Illicit

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Featured:

A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

Not sanctioned by custom or law; unlawful.--AHD

[edit]

The illicit origins of disco [...]

The very origin of disco was during the French resistance during World War Two. Basically an illicit form, it was a music - jazz - that the Nazis in wartime Paris had banned because it related to several things that they didn't want to deal with like Americans, Jewishness, blacks, so they banned it. So it became the official resistance music in clubs. Discotheques started out in this completely illicit environment, they weren't tolerated by the state, and they never lost that underground appeal. --Peter Braunstein

[edit]