Most right-thinking people agree that the pinnacle of American artistic achievement involved racially integrated, heavily African-American groups of musicians playing tunes written by people who were usually at least one, and sometimes two, of the following things: gay, black, Jewish (I mean Billy Strayhorn and Lorenz Hart, not Sammy Davis Jr.). And throwing some Italian-American singers into the mix didn’t hurt either.
A musician friend once told me that he thought American popular music started to go all wrong when record companies got heavily into market segmentation: music for young people, music for old people, music for black people, music for white, music for urban people, music for rural people. And of course, the last forty years of American politics is the story of how Republicans followed the Buchanan-Nixon playbook of using post-civil rights racial backlash to create an almost entirely white Republican majority or near majority. I realize that to some extent it’s like that everywhere, that the British played on religious difference in India to divide and conquer, for example. But it still makes me sad.
So I think Steve M is completely correct about Disco Demolition Night (on its 34th anniversary):
But at the risk of going all Slate-pitchy, I’d like to make the case that Disco Demolition Night was an early harbinger of the right-wing backlash that had become obvious a year earlier with the passage of the anti-tax Proposition 13 in California, and fully took root a year later with the election of Ronald Reagan.
Even if you loathe disco, think about what it was. It was music that was black and white, gay and straight — you could argue that the disco coalition looked like the Obama coalition thirty years later. It was, in part, the music of groups that had had second-class status in America and didn’t want to take that anymore.
Now think about rock in 1979: what had once been a multiracial form of music, with Buddy Holly sharing the spotlight with Little Richard and Richie Valens (ne Valenzuela), had become virtually a whites-only club by the late 1970s. On album-rock radio stations, the only black performer you were likely to hear was Jimi Hendrix, and he’d been dead nearly a decade. Prince put out his first record in 1979, but you didn’t hear it on rock radio.
To some extent, the disco backlash was understandable — disco dominated top 40 radio, and a lot of it was schlock with a monotonous beat. But what seemed to piss a lot of rock fans off was the sense that it was an injustice for radio to play music that wasn’t by white guys with guitars. Remind you of anything? The sense that whatever white people prefer should be what we get, with no one else allowed to express a preference?
Redshirt
That’s an awesome thesis. Never considered disco that way before, nor the Demolition. Interesting.
Were not the racially mixed groups of yore though by necessity? An all black group might not be allowed to play, whereas a mixed group might have more luck?
schrodinger's cat
Why see everything through an ideological lens? That just sucks the joy out of life. This argument sounds like one of the many posts Freddie DeBoer wrote about Girls.
Doug Milhous J
@Redshirt:
Good question. I have no idea how true that was, except that in the movie “Bird” they pretended their white keyboard player was a black albino so that they could play the chitlin circuit.
Ted & Hellen
You can ring my bell if you turn the beat around, as long as you get down on it and push push in the bush.
Doug Milhous J
@schrodinger’s cat:
Those are harsh words.
peach flavored shampoo
How does this relate to George Zimmerman again?
dan
Disco sucks. And sucked.
schrodinger's cat
I know that McCardle and many MSM bloggers don’t understand percentages but what is an economics professor’s excuse?
Punchy
What does Sullivan think of Disco?
Jeff Spender
Sorry in advance for going OT, but I read an article about how labor unions feel the PPACA will do a lot of damage (it was an article in Forbes).
I don’t have the time to really look into it, and I honestly lack the expertise, so I was wondering if anyone here had any insight.
Doug Milhous J
@Punchy:
Good question.
Mike E
I’ll get off your lawn, but lemme 1st point out that the major label paradigm has been supplanted by social media and direct downloads.
Lawn monoculture is deader than disco, btw. [runz]
Redshirt
@Doug Milhous J: It’s been a long time since my jazz classes, but I seem to recall the necessity of having a white guy on board. Not just to get into clubs, but in order to work with record labels, producers, promoters, etc. Helped grease the wheels.
Comrade Jake
All this time and I just thought people had come to the obvious conclusion that Disco sucks.
Along these same lines, I don’t get the recent infatuation with Daft Punk. I didn’t like that band back in the day when they were called the Bee Gees.
Redshirt
@Punchy: You know he loves it. Semi-ironically, of course.
Comrade Jake
OT: wife and daughter are headed out to Moral Monday. Daughter made a sign.
Hawes
I thought it was because disco sucked. The way Big Hat/Hair Country sucked. But then again I’m a post-racial elite.
ruemara
hm. In Living Color and the reaction when they got a cover on a metal magazine.
Redshirt
I’ve come to really like disco. Its fun!
Doug Milhous J
@Comrade Jake:
I love that song they do with Pharrell, but…I also even like that song Robin Thicke does with Pharrell.
Poopyman
@Comrade Jake: Yeah!
geg6
Meh. I’m not sure you can paint with that broad a brush. I was (and still consider myself to be) a punk in 1979. But Blondie was punk and disco. And we all loved Earth, Wind and Fire. I’m guessing that Steve M may not have actually been around in those days if he thinks that it was all as simple as he paints it.
Nicole
A few years back you could just have easily replaced “disco” with “Nickelback.”
I remember disco being the punchline to jokes back when I was a wee New Wave kid, and yet, all these years later, “Brick House” is what sends wedding guests racing to the dance floor. Disco gets the last laugh.
But I can see the validity in the theory. I read somewhere CBS records had to threaten MTV with a boycott of their roster before MTV was finally willing to cave and air the video for “Billie Jean.”
Doug Milhous J
@geg6:
Lots of punk/disco crossover, Sandinista-era Clash, later Gang of Four, etc.
schrodinger's cat
@Doug Milhous J: I thought it was Steve M making that argument, not you. Besides, this 90+ degree weather makes me cranky. Are you back from your world travels? I may be coming to Rochester area in August sometime, may be we can have a BJ meetup then.
Napoleon
Huh?
Music was always heavily market segmented, particularly when it came to race. Hell the first white groups in this country that even dare admit that they were influnced by, and liked, black groups were not even American (such as the Beatles, the first major white group that defied segration laws in this country and the Stones). Hell in the early 1800’s white musicians “sneaked” black inspired music in front of their audiances in the form of minstrel shows which where not exactly shows that treated black people fairly.
As to disco, it sucked, that is why people loved stuff like Disco Demolition Night. GIve me the Ohio Players or the Clash but you can keep Donna Summer and the disco era Bee Gees.
Sorry, but to come to Steve M’s conclusion you basically have to ignore musical history in this county.
Gin & Tonic
@Redshirt: Not sure what that last comment even means. His first quintet (the “First Great Quintet”; one of the greatest small groups in jazz history) was all-black until Bill Evans stepped in for Red Garland in 1958.
The Dangerman
@schrodinger’s cat:
I wouldn’t know Freddie DeBoer from Freddie Krueger, but, I agree, this Disco hypotheisis sounds like a load of crap.
geg6
@Hawes:
Sucked? Really? Shouldn’t that be “sucks”?
Nothing I hate more than country. I’d spend eternity listening to the soundtrack album for Saturday Night Fever if someone could promise me I’d never have to listen to a country song ever again. And be happy about it, too.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The writer is full of it – Regan was governor of California from 1967 – 1975, Prop 13 was 1978 and wasn’t just a conservative thing – almost everyone I knew who owned a home right or left was worried about losing their it over the way property taxes were going up at the time.
As for disco – polyester suites were the uniform for it. Of course every male in the country despised it. To this day I am amazed it was a gay thing since the clothes looked so bad. Not to mention the rampant drug abuse that was considered bad by even 70s standards.
I think the thing to keep in mind about the late 70’s early 80’s it’s the mirror of what is happening now; the left had jumped the shark and started trying to force the agenda of it’s fringe on the main stream and there was a huge backlash against it. Now it’s the right is doing the same thing.
Poopyman
Thanks, DougJ. I strongly suspect this thread is why the ad up top is for “Soul Doctor: Journey of a Rock Star Rabbi”.
Apparently, it’s headed to Broadway.
Gershwin wept.
geg6
@Doug Milhous J:
Yeah, that’s why the argument seems ridiculous to me. Not to mention that mainstream rock also jumped on the disco bandwagon. See Stones, Rolling.
Gin & Tonic
@Gin & Tonic: Huh. I seem to be replying to a sentence Redshirt edited out.
Gus
@schrodinger’s cat: Or one of the wingnut posts that Edroso rips to shreds on a regular basis. Sometimes a silly marketing device is a silly marketing device.
Redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, I realized I was wrong about that.
Nicole
@Poopyman: On the bright side, so is Hedwig and the Angry Inch (headed to Broadway). I saw it in its Off-Broadway run and it was the best rock musical I’ve seen before or since. Also the only rock musical, as most of what bill themselves as “rock musicals” are just traditional musical theater with a slightly louder bass line.
Well, okay, Spring Awakening was pretty good.
The Dangerman
@geg6:
Doesn’t Blondie also get the first mainstream “rap” segment of a song with “Rapture” (the intro for that song is the earworm from hell; sorry for those similarly afflicted)?
Alex S.
