What is disco?

[GrandMaster-D]

I totally love the game.
But what I dont get about the game is: What does "disco" actually mean?
What is disco? Is it a sub-culture? Is it a long gone time of Harry's better days? Is it a lifestyle? Or is it maybe just a certain feeling?

The game contains very few elements that I'd actually call "disco". The disco-ballish light at the first dream sequence. The cocaine. Harry's pants and tie... but that's about it.
There is not even one funky disco track in the game.

So what within the game's context is disco? Since the game plays in a fictional world, maybe disco means something different then what it would mean in this world? But then again we need our vocabulary to reference to Disco Elysium's world.

What is disco? What makes the game disco? What makes Elysium disco?
What does disco even mean in our world?

Please elaborate!

[Ichmag 🔑🌙]

YES

[jbrd_]

"Disco" is brought up numerous times via intra- and interpersonal conversations. The player's character, "The Expression", Guillaume Le Million, the dancing, champagne and good times... all Disco, all a fading memory of Revachol's past.

[Du-Vu]

Musical genres and subcultures come and go, but I think maybe part of the reason disco was chosen was because disco *died*. It went away abruptly, inspired a lot of backlash, and became a punchline, still being mocked literally 50 years later, sometimes by people who were born long after it came and went. But is it really so much sillier than any other infraculture? it meant something to people once. It made people *feel* things, in its day.

And so disco becomes something of a metaphor for any part of the past which is irretrievably gone. That can be actual disco, or the Ex-something, or Girl Child Revolution or the '90s hardcore scene or whatever. Youth and hope and love.

[YellowOrange]

The main character likes to sing, drink, and do drugs.

[belangf]

Also, Disco in Latin means "to learn", so as you play your learn about Elysium.

[Kameradoktorn]

Originally posted by belangf:

Also, Disco in Latin means "to learn", so as you play your learn about Elysium.

Woah. Thanks for giving the new title a bigger meaning, was kind of bummed when they ditched no truce with the furies.

[ShadyLurker]

The name of a fantastic Anodic Dance Music club. HARDCORE!

[Telephoney]

Disco's dead, baby. That's the point. Harry clings to the last few vestiges of the subculture that formed him which he most identifies with, desperately grasping to the last threads of happiness from a life long forgotten.
Elysium is a Greco-Roman concept of the afterlife, 'the abode of the blessed after death'. So there you have it. Disco's dead and you're living in its afterlife, now bereft of meaning and purpose, drifting through it as if a ghost.
Insulinde, likewise, is a shell of its former glory, the decaying corpse of what was once a cultural phenomenon, and an intellectual powerhouse. Now all it can do is wallow in its misery and try to forget with violence and narcotics that will never be as sweet as they once were. Sound like anything else in DE?

Some might say, it even serves as a metaphoric parallel for certain empires in the world today...