Leaving This Planet | Left This Planet (Gone)

VINYL FORMAT. A heavily-played classic at David Mancuso's loft parties, Charles Earland's 'Leaving This Planet' encapsulates the visionary appropriation of the early NYC disco scene: an up-tempo funky jazz masterpiece that spoke to the precise moment of divine convergence that was NYC's underground dance community, and in so doing, secured its place in the annals of musical and cultural immortality far beyond its originally intended role. 'Leaving This Planet' explicates both lyrically and musically, verbally and viscerally the basic platform of early club culture: a veritable antithetic to organized political action, and yet deeply political in its own (possibly unconscious) right. A longing not just for immediate and total escape from the physical and spiritual plight of modern American urban poverty, but, in fact, an actually cohesive, organized and structured fraternity that applied a philosophy formulated from direct experience under the hardships of alienated material existence to the latter's objective stranglehold on passion, expression and cultural mobility, establishing a politics of the everyday that was practiced with tenacity and resolved, determined to abolish banal drudgery in favor of a new utopian vision: theoretical architecture constructed on top of the cold, estranging urban landscape of American inner-city plight. The early pioneers of NYC's underground have demonstrated for us continually through their example and legacy that to truly escape the hardships of this world requires an uncompromising exploitation of its most base material simplicities, their direct reconstruction and re-appropriation, not for the continued service of the superstructures of economic and social division, but for the purposes of human need, human passion, human necessity: in service of life.