I noticed that as well. In my opinion, music sort of got less interesting around 1980. My favorite artist is David Bowie and he’s the perfect example. Somewhere between Scary Monsters and Let’s Dance he turned corporate. Around 1980/81 counter-culture died, or let’s say, counter-culture lost the battle to replace mainstream culture. Also, a certain generation of black music died at that time. It happened between Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and Thriller. At some point, the “blackness” went away. Soul, Funk and Disco died and were replaced by Hip-Hop… and, I don’t know, Hip-Hop represents a certain ghetto-i-zation…at least to my 1982-born eyes and ears. And considering how many black artists played guitar in funk, soul, jazz or rock’n’roll bands, it’s weird how few black guitar players there are today. In fact, I’d say there are only two big names and they’re both getting a little old, Prince and Lenny Kravitz.
Disco tried to survive as disco/dance-rock though. Donna Summer’s “She works hard for the money” might be the best example.
Maybe one of these ominious ideological pendulum swings crossed the demarcation line around 1980.
Pinkamena Panic
White people declare theory on why black music was singled out for backlash wrong because white people music is just better.
Film at 11.
khead
I liked the Penn State comment better than the original post. YMMV.
Hungry Joe
No, what pissed me off was that it was schlock with a monontonous beat. Some explanations really are that simple. Steve M says it seemed that a lot of us thought it was unjust for radio to play music that wasn’t by white guys with guitars; he should name, oh, I dunno, one person who ever so much as hinted at such a bizarre attitude. I certainly never thought, read it, or heard anything remotely like that.
Mnemosyne
@Napoleon:
Uh-huh. We’ve seen what happens when we give you a few beers and the deejay plays “She Works Hard for the Money.” You don’t have to be ashamed anymore.
I do think there’s something to this thesis, though obviously it doesn’t explain everything about the hard rock/disco divide. There’s a reason this happened in Chicago, which is still to this day one of the most segregated cities in America. And, yes, I’m a native of that area (North Shore), so I vividly remember when this happened and the whole “Chicago Rocks! Disco Sucks!” era.
ETA: There’s also the class divide (blue collar vs. elites) and the New York vs. Chicago rivalry — if effete New Yorkers love it, Chicagoans have to hate it (even if they secretly love it).
Jax6655
Black folks and others living in Chicago during the late 70s knew that Steve Dahl was a racist shock jock precursor to Howard S–and Rush in some ways–at the time. He was known for saying really offensive and outrageous things like dead Haitian refugee jokes, definitely black and hispanic stereotypes and of course he really demeaned women. He was/is? a fat unwashed offensive slob with an audience just like him.
I certainly remember most AAs understanding that his hatred of disco was his racism disguised as hatred of the music genre. I never considered it in terms of entitlement white musicians to the airwaves. I’d still submit that it was a combination of both.
I actually worked in Big 6 ad agency at the time, but I don’t recall the size of his audience. I do know that WGCI *ahem black station* was CRUSHING everything in the market playing disco and R&B during that time. Then Tom Joyner came into that market and afternoon drive time was totally his.
FWIW– I think disco helped white people learn to dance on the beat. :)
Trust me, there were fewer than 10 black people (if any) at the DD. The mouth-foaming madness of that audience could have endangered their lives.
Mnemosyne
@Hungry Joe:
Steve Dahl and Garry Meier. “Chicago Rocks — Disco Sucks!”
I don’t know, maybe it was regional and restricted to the Midwest, but that attitude absolutely existed.
Comrade Jake
@Doug Milhous J:
They’re both fairly catchy, but the Get Lucky song just sounds too much like Stayin Alive to me.
Voytek Dolinksy, Dean of Students
“Disco Sucked” is the common refrain of rock snobs and sqaures.
The disco people finally were exposed to once it was sanitized and made safe for white people and John Travolta is about as far removed from the disco of the black, latin and gay communites of inner city America as the Alan Parsons Project is from Zeppelin.
I know disco.
It did not suck and it rocked a lot harder than a lot of so-called rock did.
beltane
@Doug Milhous J: And the fusion of disco with punk influenced all the early 80s New Wave stuff and a multitude of other subgenres of dance music we could talk about at length. It’s hardly the case that disco was killed by FREEBIRD! so much as that it morphed and evolved into other things which is what always happens with popular music. Even during the height of disco there was plenty of music you couldn’t dance to, and clubs and dancing did not suddenly disappear because some people wore “Disco Sucks” t-shirts.
Jockey Full of Malbec
The dirty little secret of Rock as a genre, in general, is that for all the bluster, it’s a pretty damned conservative musical form.
By 1978, disco (and other dance-derived music like early electronica) had already adapted/re-purposed the drum machine, the synth, the vocoder and the turntable. Outside of a few prog-rock groups (who, with a few exceptions like Pink Floyd, Yes or Queen, never got much mainstream love), where was Rock then?
For whatever reason, so-called “minority” music has generally been technologically ahead of the curve. And IMO this still holds true today.
Seanly
This theory is a little too much. It’s the same as the wingnut ‘Kultur’ analysis that Roy Edroso ridicules so well.
One could point to things like the popularization of Reggae and the roots of rap at the same time to make a counter-point.
different-church-lady
Oh lord, not this crap again.
Spaghetti Lee
I like Big Country. Does that count as integrated music?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@dan:
I can say the same about any genre of music- and I do- and never be wrong. Every genre has its handful of innovators and bushels full of pale imitators. By the time Steve Dahl and Garry Meier got shitcanned by WDAI in Chicago in that station’s transition in format, disco was moribund- but so was AOR.
And it isn’t like the music itself mattered all that much to those two, beyond the fact that the majority of their listeners listened to AOR in the evenings and were less likely to spin the dial to find S&G at their new digs (WLUP, iirc). Dahl was the original shock jock. The show was mostly talk, sketches and prank calls, light on the music.
BTW the whole “Disco Sucks”/”Death to Disco” meme originated in the UK as a backlash against not the genre of music, but the fact that clubs that had formerly featured live music were now spinning records instead, becoming discotheques.
GxB
@geg6:
First top 40 Rap song too (to my knowledge) aptly named Rapture.
As to the Disco hating hypothesis, I’d venture it has more to do with overexposure than anything else. Hell, Dave Mathews (remember him?) has suffered several “worst bands of the ’90s” titles, when his group is probably one of the most musically sophisticated to ever hit the charts. But even I would like to hit a thumbs down vote if I had to hear “Ant’s Marching” one more time despite the fact I think the message of that song should be pounded into every lunk-headed Merkin who ever lived.
eta: and Dangerman is the winner this time for beating me to the punch – goddamn I’m getting old and slow.
Geeno
@The Dangerman: I think the first real rap on the airwaves was Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way”. Don’t think it ever made the top 40, though.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Jake:
Seriously? It sounds way more like this to me.
beltane
@Mnemosyne: This must be one of the main differences between NYC and Chicago. In NYC, I grew up with hearing very racist Italian-Americans blaring disco and its derivatives from the souped-up speakers of their muscle cars. Hard rock was considered “suburban” and not something that any of the cliques in my high school listened to.
Casey Graham
Might I recommend Jefferson Cowie’s ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ about the 70s and the end of the working class. He employs disco as well as Bruce Springsteen to show the different ways that various groups responded to the political and economic atmosphere of the 1970s. With a loss of faith in institutions, people turned to disco as a way of individual accomplishment and a way to escape their working-class heritage, which is pretty much the plot of Saturday Night Fever. I think he indicates that disco demolition night was more a product of hating gay people.
A Ghost To Most
Funk, soul, R&B, and the blues were great. Disco killed them all. Chased away an entire generation of folk like me, and probably caused the rise of hip-hop and rap. Disco sucked.
JWL
No, no, no… Wrong.
Disco sucked, and so disco died. That demolition night was merely its Irish wake, bidding it goodbye and good riddance.
superfly
This isn’t a new theory, it was discussed in (IIRC) the PBS doc series on the History of Rock and Roll from 2004.
Could be wrong, maybe it was something else, but I think it was the PBS series.
Mnemosyne
@schrodinger’s cat:
I do think there’s something to it, politically. Chicago, blue collar (the White Sox are the urban blue-collar baseball team, the Cubs are the snobby suburbanites team), Midwest, anger at social change. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the entire backlash against disco was completely inspired by anti-gay and racist backlash, but in Chicago in 1979 with fans of (as Jax6655 put it) the original shock jock packed into Comiskey Park? Yep, it’s there.
gene108
Kids these days are probably the first generation in a long, long, long time (if ever), for whom music does not have a racial component to it.
Rap took the better part of the 1980’s, before white kids were listening to it and not getting much crap from their friends. I have friends, a few years older than me, who graduated high school in the late 1980’s and they have never really gotten into rap. It’s just not what their clique listened to in high school.
It didn’t occur to me that disco had that sort of racial element to it. I turned 5 in 1979.
Violet
@Jax6655: He’s still alive. According to Wikipedia he’s 58 years old. He would only have been 24 for the Disco Demolition. Young guy to have such a big influence.
