This garbage of demolishing a record has turned into a fiasco!
September 26, 2016 9:00 AM   Subscribe

As useful as round-ups, retrospectives, and anniversary pieces can be for making sense of historical events, there’s no substitute for going back to primary documents. And an exceptional primary document quietly appeared on YouTube Sunday: the WSNS Channel 44 Chicago broadcast of the July 12, 1979 double-header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Those baseball games, only one of which was ultimately played, lived on in infamy under a different name: Disco Demolition Night. posted by zamboni (136 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
A record-breaking performance.
posted by Melismata at 9:04 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Is this the debate thread?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:09 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Did you come here for an argument, Potomac Avenue ?
posted by k5.user at 9:11 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Can we have a Boy/Girl Band and EDM destruction night? Can we, huh?
posted by jonmc at 9:15 AM on September 26, 2016


You would need someone to actually be listening to FM radio to make it happen, I'm afraid.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:18 AM on September 26, 2016


Oddly, I've noticed that my local classic rock station has been playing more deep cuts than they did back in the day (for example Deep Purple songs that arent "Smoke on the Water" or Thin Lizzy songs that aren't the boys Are Back in Town" etc). Wonder what's up with that.
posted by jonmc at 9:20 AM on September 26, 2016


playing more deep cuts than they did back in the day

We were griping about that the other day in another thread. Good to hear that someone is noticing that listeners might enjoy more than three songs by each band.
posted by thelonius at 9:23 AM on September 26, 2016


jonmc: "Oddly, I've noticed that my local classic rock station has been playing more deep cuts than they did back in the day (for example Deep Purple songs that arent "Smoke on the Water" or Thin Lizzy songs that aren't the boys Are Back in Town" etc). Wonder what's up with that."

When nobody is listening there's nothing to lose?
posted by Splunge at 9:24 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


"... but the real action begins at 2:26:00, when Jim Morrison swings and misses Aurelio López’s pitch ..."
Well, it's hard to connect with the ball when you're drunk, fat, and dead.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:25 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Obligatory link to a Dollop episode on the topic - one of the best!
posted by jason_steakums at 9:26 AM on September 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


When nobody is listening there's nothing to lose?

Maybe. It was nice to hear "Burn" though.
posted by jonmc at 9:27 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


People learned to hate disco because of pushback against the blurring of racial, gender, and sexual boundaries.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 9:35 AM on September 26, 2016 [12 favorites]


People learned to hate disco because of pushback against the blurring of racial, gender, and sexual boundaries.

Some people just didn't like the music. Like myself (with a few exceptions, Chic were good, and "Disco Inferno" by the Trammps was cool too).

However, I love Funk and seventies glam rock, which does all the things you mentioned, while still, well, ...rocking.
posted by jonmc at 9:37 AM on September 26, 2016 [8 favorites]


The best article I have read on the subject, which presents the night as a grudge event from a corporate shill for album radio rock feeding on contempt for disco fueled by a barely disguised racism and homophobia.

“Disco was gay, black and Latin in spite of the fact that probably many of the people who made it happen in a very big way were white,” says Vince Aletti, the first music critic to write about disco. “Many, many people perceived it as a kind of undermining force, like rock ’n’ roll was, in a way.”
...

But Dahl (who did not respond to interview requests for this article) also had a personal stake in the matter, Natkin and Marsh note. He had been fired from his previous DJ job at a rock station when it changed to a disco format. “Here he was out on the street on Christmas Eve,” Natkin explains. “That’s the reason he hated disco as much as he did.”

In other words, one guy with a grudge changed the face of pop music in one night. And yet, radio stations that went disco were just pleasing the public. The “Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack” album sold 11 million copies and the Bee Gees scored four number one hits from it.
...

“I was appalled,” remembers Marsh. “It was your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead. It was everything you had feared come to life. Dahl didn’t come from Top 40 radio, he came from album rock radio, which was fighting to heighten its profile.”
...

