Victor Willis, who co-founded the Village Folks and co-wrote their largest hits, died Tuesday, June 30, after a “quick however aggressive sickness,” in line with a submit on the singer’s and the Village Folks’s Fb pages. His spouse posted an analogous assertion on the singer’s personal Fb web page. Willis was 74 years previous.
Fashioned in 1977, the Village Folks have been successfully the idea band of producer/composer Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, the duo behind Can’t Cease Productions. Morali dreamed up the group after stumbling right into a Greenwich Village homosexual bar the place “boys decked out in butch drag have been dancing round a person referred to as Felipé Rose,” who was carrying an Indigenous American costume, as Tim Lawrence writes in Love Saves the Day: A Historical past of American Dance Music Tradition, 1970-1979. Willis was enlisted to sing backup on an idea album about homosexual New York life, however finally satisfied Morali he needs to be singing lead. The band’s self-titled 1977 debut, conceptualized and produced by Morali, was a landmark within the enlargement of Eurodisco in the US, in addition to a world hit.
Second album Macho Man continued to push the Eurodisco sound, cementing the core Village Folks lineup of costumed, principally mustachioed males modeled on American archetypes. Disco-at-large was boiling over, leaving its imprint on pop and rock by way of blockbuster remixes of songs like Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Suppose I’m Horny?” Into this flamable second, the Village Folks unleashed “Y.M.C.A.,” an anthem of lustrous orchestral motifs and suggestive lyrics from third album Cruisin’. Co-written and sung by Willis, who wore the police and naval officer costumes, “Y.M.C.A.” dialed down not one of the band’s ostentatious type however turned ubiquitous anyway, unreservedly embraced by a lot of the mainstream. As disco promoter Kenn Friedman advised Lawrence in Love Saves the Day, the album “didn’t occur in homosexual golf equipment however in straight ones.” The Village Folks, he mentioned, turned, “the primary gay-to-straight ‘crossover’ group.”
Willis, who was heterosexual, was joyful to play up homoeroticism on stage and on report however joined the group in presenting a extra muted media presence as their fame rocketed. (Mentioned Rose on the time, “I’ll inform the homosexual press I’m homosexual. If the straight press asks, we inform them it’s none of their enterprise. Or ‘none of their fucking enterprise!’ relying on how they ask.”) The anomaly allowed the group to function on the border between queer and straight tradition, turning into one of many few disco artists—alongside Donna Summer season and Stylish—to realize continued success, reasonably than scoring one-off or scattered dancefloor hits.
Fourth album Go West, once more produced by Morali, supplied the group’s remaining hits: the title observe and “Within the Navy.” By the top of the Seventies, the band and movemenet have been dropping goodwill, loathed by each the hip disco cognoscenti and a reactionary macho counterinsurgence that culminated within the vinyl furnace at Disco Demolition Evening in Chicago. (A Village Folks-soundtracked movie from 1980, Can’t Cease the Music, was renamed from Discoland: The Music By no means Ends and introduced a straight-coded model of the band, in an unsuccessful bid to dissociate them from disco.) But the Village Folks’s hits endured in a approach few different disco novelties might, eternally blasted out at weddings and sometimes ill-fitting public occasions.
Willis left the band within the early Nineteen Eighties and performed no position in its preliminary reunions. He was arrested on medication and weapons fees in 2006, and, in 2012, efficiently secured a greater royalty price from Can’t Cease Productions and writer Scorpio Music for his position as a Village Folks co-writer. Their authorized battles continued till 2017, when Willis accepted an out-of-court settlement and rejoined the Village Folks, which once more confronted authorized motion, this time from his former bandmates, till the Willis-fronted lineup secured the band’s trademark.
The Village Folks continued to tour and launch music, in addition to making contradictory statements about its consolation with Donald Trump’s adoption of “Y.M.C.A.” and “Macho Man” at rallies. After initially saying he had requested Trump’s 2020 election marketing campaign to cease utilizing his music, Willis later took a extra ambiguous stance and eventually accepted an invite to carry out at Turning Level USA’s inaugural ball in January 2025, in addition to a high-profile pre-inauguration Trump rally. Former member Jim Newman mentioned that month that, moreover Willis, the unique band “would by no means” have supported Trump.