Mnemosyne
@superfly:
Did you ever see “Rock and Roll: An Unruly History”? I can’t find it anywhere on DVD and I frickin’ loved that one. It was like “Connections” for rock music. I had never heard the reggae backbeat in “Heart of Glass” until that show pointed it out.
Tom
Isn’t there enough racism in this world that we don’t have to invent it where it doesn’t exist? Disco sucked. People were sick of it. That is what Disco Demolition was about. (plus, beer)
Comrade Jake
@Mnemosyne: Whatever. It’s nouveau disceau trash.
Alex S.
@beltane:
Italian Disco….Giorgio Moroder. For some reason, the Italians loved Disco, and through Italo disco the influences are still felt today. Chicago adopted these influences and created Chicago house.
Mnemosyne
@beltane:
I do think that anti-New York feeling probably contributed, especially in Chicago in that era. We (they?) joke about being the “Second City,” but it stings sometimes. If New York working-class guys were doing one thing, Chicago working-class guys would go the opposite direction.
Joel
On the whole, pretty much any art form sucks, especially popular art.
But there are selected gems amongst the rubble.
I’m personally fond of “Best of My Love” by the Emotions, who Mariah Carey would shamelessly rip off for her entire career.
Svensker
I’m old enough to remember “race” stations, which is where I’d hear soul music before it went mainstream on the white stations. I still remember telling my friends about this great song called “Where Did Our Love Go” by some group called the Supremes that I’d heard and loved. Still, “race” music would crossover and be mainstream.
But I do think music really split in the late 70s/80s. I went from disco to funk, whereas almost all of my white friends hated funk and were listening to Squeeze and Ultravox. And the split never seemed to heal — white kids at my son’s school listened to white music, black kids listened to hip hop and no twain met.
Purely anecdotal, though.
piratedan
fun stuff to dance to but has the musical nutritional heft of pixie sticks. Didn’t like that the overall product was dependent more on the skill of the producer and engineer than the talent and inspiration of the musicians.
FlipYrWhig
Amanda Marcotte has raised this theory before too — that anti-disco backlash was anti-otherness backlash. I dunno. I was born in 1971 so I wasn’t the right age for the heyday of disco, but the way I remember it, the problem people had with disco wasn’t that it was too girly or too black or too gay, but that (obviously I was a kid and didn’t know these kinds of words) it was mass-produced disposable party music for coked-up hedonists. In retrospect that seems stupid, especially considering all the commingling and cross-pollination among kinds of ’70s pop. But I think the issue on its own terms as it percolated in its own time was fake music vs. real music, not minority music vs. white people’s music.
Joel
@Alex S.: Daft Punk’s best album is called Discovery for a reason. Now, with so many EDM producers in that style, we’ve come full circle.
Mnemosyne
@Tom:
Dude, you have multiple people who grew up in the Chicago area at the time telling you, yeah, it was about race and homophobia. I was 10 years old and lived in Libertyville — where were you?
different-church-lady
Just a general point: the reasons we can look back on disco (and this applies to other forms of music that become trendy) with some fondness today are…
a) We’re not absolutely saturated with it. It’s a novelty
b) Only the best survived. For every Donna Summers there was a Silver Connection. Today we still want to hear “Love To Love You Baby”, but not so much “Get Dancin'”
You can say the same about any genre: grunge, boy bands, big bands, punk… hell people were probably sick of Vivaldi in his time.
polyorchnid octopunch
I don’t know if anyone’s seen this yet, but Lester Chambers was assaulted on stage Friday night after dedicating “People Get Ready” to Trayvon Martin. A woman jumped up and knocked him down.
http://www.americanbluesscene.com/2013/07/lester-chambers-assaulted-on-stage-at-blues-festival-over-zimmerman-trial/
Right-wing creeping eliminationism at work.
PurpleGirl
@Comrade Jake: Lovely young girl and a great sign. You and your wife are doing a good job.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
Who were mostly …? Come on, you can fill in the blank for yourself.
One of the reasons I’m being kind of an asshole about this is that I vividly remember how New Wave music was regarded in Chicago. The racial component wasn’t there because it was mostly British, but the homophobia? Oh yeah. You should have heard the things my brothers would say about the “fags” in Duran Duran.
PurpleGirl
I didn’t like Disco and I don’t like Rap/Hip-Hop. But that’s because I have a particular aural/neurological quirk wherein certain sounds cause physical pain.
A Ghost To Most
@Svensker: this is how I remember it as well. Disco split music into white music and black music. Then hair bands ruined rock n roll.
FlipYrWhig
@gene108: yup. I graduated high school in 1988 and while pretty much everyone liked the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and LL were still hardcore and exotic, let alone Public Enemy. I had one Filipino friend who got way into hip-hop when the rest of us were still engrossed in music from 10 years before, like Led Zep and the Eagles.
catclub
@different-church-lady: “hell people were probably sick of Vivaldi in his time.” I think Vivaldi wrote a LOT and we re-play only the few best pieces.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne: Are we talking about disco itself, or Steve Dahl in particular? Because I had no idea who the hell he was until 25 years later.
All we knew is it was everywhere, you couldn’t get away from it, and it wasn’t cool. We weren’t even aware it was a “gay” thing.
srv
Look, if disco was so great, why doesn’t the general genre positively dominate our music environment now? Why aren’t we all wearing bell bottoms, big hair and white clothes with shirts unbuttoned to our navel?
It’s because it mostly sucked, and we were mostly right.
I do know that disco influenced later rock and electro and all that. Disco Demolition Night was about a lot of things, and the outcome was not all about disco or race. I didn’t mind disco or rap being on the radio. I did mind when it was the only choice. When your classical station switches to rap, I reserve the right to be a snob.
If anything, modern ‘country’ reminds me more of disco and early electro. Try listening to that over-produced autotuned country. Just try. Johnny Cash is on my regular rotation, but 99% of country is still shit.
beltane
@Alex S.: My father is Italian (not Italian American) and he would often tell me how “beautiful” disco was. Even now, my cousins in Italy seem to spend all their evenings at clubs dancing to music that is very heavily influenced by disco. I never realized there was a racial component to this; I just thought it was about dancing, looking good, and having fun with your friends.
gene108
@Jeff Spender:
There’s a surtax stuck onto “cadillac” health insurnace plans.
A lot of unions negotiated good health plans for their workers in lieu of pay increases. These plans will face an additional tax or have their benefits reduced to avoid the tax.
I never really understood the logic behind that part of Obamacare, other than they needed ways to pay for it and this is one of those ways.
Mnemosyne
BTW, there’s a pretty interesting interview with Nile Rodgers from the BBC from a couple of years ago where he talked about his memoir. It sounds really interesting — he had a pretty amazingly open and free and yet fucked-up childhood, particularly for the 1950s.
geg6
@The Dangerman:
Yes, absolutely. The Stones jumped on that one early, too.
burnspbesq
Disco committed the one unpardonable sin for popular art: it was boring.
A Ghost To Most
@PurpleGirl:
.
For me, opera causes me physical pain. Can’t abide that shit.
beltane
@different-church-lady: I agree. The exception to this is hair metal-all of it sucked.
gene108
@FlipYrWhig:
I started high school in 1988. By the time I graduated, a lot of the white kids were listening to NWA, Ice T w/ Body Count, etc., plus who didn’t own a pair of Hammer Pants?
I now wonder what the influence and popularity of Hammer Pants have been in making rap music acceptable to a broader audience?
Someone should blog about this ASAP!
burnspbesq
@srv:
If anything, modern ācountryā reminds me more of disco and early electro
The output of the Nashville Hype Machine has nothing to do with country music.
/purist
Marc
Not everything should be crammed into contemporary political categories.
1970s rock had become very musically conservative and new genres developed from people who were sick of 45 minute drum solos. These new genres provoked a fierce reaction – a lot of these fans absolutely hated punk rock too, or new wave. Disco was dance music with lyrics that were…well, about what you expect from dance music, e.g. moronic. It was tied with club culture and pretty hostile to the left-over hippies (and vice-versa). Disco was also intertwined with class – the drug of choice was expensive cocaine, not cheap hippie pot, and there was a lot of money and glamour that folks on the outside resented. It also seemed like a real betrayal of counterculture ideals.
A lot of the reaction was “get off my lawn kid”, but that doesn’t make it racial. You’d have more of a good case that there was an element of homophobia, as disco was tied to an emerging out gay culture. But the racial angle is utterly misplaced.
Debbie(aussie)
@Comrade Jake: she and the sign are gorgeous, wish them luck.
Alex S.
@Joel:
Yes, it’s funny and I agree completely. In the past 3-4 years Euro-Disco returned to America with a vengeance. Former rappers or R’n’B stars like Usher and Ne-yo have comebacks with electronic dance music. Not to mention the cheese of Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas…
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
We’re talking about Disco Demolition Night, which was a specific event that happened in Chicago. People are extrapolating opinions about why disco became so hated from that specific event.