“Disco never got credit for being the first and only music ever to transcend all nationalities, race, creed, color, and age groups,” Gaynor observes. “It was common ground for everyone.”

posted by maxsparber at 9:39 AM on September 26, 2016 [14 favorites]


I met Vince Aletti recently. Nice guy.
posted by jonmc at 9:40 AM on September 26, 2016


Man did the Disco Sucks people lose. Turn on the radio these days and you're much much more likely to hear something that sounds like disco than something that sounds Led Zeppelin. The racism/sexism explanation makes sense to me, if only because I have no other idea why you'd come out to an event to...hate music you don't like? It doesn't make sense. You also saw plenty of homophobia mixed in with the hatred of boy bands in the late 90s, which I think of as being pretty similar.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:40 AM on September 26, 2016 [10 favorites]


Some people just didn't like the music.

There is a lot of music I don't like. It would take something special for me to want to set in on fire in a stadium. Some special, profound undercurrent of rage and loss of status.
posted by maxsparber at 9:43 AM on September 26, 2016 [15 favorites]


There is a lot of music I don't like. It would take something special for me to want to set in on fire in a stadium.

I would set anything on fire in a stadium if given the chance.
posted by bondcliff at 9:45 AM on September 26, 2016 [21 favorites]


" ... in 1999, Steve Dahl admitted secretly recording conversations among staffers at WCKG because he suspected they were talking about him behind his back. In snippets Dahl has played on his afternoon show, two station employees can be heard mocking him as "Steve Dull" and ridiculing his show ... [54]"
Ha ha. What a sphincter.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:46 AM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


What must that be like, to have a bombastic media figure lead a violent reactionary crusade against the rising diversity and tolerance in popular culture.
posted by edheil at 9:49 AM on September 26, 2016 [21 favorites]


I would set anything on fire in a stadium if given the chance.

They should have flooded the stadium and had disco v no-disco naval battles.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:52 AM on September 26, 2016 [15 favorites]


I think disco would have an obvious advantage there.
posted by RobotHero at 9:55 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Man did the Disco Sucks people lose.

May the same happen to the troglodytic losers trying to choke up culture in our own age.
posted by Artw at 9:55 AM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]




Speaking of meltdowns, when I was living in Cleveland in the 80s, people were still talking about Ten Cent Beer Night.
posted by lagomorphius at 10:10 AM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


Extra bonus with this, you get to hear Harry Caray call a game again.
posted by hwyengr at 10:15 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Can we have a Boy/Girl Band and EDM destruction night? Can we, huh?
"Mike Veeck has since become an owner of minor league baseball teams and in July 2014 the Charleston RiverDogs, of whom Veeck is president, held a promotion involving the destruction of Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus merchandise.[40]"
When you gotta shtick you gotta shtick, I guess.
posted by octobersurprise at 10:15 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Wait, they actually played the second game of the double header?
posted by photoslob at 10:15 AM on September 26, 2016


Make sure to hang around until 2:45 to experience the very sober and serious discussion of the fiasco. So amazing.

"A lot of drugs. The smell of marijuana...." It had absolutely nothing to do with everyone being drunk.
posted by photoslob at 10:19 AM on September 26, 2016


Lose? Last time I checked reunion tours by Kiss and Deep Purple do better than any disco outfit.
posted by jonmc at 10:24 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Lol come on Jon, that's the exact opposite of a success metric.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:25 AM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


when I was living in Cleveland in the 80s, people were still talking about Ten Cent Beer Night.

Who'd have imagined people could get that drunk on three/two beer? Interestingly, Rusty Torres was at both riots.
posted by octobersurprise at 10:26 AM on September 26, 2016


How?
posted by jonmc at 10:26 AM on September 26, 2016


people were still talking about Ten Cent Beer Night

What innocent times, when reasonable people could assume that some people would not take advantage of this.

Wait, they actually played the second game of the double header?

No, they did not. They had to forfeit due to the field being unplayable.

Read Ron Luciano's account of the game in his "Strike Two", from an umpire's perspective. The umpires were pretty scared.
posted by Melismata at 10:27 AM on September 26, 2016


To tell the truth I'm just kind of irked at the implication that anyone who doesn't like disco must be a racist or a homophobe.
posted by jonmc at 10:28 AM on September 26, 2016 [7 favorites]


Rusty Torres was ALSO at the 1971 last game of the Washington Senators existence before they moved to Texas. Three games were forfeited in the 70s and he was at all three. (It was a more fun piece of trivia before he was convicted of molesting children he was coaching)
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:29 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Rusty Torres.
posted by mwhybark at 10:30 AM on September 26, 2016


To tell the truth I'm just kind of irked at the implication that anyone who doesn't like disco must be a racist or a homophobe.

