The disco-pop band Village People has been in the news lately, and not for good reasons, explains Craig Young.
Witness “YMCA” being played at Donald Trump’s inauguration! and one of the original band members denying that their hit “YMCA” had anything to do with gay men at all.
It may be instructive to provide a capsule history of the group in question. It was actually the progeny of two French music producers and directors who then proceeded to synthesize archetypal stock characters into an ensemble and write a number of hits for them. The characters were a generic “Native American,” a leatherman, a police officer…
As for “YMCA,” Victor Willis is right—back in 1977, when the song was released, it was accompanied by fully clothed U.S. Navy sailors from the USS Reasoner. In 1980, an ill-decided commercial misstep resulted in Can’t Stop the Music, a film that co-starred Caitlyn Jenner. The musical bombed everywhere but Australia—make of that what you will.
By 1980, disco was dying as a musical style, and the original lineup was phased out in place of an interchangeable group of successive figures who still played the same characters. The band had some resurgence in the nineties, fronting teams like the Australian National Rugby League competition and FIFA’s 1994 Football World Cup in Germany as front acts. Their newer items grew increasingly anodyne, and there were squabbles between the performers. One was arrested for firearm crimes, later got into copyright litigation with the company that ran the band, and so on. The aforementioned Victor Willis is both straight and married.
Despite objecting to the use of their soundtrack in Donald Trump’s 2017 election campaign, the band played at the 2024 second Trump inaugural, horrifying many U.S. LGBTQI+ community organizations—especially at a time when the Trump administration is busy erasing legislative and regulatory decisions that benefited trans people during its predecessor.
So, is it time we consigned Village People to the archives, or were they ever more than a corporate marketing ploy created to attract the gay male metropolitan market segment in the heyday of disco? Over time, the band lost its gay content, and gay men lost interest in their existence. The current apparent Trump affiliation will do little to attract us back, although whether MAGA royalties from their seventies soundtrack gain a new audience is an interesting question.