I’m not sure that the conclusions that people are drawing based on that event can be extrapolated to the rest of the country and why disco died as a genre, but they are absolutely correct that the event spun out of control in Chicago because of racism and homophobia and creeping blue-collar conservatism.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: I still say no. Your iconic ’70s hedonist is a cross between Barry Gibb and Larry the upstairs neighbor on Three’s Company. White guy with his shirt open too far and pants crazy tight. New Wave, yes, that I remember as something tagged as queer. In 1985 or so I felt like I couldn’t admit my favorite band was the Thompson Twins, let alone Depeche Mode. But I still don’t think disco stereotypes are black and gay. It was a culture of desperately horny hairy white people, unless you were in the actual music scene, I guess, rather than being a club rat on the prowl.
GxB
@A Ghost To Most:
Hey, hey now – Warrant’s Cherry Pie, Winger’s Seventeen and Slaughter’s Fly to the Angels… now that was some inspired stuff that we still listen to today…
(no wonder I have little more that traumatic memories of HS and early adulthood)
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
As Exhibit A for the second count of the indictment of the Chicago music scene on charges of sexism and homophobia, I give you Liz Phair, Pariah. Although I was never completely sure whether the boyos hated her more because she was a girl or because she went to New Trier.
different-church-lady
@FlipYrWhig:
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that a whole lot of people who weren’t at the party were subjected to it endlessly. It all made a lot more sense if you were at the disco, I suppose. 95% of us weren’t.
gene108
@srv:
Disco evolved, like rock and roll.
Rock and roll abandoned being music people could dance to in the 1960’s and especially during the 1970’s.
Something had to fill the void and still does, whether it’s Madonna to Menuedo to the Back Street Boys to Katie Perry, music for people to get up and dance to is what disco’s become and is here to stay.
Alex S.
@FlipYrWhig:
Hmm…disco and queer? What’s next, people suspecting that John Travolta is gay? (Well, he’s definitely half-Italian!)
beltane
Where do Madonna and Michael Jackson fit in with all of this? What role did MTV play? If we’re going to have this discussion it should be more comprehensive than “multiracial disco was killed by wingnuts and that’s why we’re a center-right nation today”.
Marc
@Mnemosyne:
But there is also a general indictment of hostility to disco in general, and people are reacting very much to the general indictment. I really disliked disco at the time (I was 17 in 1979), but I don’t even remember any of my friends raising race as an issue at all. We didn’t like the money-grubbing rich kid cocaine vibe of the scene.
superfly
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, I think I did, because I remember hearing that too, and the original demo of Heart of Glass was a full on reggae tune.
Was the disco backlash theory discussed in there? I watch so many docs re: music, it’s difficult to keep track of what came from where.
Mnemosyne
@srv:
Name any musical genre from 30 years ago that dominates our current musical environment. Rap and hip-hop didn’t exist yet.
Subgenres become popular, and then they evolve into something new. Disco didn’t die, it was co-opted and retrofitted into new genres.
FlipYrWhig
@gene108: Once when I was home from college I was at a record store and overheard a nervous conversation between a kid, his mom, and a clerk. The mom wanted to know if DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince was suitable for her child. The kid said, “he’s, like, funny, right”? I don’t actually remember what the clerk said. I do remember that I bought an Ice-T album that day to show that I wasn’t one of the anxious white people. The one with “Original Gangster” and “New Jack Hustler” on it. Haven’t listened to it in a long time now… Maybe I should dig it up!
A Ghost To Most
@GxB:
The prosecution rests, your honor. Because of shit like this, I now listen to alternative country (not that Nashville KKKunt-tree KKKrap)
FlipYrWhig
@Alex S.: I remember all kinds of entertainers being whispered about as gay in the late 1970s, starting with David Bowie and Rod Stewart. But I don’t remember Travolta being part of that set of rumors.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne:
The reason I asked the question is that I’ve seen that extrapolation happen before, in the world outside of this thread.
If folks say Dahl was a tacit white male cultural supremacist, then I’d have no cause to object, ’cause other than that image of him in the flack jacket and helmet I have no cognizance of him.
Like everything else, there’s probably multiple reasons. One might be that the music in and of itself sucked. Another might be cultural resentment — fans of one kind of music defensive about it being replaced by another. And a third might be that people unknowingly people picked up on the fear of otherness from people like Dahl — we knew it “sucked” because we were cued to think it sucked, but the homophobia part was three filters removed.
Jax6655
@beltane:
For the most part it was. Esp. in the big cities. In Chicago, lots of dance clubs, bars stayed open till 4-5am and just as many people went out on Tuesday night as on the weekend.
I had a ball.
@Violet:
Hmmmph. Well at least he looks like he bathes now.
Napoleon
@Marc:
I am not going to say this is simply wrong, but by then wasn’t Elton John out and it was perfectly obvious that Freddie Mercury (of, you know, Queen) was gay?
Marc
This thread reminded me of this classic Doonesbury:
http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/08/26
FlipYrWhig
@different-church-lady: Hey, Studio 54 was a bastion of radical post-racial Utopianism. :P
But, yeah, I mean, disco and discos were all about privilege. It’s not dancing on a piece of cardboard with a record player on a card table. It was glitzy. That has to be a factor too in why it became a flashpoint.
beltane
@Mnemosyne: The stuff that dominates our music environment today seems to owe more to disco than classic rock anyway. Perhaps it was the cheap, expendable, mass-produced nature of disco that allowed it to be continually reintroduced under other names while there can only be one Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, bands my teenagers still listen to even though they were already old in my day.
Mnemosyne
@Marc:
I think that, to a large extent, people are remembering that they hated disco but don’t entirely remember why. I’ll admit, I still have some fondness for disco as the music of my childhood (that and the Carpenters), so I really don’t get the whole, “Disco sucks!” thing. “I Love the Nightlife” sucks? “Le Freak” sucks? “We Are Family” sucks? “I’m Coming Out” sucks? If those all suck so much, why do people rush the dance floor at weddings when the deejay puts them on?
I really think that “Disco Sucks!” became a hipster stance and, yes, I think racism and homophobia were components of that. Not the whole story, but components.
Darkrose
@Jax6655: Yeah, I’m kind of amused by all of the people insisting that it totally wasn’t about race. It was Chicago in the late ’70’s/early ’80’s: everything was about race. I was 8 at the time, and even I figured that out from the way the black kids in my school listened to disco and R&B, as did the trendy white teachers. The white kids from the south suburbs hated disco with a burning passion. (Me, I was Daddy’s girl, and pretty much all we listened to was classical music with some occasional Broadway and jazz thrown in.) It was especially charged on the South Side, where the white folks were fleeing as previously all-white neighborhoods like Beverly became integrated.
Steve is hardly the first to note the sociological aspects of the disco backlash. Just checking the Wikipedia article returns three cites to peer-reviewed journals, though they’re focusing on the homophobia aspect more than race.
Redshirt
Hmm: Is the current hatred of NYC as the bastion of Liberalism really a re-working of Disco hatred?
p.a.
@beltane: and cocaine!
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: All the north shore people I knew in college – and at my school, there were a shitload – liked punk and/or funk. Prince was huge (get it?). Disco was disliked because it was seen as overproduced schlock. It was watered down funk. I am ’82 for high school and ’86 for college if that gives any perspective.
gene108
@Mnemosyne:
30 years ago was 1983. Rap existed.
It may not have made it big but it existed.
srv
@A Ghost To Most: We’re still recovering from all that. Look at what passes for rhythm or blues here:
http://www.officialcharts.com/r-and-b-singles-chart/
Botsplainer
Disco sux. Always has, always will.
It is the perfect distillation of American mediocrity – not authentically black, not authentically white, unchallenging, emotionless.
beltane
@Redshirt: There may be an element of this. Never forget that the white population of NYC is not 100% white by the standards of RealAmerica, and RealAmerica has always been aware of this.
Jax6655
@Marc:
Never did any coke although obviously it was rampant in the ad biz.
Also, I think your comment represents another cultural/racial perspective divide. I think black people liked disco music because it was dance music. All this other stuff is #whitepeopleproblems.
Plus, isn’t destroying music (albums at the time) sort of like burning books? I mean I can’t stand metal or a lot of the current stuff like Taylor Swift (yech!) but I would never go to a stadium and watch someone pour kerosene on Taylor Swift cds. Then rush down onto the field in a mob and . . . .
Just sayin’
Yeah, right, disco sucks (my ass . . . ) it was a total cultural/racial backlash. In Chicago and elsewhere.
maya
@gene108:
Yup. Having lived my 20s in the first heyday of Disco, in SF, there were any number of dance clubs around that tried to bring in local bands to play. The Orphanage comes to mind. However, way too many of those bands turned out to be no-shows and the owners were getting screwed. So they switched to DJ style playing canned Donna Summers. Everybody liked it because you could dance. + Show off your new polyester leisure suit – I still have two but they shrunk.
One of my younger female employees in the mid -90s used to bring in her disco tapes to play and I was at first surprised to find that disco was back and for the same reason – people could dance.
Also those disco mirror balls are cool.
Marc
@Napoleon:
Queen got an unusual degree of hatred compared to other bands in the genre, and Freddie was the reason.
sparky
@Mnemosyne: Rap didn’t exist 30 years ago? I’d beg to differ.
