The song in question
Let's start with the raison d'être. I was scrolling through Tumblr one day, as you do, and there was a post about someone's cousin insisting that Mother Nature had a counterpart named "Daddy Electric", someone else commenting that sounded like a disco skating duo, and then someone else drawing them. Well, you can't pass that kind of thing in front of my eyes without expecting me to do something about it.
The original inspiration informs the name of the piece. Not wanting to commit IP infringement, I decided it sounded like "Daddy's Selectric". The IBM Selectric was an electric typewriter with interchangeable fonts that was commonly found in homes and offices from the mid-to-late 1960s all the way up until the corporate sector adoption of the IBM PC in the mid-1980s. Does daddy have a Selectric? If so, then it's daddy's Selectric.
Now, since Mother Nature and Daddy Electric are disco dancers, their theme's got to be disco, hasn't it? And this is really what's brought me here, 2 years after the fact, to talk about it. Someone offline commented that the song sounded "eerily like real disco", and I'm just like... um, it is real disco. No, it wasn't written in the '70s, but it is genuine disco. People are able to write new music in that style. You can write new music in ANY style. All it takes is an understanding of how that style is structured.
I've been listening to disco on and off since I was in primary school, so I'm pretty familiar with the genre and individual examples of it. It's sort of my job as a composer to be able to imitate other styles, no matter how familiar I am with them. I mean, "Ray Bradbury was Right About Everything" happened after I listened to a 30-second demonstration of drum-and-bass on Wikipedia. "Fast Wail" happened because R has been recommending hardcore punk bands to me and I decided to imitate their style. That's just what being a composer is, and with a bit more practise, I could write a proper drum-and-bass tune or hardcore punk song (I think I insulted R when I said that hardcore punk seemed to be just however much lyrics you could jam into a single chord... I'm sure it's more nuanced than that). Disco, however, was easy. Not as easy as Devo-style synthpop, but easier than drum-and-bass certainly.
That's the full postmortem done right there, but since I'm here, let's talk about disco for a moment. Songs have to be slow enough you can dance to them, but fast enough for that dance to tire you out a little bit. Dancing is integral to the style, given "disco" is a short form of "discothèque", having the meaning of "a place you go to dance to music on records". Places of this kind were extremely common during the '70s and '80s, being forerunners to today's nightclubs.
In order to dance to it, the song should be between 105-135 beats per minute in common time. You often see CPR teachers using "Stayin' Alive" by the Beegees (ostensibly the quintessential disco song) to demonstrate circulatory rhythm. You can have a brisk walk if you step in time to the song's downbeat, but not so fast that you get puffed after 30 steps.
The next thing to think about is the rhythm section. The drums. You can think of the bass drum being your left foot and the snare drum being your right. If you listen to a selection of disco hits, you'll find their rhythm sections are all very similar. They're not identical, but similar enough to distinguish a pattern where you can say, "ah, that's a disco song". Personally, I've always liked the drums from "Macho Man". Whenever I listen to that song, I always think about how much of a shame it was that disco and monotonal sampling never co-incided, because that song was absolutely tailor-made to fit the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer. Nothing against Russ Dabney, the drummer on that song, but I just really like drum machines. This is the reason why I decided to use a piece of '80s tech on a '70s-style song: the Linn LM-1 deserved to be on a disco record, but it never got the chance, because heaven forbid Black women and gay men have a musical genre. That is why "disco died", you know. Anyway, that's a discussion for another time.
Next, instrumentation. Disco often had a backing orchestra, just like dance music from the '40s and '50s. This was done mainly at the behest of label executives in order to sell records. Marketable music has always needed a grand sound to it, and how much grander can you get than a 20-piece strings ensemble and a brass band? Apart from that, lots of amplified electric guitars playing 7th chords, clavinets, and the occasional synthesiser, but never usually more than a Minimoog or one of its competitors. Just a personal-sized monophonic synthesiser. To my everlasting shame, I forgot to put any brass into "Selectric" at all. Mainly, I just wanted to get the funk chords out of the way and, after that, my hands ached so much I just shut down, said "There, that's done it. Disco song," and published it.
So, basically, "Selectric" is a meme. Other people make memes in Powerpoint or Paint or something, but I make memes in FL Studio. Yeah it takes a longer time, but sometimes you just have to have a musical meme. Something that isn't Rick Astley.