Now, now, one can be both.
posted by beerperson at 10:32 AM on September 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


To tell the truth I'm just kind of irked at the implication that anyone who doesn't like disco must be a racist or a homophobe.

There is no such implication.
posted by maxsparber at 10:32 AM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Can you explain what you don't like about the genre? I don't mean disco duck I mean you already mentioned some great classic disco artists I'm sure I can get you to agree to more.

It's one thing to say "Disco, like most pop music, had a bunch of mediocre hits that annoyed me because of their ubiquity." Saying "I don't like disco", especially at the time, seems really weird to me without context, much like "I hate Rap" did in the 90s.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:33 AM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


Last time I checked reunion tours by Kiss and Deep Purple do better than any disco outfit.

Ah! But the KISS coffee shop closed in '13 while "Disco Coffee" is a phrase on Urban Dictionary. Check and mate!
posted by octobersurprise at 10:33 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


From maxsparber's comment:
“Disco was gay, black and Latin in spite of the fact that probably many of the people who made it happen in a very big way were white,” says Vince Aletti, the first music critic to write about disco. “Many, many people perceived it as a kind of undermining force, like rock ’n’ roll was, in a way.”
I was a Chicago teen and radio listener during Demolition. I remember it well. Ironmouth's comment from a previous thread sums it up precisely:
"It had nothing at all to do with race or homosexuality--gay rights and culture did not exist at all for the hordes that listened--this was the 70's in the midwest."
Dahl was an idiot, but he was our idiot and he never had a mean bone to pick with the black or gay crowd. Disco (the Disco-Duck-Star-Wars-Theme-type) was an obnoxious musical style (when appropriated by Rick Dees and Meco) and this gave him something to riff on every day during his show for reasons explained.

I still listen to Dahl years later and he looks back on that event with a bit of embarassment and humility, but never a bad word on the black or gay crowds. Hell, at the time I don't even think he knew where disco had come from, only that it was killing FM radio as far as he was concerned and the teens listening to Rush (Lee/Lifeson/Peart...not Limbaugh) on 97.9 just ate it up.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:34 AM on September 26, 2016 [8 favorites]


Ha ha.

*wanders of to bar to play old ZZ Top songs*
posted by jonmc at 10:34 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Last time I checked reunion tours by Kiss and Deep Purple do better than any disco outfit.

Disco was a record phenomenon, not a live performance phenomenon. We don't judge disco's value on how well it does at the concert venues, but how well it does on the dance floor.

Last time I was at a gay bar, Mighty Real came on, and I can tell you, disco is doing just fine.
posted by maxsparber at 10:35 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Potomac, as a kid in the 70s disco was truly ubiquitous so when hard rock came back it was downright refreshing. Plus that beat (like most EDM today) and that sterile production makes me feel like I need to run outside for fresh air. No accounting for taste. Right
posted by jonmc at 10:38 AM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Just to get this from getting too serious, here's the "Disco Lives Forever" gag from Airplane.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 10:40 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Disco (the Disco-Duck-Star-Wars-Theme-type) was an obnoxious musical style (when appropriated by Rick Dees and Meco)

You can have my copies of Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk and Meco Plays The Wizard of Oz when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
posted by octobersurprise at 10:41 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


I'm not saying people who hated and were sick of disco were in the KKK but I do think it's very likely that most of them were associating the music with cultures that made them uncomfortable. Including me: As a young punk I hated techno with a passion in the 90s and looking back a lot of that aesthetic reaction was probably just knee jerk teenage homophobia (of the ewwww boys dancing with boys) variety.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:47 AM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Dahl was an idiot, but he was our idiot and he never had a mean bone to pick with the black or gay crowd.

This is the important distinction between personal prejudice and institutional prejudices like racism and homophobia: It doesn't matter how you personally feel. Trump make actually not have a racist or antisemitic bone in his body, as his friends claim. But, regardless, he found racism and antisemtism useful, because it's there, hard-baked into the very structure of society.