This whole thesis of race influencing a hatred for disco is pretty lame. And as I recall, the Disco Demolition turned into a riot mainly due to alcohol, a bonfire, and rowdy working-class youngsters. That mix is gonna be trouble.
srv
Nobody ever got beat up for singing Bohemian Rhapsody.
Mnemosyne
@Napoleon:
Nope. Elton claimed to be bisexual and then promptly married a woman. Freddie never publicly admitted he was gay IIRC and only admitted he had AIDS a few days before he died.
Botsplainer
The more I think of it, the more pissed off I get.
What was this inane fool listening to? Clarence Carter always been strokin’ down my way. George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelics, Commodores, Aretha – they were all on.
Fuck this writer. Hard.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh yeah, fwiw the soundtrack to Grosse Point Blank with a little more Dazz Band covered a lot of what I was hearing.
Disco was dƩclassƩ; too much polyester, too much Paco Rabane.
FlipYrWhig
@Redshirt: but isn’t disco kind of Wall Street-identified? Or is it just that both involved mounds of cocaine?
Mnemosyne
@Jax6655:
Good point. People are looking at what disco became after Saturday Night Fever and assuming that’s what it was from the beginning. It’s like assuming that rap/hip-hop was all about “thug life” before white suburban kids started listening in droves.
Wally Ballou
@burnspbesq: Chuck Klosterman, in Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, argues that Nashville pop country *is* the authentic country music now, precisely because it speaks to current conditions in rural America (which is much more Wal-Mart than family farms these days) than the quasi-traditional Americana stuff favored by educated urban hipsters.
Jax6655
@sparky:
FTFY
But it wasn’t race.
Mnemosyne
@Botsplainer:
Yes, when I think of emotionless songs, I think of this one.
Man, I can’t tell you how many times I sang that one into a hairbrush, and I’m not even gay.
Jax6655
@Mnemosyne:
Amen!!
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@gene108:
“Rapper’s Delight” was released in September of ’79. I remember well learning it as a freshman in the locker room after gym class.
beltane
@FlipYrWhig: The post-disco club scene of the 1980s at places like the Palladium was very Wall-Street identified. I will never forget being hit-on by a coked-up trader at the Palladium on “Bear Stearns Night” when I was 17 but looked more like 14 (as an underage girl I never had a problem getting into any club I wanted). Not all clubs were like this, however, and clubbing was by no means an activity limited to rich people. It wasn’t really my scene, but I could see how other people could love it.
Mnemosyne
@gene108:
But disco no longer did. “She Works Hard for the Money” was, maybe, its last gasp, and it’s much closer to 80s pop than 70s disco.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Mnemosyne:
But SNF is what popularized the genre, watered it down and made it possible for radio stations to switch over to all disco formats. Disco v.79 was not Disco v.74.
Forum Transmitted Disease
AOR white radio was just as bad, it just took a bit longer to die as more people were listening to it. How the fuck do you think punk, the original music for people with zero musical talent whatsoever (it didn’t stay that way) got a toehold?
Mnemosyne
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
And what band was popularized? Not Chic or Kool and the Gang, but the (white, Australian/British) BeeGees.
ETA: Shorter me, this whole thread: white people ruined disco, and then turned on it so that even 30 years later people still talk about how the whole genre “sucked.”
Paula
Ya’ll are disappointing me here:
Donna Summer
Barry White
Early Jackson 5
Blondie
late Stevie Wonder
Parliament-Funkadelic
>>>
New Order
Afrika Bambaata
Bowie/Eno
Prince
Madonna
>>>
Daft Punk
[“various global house musics”]
>>>
LCD Soundsystem
Franz Ferdinand
Kanye West
Hot Chip
The Knife
[everything you’re currently hearing on Top 40 radio]
OK, so, on that list … I don’t think you can separate disco’s influence on this stuff from, say, the influence of Kraftwerk, Detroit techno, funk, and R & B.
geg6
@FlipYrWhig:
I lived it and can tell you that you are wrong. Disco was very much seen as black and/or gay. At least it was here in suburban Pittsburgh. But then, they didn’t think much better of us punks either. We were thought of as gay and/or criminals by the “Freebird” crowd. Gawd, I still absolutely despise that song and that band.
gene108
@sparky:
Strange thing is, I think kids today are better behaved. They wouldn’t riot, even if they had the chance.
Maybe all the people helping each other out during 9/11/01 touched a nerve in their young minds.
I don’t know.
I just can’t picture a stadium full of youngsters trashing the place, like they did back in those days.
Also, too maybe the better behavior has some correlation to the record low rates of crime these days.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
What, no love for REO Speedwagon, Nazareth, Styx and Molly Hatchet?
/snark
Omnes Omnibus
Another problem with discos is that the music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life.
Redshirt
This is a great thread. Thanks for the illumination, all.
Redshirt
@gene108: Sports riots. They happen all the time in the USA. Mostly white.
Mnemosyne
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I realize I’m revealing my truly awful taste in pop music, but I still have a soft spot for Styx (but only them on that list).
johnny aquitard
Hated disco and it had everything to do with the BeeGees who became the definition of disco. That, and the stupid beat. That, and the sappy lyrics. That, and the stupid hairy chest machismo ethos. Oh and the stupid scarves. And the polyester white suits. Fucking disco.
Prince saved my life. And Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall album came out the same year. They came along just in time.
Xecky Gilchrist
disco dominated top 40 radio, and a lot of it was schlock with a monotonous beat.
Unlike, say, every other thing that has ever been on top 40 radio.
Mnemosyne
Also, if anyone here has not seen 24 Hour Party People (which is about the opposite evolution, from punk to New Wave to electronica in Manchester, England), run out and see it right now. It’s really entertaining and has an interesting perspective on dance music.
Tom
@Mnemosyne: Actually, I was 13 and living in Libertyville. No joke! I was a huge Steve Dahl fan and I remember that time very clearly. Race had nothing to do with it. Yikes.
Mnemosyne
@johnny aquitard:
Haven’t listened to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” lately, have we? It has way more “disco” flourishes than you remember.
Xecky Gilchrist
@srv: Look, if disco was so great, why doesnāt the general genre positively dominate our music environment now? Why arenāt we all wearing bell bottoms, big hair and white clothes with shirts unbuttoned to our navel?
Because those things aren’t music?
Tom
@Mnemosyne: Also, homophobia had nothing to do with it either. This is such a dumb discussion. Disco was crappy music. Period.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Paula:
Well, you got the first one right. Barry White made forays into disco, as did Blondie, but they weren’t what you’d call disco acts. Stevie was doing a lot of reggae in the late ’70s. The Jackson 5 was always pop/soul.
I have a real big problem with your inclusion of P-Funk in there. Hard-ass funk ain’t disco. Just because the artists were black doesn’t make their music “disco”.
Paula
@Mnemosyne:
Early MJ!! Hell, yes, he was disco.
So that means we include Quincy Jones …
Also “Love Hangover”! Fuck, that’s a good ‘un.
Mnemosyne
@Tom:
Okay, that’s way too scary. We probably went to high school together. In fact … you’re not the Tom who made me miss Mojo Nixon when he opened for Violent Femmes and the Pogues because “concerts never start on time,” are you? ‘Cause that would just be freaky as hell.
Oookay, you keep on believing that. Our contemporary and fellow LHS graduate, Tom Morello, remembers his time in Libertyville a little differently.
Mnemosyne
Okay, I’ve gotta go because my boss is back and my lunch hour is over, but I’ll try to check back later.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne: I once got Mojo Nixon to spontaneously play a party I organized at a frat house I was not a member of – in fact, it was mere days after the LA Riots. Good times indeed.
FlipYrWhig
@geg6: Fair enough, but if it was black and/or gay-identified, there were a hell of a lot of horny hairy white hangers-on too, no? I’m just trying to sift out “people said disco sucked because it was too black and too gay” from “people said disco sucked because it was materialistic.” Which doesn’t mean it _was_ materialistic, or that there weren’t bigots who hated disco because it was Those People’s thing. But I think there’s another component that has to do with (perceived) realness vs. fakeness. And of course it’s all bullshit–every generation and every culture has party music that causes the decline of respectable society. If only! Disco’s no more “fake” or overproduced than prog-rock was.
Paula
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
A lot of the disco artists named above as being quintessentially “disco” are white.
I’m including those artists listed based on the way they used synthesizers. I don’t really consider how they were presenting themselves at the time. Re P-Funk. I’m not an expert, but it’s hard to hear P-funk samples in hip-hop w/o hearing the persistent synth beat. But admittedly, I am a bit young to have heard Parliament in context.
Jackson 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvmqYZr0RFo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8HkEprSaAs
brantl
Disco wasn’t hated because it wasn’t white, it was hated because it sucked. Period. I’ve got nothing against anybody of any color, but I loathed (and stiill do loath)disco.
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: I did not know that bit of history.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, you’re into renegades, ain’tchya?
I’ve gotta go to work, but I’ll leave with this: The loutish behavior of anyone in attendance at a game played at the Southern Chicago and Western Indiana Cooperative Halfway House (both the old and new buildings) is a given. And disco still, for the most part, sucks. The ideas are separable.
