For Fans of Disco

Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards built the engine that still powers pop music. The chopped guitar scratch on 'Le Freak' and the bass-line on 'Good Times' were sampled, borrowed, and rebuilt so many times that their DNA is in hip-hop, house, and everything after. Chic was not a novelty act: it was a precision instrument for collective joy.

Most people remember the white suit and the Bee Gees. The film itself is darker: Tony Manero is trapped in Brooklyn, the dancefloor is the only place where class and aspiration dissolve. Director John Badham shoots the Odyssey club like a cathedral and the streets outside like a cage. It earns every frame.

Set in the ballroom and drag scene of late-1980s New York (the direct heir of disco's queer underground), Pose cast the largest group of transgender actors in a scripted series and told those stories without apology. The music, the costumes, and the choreography are joy; the writing is serious. It stands as the fullest portrait of what the dancefloor actually meant to the communities that built it.

The game is named after the genre for a reason. Disco Elysium treats its references to disco as part of a broader argument about idealism, collapse, and what survives after a cultural moment burns out. The detective wakes up in the ruins of a utopia, and so does the music. Playing it is the rare experience of a game that means what it says about the thing in its title.