False Things You Believe About The Bee Gees

While they were many other things before, after, and during the world's brief infatuation with disco music in the late 1970s, the Bee Gees are rightfully remembered as the most disco of all disco acts, thanks to genre-iconic songs like "Stayin' Alive," "You Should Be Dancing," and "Night Fever." In those tunes and others, the band found a formula that worked: a relentless bass groove, plenty of brass and strings, and the ultra-high-pitched and powerful vocal stylings of lead singer Barry Gibb. He utilized a vocal technique (or trick) called falsetto, generally used by male singers to reach the upper register of the musical scale, which they wouldn't otherwise be able to hit naturally. 

Gibb used falsetto so much that he's forever linked with it, even though many famous post-'70s singers have given it a shot, including The Weekend, Frank Ocean, Justin Timberlake, and Josh Homme. Gibb popularized falsetto for crossover pop and rock audiences, but he certainly didn't invent it. When the Bee Gees moved into its disco phase, the band didn't even call it by that name. "It certainly wasn't in our minds, and we certainly wouldn't have called it disco, we thought it was R&B," Gibb told Rolling Stone (via The Ultimate Biography of the Bee Gees). "We liked The Stylistics and the Delphonics and people who sang in falsetto." Gibb was merely imitating singers he admired.

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