FlipYrWhig
@johnny aquitard: See, I’m not the only one who remembers that there was an overlap between disco and machismo. I can see everyone’s point about gay and black identifiers, but there was another component too that had its part in sorting out the scenesters from the non-scenesters.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: Also suffused with disco signifiers: Another Brick in the Wall.
Tom
@Mnemosyne: I like Tom Morello fine. he was always nice enough to me. I even like Steve M, and I read his blog all the time. But there’s no way that Disco Demolition was about white people rebelling against black music, or gay music, or anything other than SUCKY music.
And no, I’m not responsible for you missing Mojo Nixon. Although if for some reason I’m wrong and it was my fault, you’re welcome.
Omnes Omnibus
@Paula: Funk =/= Disco. P-Funk was pure funk.
Omnes Omnibus
@Paula: Funk =/= Disco. P-Funk was pure funk.
Paula
@Omnes Omnibus:
Who said it was?
“OK, so, on that list ā¦ I donāt think you can separate discoās influence on this stuff from, say, the influence of Kraftwerk, Detroit techno, funk, and R & B.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Paula: You implied it.
Bob In Portland
American popular music has fluctuated between segregation and integration. Often a new dance craze would appear in white America in the forties and fifties when someone crossed the tracks or got off the boat. In the fifties and sixties was absolute miscegenation of music, from girl groups through Motown and the Brits returning our blues to white teens.
Soon after pop music moved into the FM bandwave there was some decent free-form formats with lots of overlapping genres, but about the time disco became popular the media began its segmentation. Disco was extreme popular music in that it was very danceable but also not terribly lyrically provocative. (For the most part; the beauty of music is that if you look at any genre there will outliers and mashed up styles.) There was an intellectual rejection of disco by many whites who had their ears tuned to LA-country-folk confessional pop (Ronstadt, Eagles, Jackson Browne). There was a split into a countrified rock. This was about the time that there was a flip in rural culture and redneck kids started wearing their hair long and absorbed the artifacts of sixties counterculture without its liberal philosophies.
Another development in pop music has been the change in formats which allowed large record companies to recycle old artists and slow down musical evolution. Along with that came further segmentation. Michael Jackson could still cross genres, but the funk of, say, Cameo would find markets becoming increasingly alienated from their brand of music to win much appeal. White music got reignited with punk, but even there it segmented between intellectual, thrash, and more easily digestible new wave.
Cassettes offered the ability for listening to your sub-genre of music in the privacy of your car, further weakening the power of radio. Then came CDs and the download thingies. Now if you want you can be a big Slovakian rap fan or into Algerian dance music without leaving your home and crossing the tracks.
I think that there was both an intellectual disaffection as well as a reactionary (racialist) rejection of disco which was not allied but which proceeded from different groups. Plus, disco had run its course and rap and hiphop began making inroads in urban music which further weakened its base.
These things are cyclical.
NobodySpecial
Nonsense.
At the time of Disco Demolition night, record execs were strapping monitors on people to try and find the correct beat that would cause the maximum hook effect. Not to mention the original wave of innovation of the early 70’s had already crashed and the innovators had already started moving on. It’s why country goes through waves of assimilating pop and then imitating pop and then having the pop stars crash and ‘authentic’ music becomes the thing, until the next wave of pop.
Most people back then also had no idea or cared much that anyone outside of Elton John was gay/bi, other than the endless Bowie/Jagger jokes. It certainly didn’t stop them from moving units.
burnspbesq
@Wally Ballou:
That would, I presume, be the same Chuck Klosterman that is a regular contributor at Grantland?
I know Ziploc bags that are smarter than Chuck Klosterman.
Paula
@Omnes Omnibus:
Re “funk” though:
I have two discs’ worth of Bay Area funk, staples from the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Innervisions-era Stevie, Rufus…
Roughly, all “funk”, but all different. And Parliament brings something else, obv.
I wouldn’t call anything “pure”. From the wiki:
“In what is considered a forerunner to disco style clubs, New York City DJ David Mancuso opened The Loft, a members-only private dance club set in his own home, in February 1970.[21][22] Allmusic claims some have argued that Isaac Hayes and Barry White were playing what would be called disco music as early as 1971. According to the music guide, there is disagreement as to what the first disco song was. Claims have been made for Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” (1972), Jerry Butler’s “One Night Affair” (1972), the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat” (1973), George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” (1974),[6][23] and “Kung Fu Fighting” (1974) by Biddu and Carl Douglas.[24] The first article about disco was written in September 1973 by Vince Aletti for Rolling Stone magazine.[25] In 1974 New York City’s WPIX-FM premiered the first disco radio show.[22]”
… implying that disco is actually an outgrowth of soul/funk?
Tripod
The Zepheads doth protest too much. The comments on any classic rock youtube video are damning. You know, the good old days back before THOSE PEOPLE went and ruined everything.
smintheus
@Napoleon: Agree with you entirely. And disco should have been strangled in the cradle. It popularized the vapid, monotonously repetitive rhythms that have dominated pop music since the late ’70s.
Bob In Portland
In any case we are each a musical geiger counter, and this thread is really more about what made each of us click in the general muck of popular culture than an absolute means of measuring the worth of any music.
PurpleGirl
@Redshirt: NYC has always been hated as that big bad place, as if it didn’t have different neighborhoods and such. I guess we’ve been seen as a just a huge number of people with no community centers. It doesn’t help that people who once lived here, moved away and then had to keep bad-mouthing us. They had to give a reason for leaving, instead of saying that they wanted something different. (I, for one, never believed that the country was friendly or “behind” us after Sept. 11th.)
Bob In Portland
Where does Andy Pratt fit in all this? And Springsteen?
OmerosPeanut
This has me viewing the new Daft Punk album in a whole new light. Interesting thesis.
Heliopause
Oy. Young’n, I was there. This is utter nonsense.
I’ll put it as simply as I can. Disco was white teenagers’ version of black music. It was Pat Boone for the 1970s. It was derivative shit.
There was a big backlash against disco because it was shitty music and ubiquitous at a time when there weren’t as many TV and radio stations to choose from.
It was black only insofar as blacks were increasingly being allowed to make a little bit of music for white teenagers. It was gay only insofar as gay performers were either closeted or flamboyant clowns and stereotypes.
Gawd.
tybee
@Bob In Portland:
da
hell, the Commodores played my high school senior prom in 1972 – before they ever signed a record contract. and it was a 75% white school.
gmann
Racism or anti – gay did not fuel this riot. . . and it was a riot. Between games of a double header the let Steve and Garry take the field and blow up disco records that fans had brought to the stadium. 99 cent entry if you brought a disco record. . . This was an alcohol and weed based circus. . .
They blew up the records and fans rushed the field. . . They couldn’t get them to leave. . . They started pulling up hunks of grass as souvenirs. . . They forfeited game two. . Chicago police on horses with riot gear took the field and regained control. . . To late, the field was trashed.
Bill Veeck (as in Wreck) was the owner and a showman extraordinaire. . . This was nurtured by him (or his son) and the radio station jocks .
I was in the left field outfield next to an older gentleman who had a cracker jack box sized transistor radio. . . He gave the play by play. . . They have shut down the Dan Ryan Flyer (train) no stops between 31st 35th & 39th (Pershing). . . 70,000+ inside and 30,000 plus outside. . .
This is my recall without reading the Wiki article, which I know I will want too. . .
Dahl was a shock jock and was ahead of Howard Stern, but didn’t go nation wide (but was trying). . .
Jax6655
@Mnemosyne:
Absolutely right. Many/most of the white people, were only exposed to disco after SNF. There was a precursor to disco. It was really this:
@Paula:
Way before SNF r&b including funk was club/dance music among AAs. It was illustrated most visibly by the Saturday afternoon program Soul Train. It’s how we learned the dances and latest music from the West coast in the early 70s.
To @Mnemosyne’s: point above. Club/college funk/r&b dance music morphed into disco when SNF exposed the “urban” club scene to the general public from the POV of a white [Italian} guy as sung by the Bee Gees.
BINGO!
Hence the race thing.
Jax6655
@Heliopause:
Exactly.
taylormattd
@dan: snooty, self absorbed, elitist arbiters of what is “proper” or “authentic” music also suck.
Just Some Fuckhead
I love disco but all things considered, I think the disco backlash is because people could only maintain that level of energy for a finite period of time.
johnny aquitard
@Jax6655:
I head somebody say
Burn, baby, burn
Disco Inferno
IIRC “Burn, baby, burn” was said during the various race riots in the 60’s as well. (which Public Enemy’s Burn, Hollywood, Burn no doubt referenced).
Just remembered: some 20 or so years ago a (white) college buddy of mine who lived in Milwaukee had made a jacket that said ‘Burn Milwaukee Burn’ on the back of it. He told me it really made some older white people upset. One old guy told him it was because that’s what the black people were saying during the ’67 riots. My friend didn’t know that but was very pleased to learn that.
sparky
@Omnes Omnibus: She phrased it poorly. I think she was making note of P-funk’s influence on hip-hop ’cause everybody samples their stuff. At least that’s what I got after reading it a couple times.