I was a boy in the midwest at the time, and there was no lack of casual racism and homophobia, and, in fact, no lack of more extreme racism and homophobia. It undergirded a lot of day-to-day experiences.

So there were people who just didn't like disco, and that's fine. It's just a personal preference.

But when it becomes a cultural bonfire, an act of destroying culture because the assembled have an activist amount of contempt, it starts suggesting there is more there. And there was. "Disco fags" was a phrase back then -- I heard it, and it's documented in the Fast Times at Ridegmont High book (which preceded the film, as was based on Cameron Crowe's actual experiences). Discotheques were popular trolling ground for bullies looking to fight someone, and those fights were often nakedly racist or homophobic in character.

I'm sure there were a lot of people there that were just there in good fun, but, the fact is, when you attend a public event that is about burning the cultural creations of minorities, it doesn't really matter what your intentions were.
posted by maxsparber at 10:48 AM on September 26, 2016 [19 favorites]


Last week Red Bull Music Academy released a nice mini-documentary and series of articles about this. I was lucky enough to work on the documentary, and I wrote the piece on ten Chicago clubs from 1979.
posted by hyperizer at 10:50 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Maybe. It was nice to hear "Burn" though.

They are likely playing this because the Children of Men movie soundtrack used it
posted by sideshow at 10:54 AM on September 26, 2016


Some people just didn't like the music.

There is a lot of music I don't like. It would take something special for me to want to set in on fire in a stadium. Some special, profound undercurrent of rage and loss of status.


obligatory link to previous obligatory link to rebuttal to this perhaps overly simplistic bit of revisionism.

in a very short period (1974-77), this fresh new sound went from being a nice part of the overall mix that made for the pop music stew of the time to THE OVERWHELMING DOMINANT ingredient, to the extent that you couldn't really taste anything else (kind of like a recipe with way too much cilantro). Add to this the fact that, as always with pop trends, the stuff that got the most exposure was usually the thinnest in terms of genuine quality, and you ended up with a perfect storm of SUCK by about 1978.

DISCO HAD TO GO.

posted by philip-random at 11:08 AM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


Medium Cuepoint article by Dahl: Steve Dahl claims Disco Demolition Night wasn't racist or homophobic & Chicago had "No secret venues for gay folks."

This ignores contemporary late-70s Chicago gay disco venues such as Carol's Speakeasy/Den One, covered in the Red Bull Music Academy series hyperizer linked above.
posted by larrybob at 11:17 AM on September 26, 2016


Also note hyperizer's 2014 in-depth piece on 1970s Chicago Gay Black Disco Den One.
posted by larrybob at 11:19 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Can you explain what you don't like about the genre?

Not saying this reflects the views of anyone on here, but something I've heard a lot from musicians is that they consider disco as "lazy". Similar criticism is often lobbed at rap/hip-hop.

For disco it is the 4/4 beat, which in the worst examples can be very monotonous. For rap it is typically the use of samples which often gets painted as "lazy".

My take: you can find this in any genre of music, there is nothing inherently lazy in any genre.
posted by jeremias at 11:20 AM on September 26, 2016


and you ended up with a perfect storm of SUCK by about 1978.

That may be the way you remember it, but the charts don't support the claim that there was nothing but disco by 1978. "Lay Down Sally," "Miss You," "With a Little Luck," "We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions," "Baker Street," "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad," "Hot Blooded," "You're in My Heart (The Final Acclaim)," "Thunder Island," "Still the Same," "Come Sail Away," "Peg," "What's Your Name," "Because the Night," "Running on Empty," and "Hollywood Nights" all charted on 1978's Billboard Top 100 and they aren't remotely disco. And another chunk of that chart is R&B-ish soul/rock and soft rock: also not disco. Now you might've not cared for chart music, but the claim that the charts were nothing but disco is just false.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:30 AM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


I manage to not like lots of things without organising any weird hate-filled rallies against them.
posted by Artw at 11:34 AM on September 26, 2016 [10 favorites]


I need to start organising some weird weird hate-filled rallies against things I don't like.

