Stayin' Alive - From "Saturday Night Fever" Soundtrack

This plays over the opening credits of the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever while John Travolta struts through the streets of New York City. The movie has come to represent the disco era, and has made "Stayin' Alive" one of the songs most associated with disco. The Bee Gees had been singing in a high-falsetto style since their 1975 hit "Jive Talkin'," which was also on the soundtrack, but they were very popular as a vocal harmony group in the late '60s and early '70s. Their contributions to Saturday Night Fever brought them huge success, but marked them as disco singers. In a 1989 interview with Q magazine, they talked about this stigma and why they didn't deserve it. "We were not disco," Robin Gibb said. "People who emulated us were disco. All you heard on the radio was that dooo! dooo! syn-drum sound. We never had a syn-drum on one of our records!"

This was one of five songs the Bee Gees wrote specifically for Saturday Night Fever. Like the film, the song is about much more than dancing and having a good time. It deals with struggle and aspiration; making your way in the world even after you've been kicked around. John Travolta's character in the movie is a young man working a dead-end job who feels alienated by his parents. Dancing is his form of expression, and weekends are his time to let loose.

Robert Stigwood, who produced Saturday Night Fever, is the one who asked The Bee Gees to write music for the film. Stigwood got the idea for the film from a New York Magazine article called "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," about the Brooklyn club scene. This may explain the rather random line in the song, "We can try to understand the New York Times' effect on man."