Thlayli
@different-church-lady:
Silver Convention.
(OK, I just scared myself that I knew that).
McJulie
You know, by the late 70s disco did suck, but let’s not forget, the rock of that era also sucked, as did the country, and the easy listening, and the non-disco pop. 1978-80 (roughly) was a dark, dark time for popular music.
It is only in retrospect that I can find merit in the better tunes of that era, including the better disco tunes. At the time, it just felt like the radio was drowning in crap.
Jax6655
@johnny aquitard:
Saaaatisfaction
Came in a chain reaction . . .
taylormattd
All of you people hating on disco are embarrassments.
You are like some pathetic combination of an old man shaking his fist, bitching about “kids these days” + a douchebag hipster, snobbily informing everyone around you that *your* music is both morally superior to everyone else’s music, and it is also the true pinnacle of counter-culture.
Grow the fuck up, and quit repeating a stupid, tired mantra. It’s no longer 1984, and the same lines you used to vomit out back then in an attempt to convince the young ladies of your deep musical knowledge don’t work anymore.
Spaghetti Lee
It’s impressive that disco still has so many people complaining about it 35 years later. Me, I’m not a huge fan, but I’d rather listen to disco than a whole lot of other crap. And for the record, I think the last five years or so of pop music will go down in history as some of the worst songs ever written, and there seems to be no end in sight on that front.
johnny aquitard
@FlipYrWhig: Huge overlap. The macho worked for both the Village People and the super-hetero males.
I tend to think this is like a mobius strip kind of thing — macho eventually bends around on itself to where teh gay is just the other, hidden, side of the super-hetero.
I always get the feeling the super-hetero machos are overcompensating for some dark fear.
johnny aquitard
@Mnemosyne: Then I love disco.
Simple as that.
But alas disco became the “BeeGees” and Saturday Night Fever. Can’t stannit.
I want my Michael J. back, before he went white too.
johnny aquitard
@Jax6655:
Jesus I loved Soul Train.
SOOOOOOOOuuuuuuull Traaaain! And that funky train would come rhythmically chugging around the screen, leaving behind funky glowing tracks.
Nothing finer as an 8-year-old white kid in white suburbia of Detroit to tune in and watch Soul Train. Or so it seemed to me then. Remember seeing the Jackson Five do ‘ABC’. Heh.
Mnemosyne
Popping in for a second to post a link to another Nile Rodgers interview, this one on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn.
His story about how he wrote “I’m Coming Out” as a specifically gay disco song and then had to lie to Diana Ross about it might convince some people here that, yes, disco had a lot of gay roots and some people resented said gay roots.
Or maybe not. Some people seem awfully stuck in their “disco sucks!” rut.
Mnemosyne
@johnny aquitard:
You can say you love real disco, like Chic and early Michael Jackson, and not that poseur white disco that the BeeGees were doing. Disco hipster! ;-)
Also, too, a general comment — IMO, trying to differentiate between disco and funk is kind of like saying you like country, but not western. They’re very heavily intertwined and intersect in so many points that it’s hard to separate the two.
Reformed Panty Sniffer
I’m not sure I’m buying this argument. If you look at the albums released/popular in 1979, you see some emerging stars, old favorites, and disco, but also a lot of diversity (see http://www.superseventies.com/albumsbymonth79.html) .
A sample:
Chic, Cāest Chic/Eric Clapton, Backless
Grease soundtrack/Elvis Costello, Armed Forces
Rod Stewart, Blondes Have More Fun/Dire Straits debut
Earth Wind and Fire, Greatest Hits/Blondie, Parallel Lines
Village People, Crusinā/Doobie Brothers, Minute by Minute
Donna Summer, Bad Girls/Supertramp, Breakfast in America
The Blues Brothers album/Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Damn the Torpedoes
J.D. Souther, You’re Only Lonely/ Fleetwood Mac, Tusk
Pat Metheny Group, American Garage/Bruce Cockburn, Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaw
So yeah you kids get off my lawn with disco started the rightward backlash BS. You can pry my Bee Gees vinyl from my cold dead fingers…. Everyone knows the right wing loves country, the more corporate country, the better.
LauraNo
I notice more and more country music at the places I frequent, the dentist, restaurants, etc. There is more of it on American Idol and like shows every year. I wonder if that is some reflection on how white people are feeling, too.
Paula
@johnny aquitard:
It’s entirely possible to think of disco as worthwhile and still hate those artists.
They were the most popular of the genre, but not necessarily the best version of it.
I think what’s breaking my heart a little is that there is still so much anti-dance/anti-synth bias around rock circles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzeNAUOp17c
johnny aquitard
@Jax6655:
I remember as a very small boy, my father going to work one summer. It was different, his going. Not hugely so, but he said goodbye to my mother at the door differently, I could tell. And my mother acted differently at his going, I could tell.
Dad was an engineer for the power company. Detroit was burning. Day and night it burned. Blocks and blocks were burning. And they were shooting people. In the streets, in their houses, the rioters and the national guard.
I didn’t know that, then.
And they asked for volunteers from the power company, to go in there and do the work to restore power, for in the dark it is always worse. They gave my Dad a steel helmet and a flak jacket and half a dozen National Guardsmen to protect him. And he went down into that hell, doing what he had to do, and trying not to think about the snipers, for a sniper would surely shoot the guy surrounded by guards. Such a target must be important, else why protect him?
I didn’t know any of that. I just knew my Dad and Mom kissed goodbye those mornings differently from the other mornings. As if it was a special goodby. It was summer, 1967.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne:
It is also possible to define disco so broadly that it includes everything danceable from I Want to Take You Higher to Blue Monday – both of which I would say fall outside of the parameters.
nobadcats
Back in May of 2012, Sound Opinions did whole episode on disco, which was largely based on the same premise as this post, and Pete Shapiro’s 2005 book “Turn the Beat Around: the Secret History of Disco”
Bob In Portland
@McJulie: 1978 I was listening to punk and playing in the Vah-Mitz. Getting out my yah-yahs before I got married.
PanurgeATL
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I don’t see this. I was a kid back then, but I was paying attention, and what I saw was a very slow, steady media conservatism (in all senses of the word) campaign, starting around 1975. We were already hearing horror stories on the TV about what Them Damn Unions/Liberals/whatever were going to do to the economy, and THEN there was the Iranian hostage crisis. And then here comes “new wave” to make getting a HAIRCUT actually hip and cool.
For all that, what should the Left (in all senses of the word) have done??
Narcissus
Disco is great bedroom music
I am not at all joking
Bob In Portland
@taylormattd: On KMHD (Portland) jazz station they have a great funk show on Saturday nights called “The Drop Shop” (10 to 12 West Coast Time), and it’s some great stuff.
Rich (In Name Only) in Reno
Not listening to a musical genre because you dislike it is one thing; holding massive rallies in sports stadiums where the records are burned on bonfires is something else again. To avoid being dinged for a Godwin, letās say it was something Savonarola and the Inquisition did too.
PanurgeATL
@Jockey Full of Malbec: Rock was in AOR mode, trying to put bits of the previous ten years all together and more often than not coming out with something vaguely OK at best, as if diluting each influence was OK if the range of influences was broad enough. The pop wasn’t poppy enough, the metal wasn’t metal enough, the prog wasn’t proggy enough, the blues-based riffs weren’t riffy enough. OTOH, it was also the time Van Halen was starting out, with their “purer” approach, which seemed more vital than REO/Journey/Foreigner.
I can think of four major-label rawk bands putting out consistently high-class music during that time: Rush, Jethro Tull, the Dixie Dregs, and U.K. And radio wasn’t playing the last two, nor were they consistently playing Tull’s new material. That leaves Rush (and Van Halen, if you want to throw them in, too). A few years later came the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, for what that’s worth. I’m sure there are others, but that was my universe. No punk for me, no disco, no new wave. It felt like a desert, and I was still in high school. I’m not sure it’s gotten any better mainstream-wise.
Bob In Portland
@Narcissus: My lady and I are in our sixties. Nothing like loading up with our vaporizer, turning up the funk and turning down the lights on a Saturday night. Some of those jams….
PanurgeATL
@Botsplainer:
They sure as hell weren’t on the rock radio station here in ATL when I was growing up. Maybe Top 40, but I didn’t listen to Top 40.
PanurgeATL
@FlipYrWhig: That sounds right. That meme’s been going strong ever since, to the point where the culture of popular music has very definite ideas about what makes music “real”, to the detriment of any real imagination or creativity. AOR, hair bands, disco: Fake. Punk, thrash, grunge, crewcut-metal, indie-rock: Real.
PanurgeATL
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Here’s a question no one ever asks: What could AOR have done to keep punk from getting more than a toehold? (BTW, this also goes for hair bands of various types–rock’s biggest missed opportunity, if you ask me.)
PanurgeATL
@Xecky Gilchrist: It’s a fair point. Why don’t we keep the clothes we like and the music we like, even if they’re not “officially” associated with each other? Why can’t we wear the feathered hair and bell-bottoms and scarves if that’s the look we like and listen to hardcore punk if that’s the music we like?