My therapist says that I suppress anger, which is then internalized and gives rise to feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression. They'd rather have me learn to assertively express my anger, but I'd like to explore agressive and passive-agressive anger before I commit to a strategy.
posted by Doroteo Arango II at 11:45 AM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Which is to say that the actual history of pop music in the '70s is not nearly as simple as disco/anti-disco.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:50 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Can you explain what you don't like about the genre?

"One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying." -- Sontag, Notes on Camp
posted by 1970s Antihero at 11:50 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


I could throw a hate rally for sweet rather than savory gefilte fish, but I am not sure that the gefilte line is still a thing.
posted by maxsparber at 11:52 AM on September 26, 2016


We've had this conversation before but -

the case for homophobia seems pretty straightforward though it maybe more "dance music is effeminate and decadent" than "I am more than dimly aware of the existence of actual gay people." The racial angle is a little more complicated because I know people from that generation who are well aware of the black roots of rock and blues, who like 60s soul, etc. who still treat view disco as an embarrassment if not a plague. But you could also say it's, yaknow, intersectional.
posted by atoxyl at 11:54 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Can you explain what you don't like about the genre?

Growing up, I wasn't aware of the connection to gay culture. (As a teenager living in the suburbs of Toronto in the 1970s, I had never even met a gay person, let alone heard of gay culture.) Mostly, what I recall was disliking the fashion choices, and thinking that this culture had no place it for nerds, which is what I was.

As an adult, I find that disco isn't really suitable for listening to - it's meant for dancing. It's not a "put the headphones on and start up Spotify" experience. Plus, I'm now a middle-aged white guy.

That may be the way you remember it, but the charts don't support the claim that there was nothing but disco by 1978.

I like some of the songs on your list, but reading the entire list made me grateful that no time machine exists to forcibly transport me back to my teenage years.

Which is to say that the actual history of pop music in the '70s is not nearly as simple as disco/anti-disco.

For sure. For some reason, there were a lot of songs imported from the Netherlands during the 1970s. And there was an awful lot of Osmonds. I'd rather listen to disco than to the Osmonds.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 11:59 AM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


That may be the way you remember it, but the charts don't support the claim that there was nothing but disco by 1978. "Lay Down Sally," "Miss You," "

A. There was obvioulsy more than just disco getting played in those days, but per my cilantro reference earlier, it was clear what the dominant ingredient was ...

B. Miss You was huge in the discos, particularly the 12-inch version which ...

C. got played all the time on Vancouver's CKLG-FM, which up until some point in 1977, was known as a rock station (increasingly prone to playing lame corporate options, but nevertheless rock). But all that changed very suddenly when they decided to go pretty much go all-in with the disco. Such that by 1978, something like Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town was getting precious little radio play.

Seriously, I was there and it sucked. The upside, of course, was that it tipped me well out of the mainstream, got me seriously questioning what the corporate types were force-feeding me. And I never really went back.

Which is to say that the actual history of pop music in the '70s is not nearly as simple as disco/anti-disco.

Except, in its way, it was for a while 1976-78, certainly in my hometown, Vancouver, BC. You'd go to a party populated by headbangers, proggers, old-school rockers, who at any other time would have found all kinds of stuff to divide against ... but disco jammed us all together.
posted by philip-random at 11:59 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


The racial angle is a little more complicated

Disco had an enormous Latin influence. It's always been possible to be at peace with the fact of black people and their art and tremendously threatened by Latin people and their art, and black people who like Latin or Afro-Cuban music.

Especially in New York, where Puerto Rican migration was at its height, and Florida, where there was a surge in Cuban escapees culminating in the freedom flotilla, as well as a growing number of Mexicans moving into urban centers.
posted by maxsparber at 12:03 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


By '79, though, Disco™ had pretty much been played out and made itself a joke. I could see a rally to burn disco records at that time. I could also see being pretty disturbed by the vigor with which such rally might be enjoyed.

There's little doubt there was a race/culture association being made among a lot of people. Interestingly, at the time pop radio was undergoing a great re-segregation, specializing into genres and sub genres that in many cases certainly aligned along race/cultural lines. The era of broadly appealing pop radio was over by the early 80s. Racial/cultural/class associations with musical styles didn't seem to weaken at all, and in my corner of the universe, the re-segregation seemed to very much solidify the divisions.
posted by 2N2222 at 12:05 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


By '79, though, Disco™ had pretty much been played out and made itself a joke.

