniformly sallow, sickly and haunted as these once-familiar faces. It’s not that hard to see, then, why the album – and single – was so despised, since it’s a singularly downbeat and depressing vision of the next decade, let alone from a group that was once so pleasure-oriented – a dystopian nightscape in which it’s too late for nightlife, too late for cruising, too late even for wandering without being picked up by the same arbiters of good taste that coerced disco artists away from disco in the first place. And in that sense there’s something ever so reproachful about it, a nagging sense that the people who most violently hated it were also the people who secretly wanted to see the Village People reduced to this anti-anthemic vision of a world without YMCAs.