McJulie
@Bob In Portland: In 1978 I was too young to pick my own music… but by 1982 I was listening to punk from 1978!
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s interesting that you say that, because it’s a theme in the rock documentaries I was talking about about that the change from singers who sang songs written by others to bands writing their own songs mostly affected … black artists. The girl groups (and boy groups) of Motown didn’t write their own material, and (mostly white) “rock fans” of the 1960s looked down on them because of it.
You might want to see if you can track down one of the documentary series we referred to above, because a lot of this stuff is a lot more racially fraught (and was more racially fraught even at the time) than you seem to realize.
Jax6655
I am so enjoying this discussion.
@Mnemosyne:
Sorry but I respectfully and TOTALLY disagree with this statement. The music of KC and the Sunshine Band and, say, Bootsy Collins are entirely different. Atomic Dog is not the same as Shake, Shake, Shake, Shake Your Booty.*
Funk is an entirely different thing than bouncy, lite disco. Much deeper and more complex. Much . . . funkier. And the concept of funk was around nearly a decade before SNF.
*Although I enjoyed them both back in the day.
“Funk not only moves, it can REmove, dig?” –Parliment Funkadelic
ETA: Yes, I know Bootsy didn’t do Atomic Dog.
Jax6655
@Rich (In Name Only) in Reno:
I sort of made this point earlier. I definitely believe it was more than simply a dislike of the genre.
#discodemolition #farenheit451ofmusic
JWL
To repeat my righteous self: disco sucked, so disco died.
Jax6655
@johnny aquitard:
Born in Harper Hospital. Spent early years just off Grand River Ave. near Motown Museum. I’m African American though, so I have a different perspective on the summer of ’67.
Michigan in the house!
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: I don’t doubt that it was racially fraught, but that’s not the same as saying that disco hatred is best understood as part of a seamless garment of white straight backlash, because another side of the disco scene was very white and very straight, and the people who didn’t like disco didnt like that part of it either. Punk was very macho too, and punks didn’t like the self-indulgent artsy-fartsy world of mainstream commercial rock, concept albums, rock operas and such. But does anyone think punk is best understood as white male backlash against the supposed feminization of the rock mainstream? I haven’t ever heard that.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t depressing gender dynamics at play in saying that our music is real, and the kind you guys like is fake (I’ve heard that about synthesizers FOREVER — they’re supposedly both fake and wussy, ergo effeminate). Just that it’s not the Rosetta Stone for the phenomenon. I think disco was also disliked among people who found it to be hook-up music for men who were old enough to know better.
Again, in retrospect, I like disco better than cock rock, so I don’t think any of these complaints have a lot of merit. But I question how much of the complaining ever arose from straight white privilege, given that some of the disco era’s icons are creatures of straight white privilege.
low-tech cyclist
Can you imagine what Jimi Hendrix would have thought about being the Token Black of Classic Rock? Sheesh.
And it galls the hell out of me when the only version I hear of a song like (just to pick one for-instance) “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” on classic rock is the mediocre Rolling Stones version, which is inferior to the Temptations original in every way, but the Stones are white, and the Temptations were black, so the Stones version is the Official Classic Rock Version of the song.
Jax6655
@low-tech cyclist:
Don’t know what stations you listen to. I didn’t even know there was a Rolling Stones version.
Tehanu
@geg6:
You’re not alone. And I’m a punk fan — my favorite band ever is (still!) X. Actually, disco sounds kind of good nowadays… but with maybe 1 or 2 exceptions, if I never hear that “Ah was flushed from the bathroom of yore heart” crap again, I’ll die happy.
FlipYrWhig
@Tehanu: I don’t like country either, with the exception of the not-particularly-country “Ring of Fire.” And I know that there was a whole backlash to the backlash where now you’re supposed to say that Hank Williams and Johnny Cash were cool. I’m not buying it. It’s just not my thing. I don’t like the singing, I don’t like the sound of the instruments, I don’t like the pace, it’s like a graft my body has to reject.
Paula
Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow
PanurgeATL
@Alex S.: By 1974, counter-culture and mainstream culture had come to a compromise, which is OK–sometimes the right compromise can be better than either side winning outright. So that scene “lost” only in the sense that it didn’t get exactly what it wanted immediately. By 1980, OTOH, “counterculture” had been blindsided by Reagan to the extent that it stopped fighting–or more accurately it gave up even the aspiration to become the mainstream due to what it saw as the selling out of the ’60s counterculture. To say that counterculture “lost” is to say that there’s somehow an end to this thing. It could’ve kept going if it’d made up its mind to do so but for the nature of what had arisen in the previous five years. In a very real sense, instead of “counterculture” we have in its place the post-punk hip consensus, which is essentially about taking 1964 (or earlier) and putting it through the Freeky Filter. But that’s not really a “counterculture” in the ’60s-movement sense. Ironically (!), its real lasting effect has been to give new life and energy to “square” culture. Another irony is that all this happened in the name of rejecting the aspiration to transform mainstream culture.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Jax6655:
Couldn’t agree more…And you’re even leaving out Clinton’s Funkadelic alias, which is about as anti-disco as it gets while still being danceable..
Mnemosyne
@Jax6655:
I guess what I’m saying is that funk and disco are pretty closely related, so it’s hard for me to understand the people who claim they love funk but hate disco.
Though you’re probably right that funk is the parent and disco is the bastard, commercialized Top 40 child of funk. Funk lite.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
Listen to punk rockers like the Sex Pistols rant about how horrible glam rockers like Bowie or T Rex were. It’s there. Again, it’s not the whole story, but it’s a sizable undercurrent.
Mnemosyne
@Jax6655:
Okay, random question: Deee Lite. Retro funk or retro disco?
Bob Cumbers
If you want to know what Dahl’s “disco sucks” attitude was about, have a listen to his (not very good) parody song “do you think I’m disco?” which was released in 78, before disco demolition. (It can be found on YouTube I believe). Mostly, he thought the white, suburban disco scene was lame.
Jax6655
@Mnemosyne:
IMO– no funk there at all.
nastybrutishntall
@Tehanu: It doesn’t help that Country is the soundtrack to White Christian Nationalism. It’s the sound of Trayvon getting tried. It’s the sound of Limbaugh’s smile.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Mnemosyne:
They are in that some disco can trace back to funk, in that some disco can be polyrhytmic and bluesy in nature…But not all funk is disco. Again, not all funk is disco.
taylormattd
@Bob In Portland: Thx Bob, will try and check it out.
PanurgeATL
@Mnemosyne:
And let’s not even talk about skinheads, hardcore, Henry Rollins, etc. If part of your overall idea is HAIRCUTS ARE COOL YOU DAMN HIPPIE, of course that’s gonna attract all the “traditional male” backlash energy. WTF did the people who put this all together expect?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Mnemosyne: @PanurgeATL:
Huh? First, the Pistols were all pretty big glam fans, especially when it came to the New York Dolls. Second, they were masters at taking the piss.
And Henry Rollins IS A FUCKING HIPPIE! No, he’s never made Jerry Garcia’s type of music, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger promoter in his generation of the Beats and the ideals they espoused.
Gus
@Mnemosyne: I once saw George Clinton say something like disco is funk with the rock and roll removed. It wasn’t very complimentary.
Gus
@Tehanu: How ironic is it that you hate country, yet your favorite punk band has a country offshoot (look up the Knitters)?
cmm
Very late to this thread and I apologize if this has already been gnawed to death, but my gut feeling is that the disco backlash was much more of a gay backlash than a black/integration one, as it followed on the Anita Bryant era and the success of the blatantly gay-themed (if not necessarily all gay themselves) Village People.
Although you could just say it was a backlash by white males, particularly lower middle/working class white males feeling their hold on everything slipping. In which case it was not only a harbinger/precursor but many of the RWNJs running around now are the very same people who participated in/cheered on the Demolition. Cuz they are still losing power and now they are OLDS too.
Kiko
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TYPbTUI4opY/UGFvujdB6RI/AAAAAAAAAgA/HxZlR7FW3xU/s640/TheFifthSeason_OneEasyPiece.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F47AfASOnA8
These things were put into my head as a child and they have never gone away.
Paula
@Mnemosyne:
Forget it, it’s Chinatown.
PanurgeATL
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I suppose. But one of the features of the post-punk hip consensus seems to be contrasting hippies with Beats, finding hippies wanting, and concluding that we just ought to go back to Beat-land and stay there. It’s fine for Rollins to find Beats cool because that’s within the consensus. (In fact, I’ve even seen “Beats came first” as a justification, which is about as conservative a justification as you can have.)
You’re right on the glam-rock, though. I remember seeing a few years ago some archival, B-&-W footage of them at what looked like a press conference ; by today’s standards they came across like a glam band with haircuts. Unfortunately, they seem to have built a world where everybody aspires to be a master at taking the piss, and we can’t snap out of it long enough to just do what we like and say what we mean. I mean, even Johnny Rotten could say what he meant occasionally.