These were the Number 1 dance singles of 1979. I guess it's always a matter of taste, but anyone who thinks "Le Freak," "I Will Survive," "We Are Family," "Ring My Bell," and "Bad Girls" are played out or a joke has musical tastes I do not understand.
posted by maxsparber at 12:13 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


In terms of quality, like with all periods of music, what survived was the good stuff. I once listened to a playlist composed by no-name disco 45s a guy found, and... yikes. Most of it was a basic four to the floor, with some boring synth strings, a bass doing something and some piano rolls, with a would-be Disco Diva singing (apply air quotes on a few cases) on top . Some of those sounded like they were recorded in a few takes in the afternoon of a night club to make a quick buck. Very much like the mid 90s had all sorts of terrible grungey bands because labels were signing every flannel-wearing band with guitars or terrible rap records after signing every kid with a mixtape, etc.


Can we have a Boy/Girl Band and EDM destruction night? Can we, huh?
The TIDAL™ Destruction Night, sponsored by Spotify™
(oh, wait, that thing is destroying itself slooooooowly)
posted by lmfsilva at 12:29 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


A. There was obvioulsy more than just disco getting played in those days, but per my cilantro reference earlier, it was clear what the dominant ingredient was ...

"Yes, you're right. The evidence doesn't support my claim, but I'm going to stand by it."

B. Miss You was huge in the discos, particularly the 12-inch version which ...

... makes anything played in a disco "disco"?

You started by claiming, vaguely, that there was nothing but disco by 1978. Now you're claiming that "disco" was the "dominant ingredient" in everything, or that it was just your local radio station that was entirely disco. Pretty obviously, what you're calling "disco" is "music my friends and I disliked."

but disco jammed us all together.

As a historical claim rather than a statement of taste, that might be more compelling if you could say what "disco" was.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:29 PM on September 26, 2016


To tell the truth I'm just kind of irked at the implication that anyone who doesn't like disco must be a racist or a homophobe.
posted by jonmc at 10:28 AM on September 26 [2 favorites +] [!]


This one's for you, jonmc (though I disagree with the author on the general premise, it's not bad, though he's dead wrong about Human League, but whatever):

Were "Disco Sucks" Kids Racist?

In my culture, I found the backlash against disco to be related much more to homophobia (music for f-words) than to racism (music for other perjoratives). Hip-hop/rap backlash, sure. With Disco, it seemed like the main objects of ire were the Bee Gees (singing like girls) and Donna Summer (gay icon).

One more:

Homophobia, White-Supremacism and "Disco Sucks!"

...
...
...

DISCO RULES!
posted by mrgrimm at 12:47 PM on September 26, 2016


B. Miss You was huge in the discos, particularly the 12-inch version which ...

... makes anything played in a disco "disco"?


It was a 12-inch mix produced specifically to be played in discos.

You started by claiming, vaguely, that there was nothing but disco by 1978. Now you're claiming that "disco" was the "dominant ingredient" in everything, or that it was just your local radio station that was entirely disco.

I started out by claiming:

this fresh new sound went from being a nice part of the overall mix that made for the pop music stew of the time to THE OVERWHELMING DOMINANT ingredient, to the extent that you couldn't really taste anything else (kind of like a recipe with way too much cilantro). Add to this the fact that, as always with pop trends, the stuff that got the most exposure was usually the thinnest in terms of genuine quality, and you ended up with a perfect storm of SUCK by about 1978.

To which I'd add that these tracks that maxsparber just mentioned --

"Le Freak," "I Will Survive," "We Are Family," "Ring My Bell," and "Bad Girls"

are all great and, I suspect, succeeded in 1979 precisely because they were GREAT. They transcended their genre, which all great music does.

that might be more compelling if you could say what "disco" was.

Imfsilva just did that very well. Certainly the generic, lowest common denominator, by-the-numbers stuff --

. yikes. Most of it was a basic four to the floor, with some boring synth strings, a bass doing something and some piano rolls, with a would-be Disco Diva singing (apply air quotes on a few cases) on top
posted by philip-random at 12:48 PM on September 26, 2016



These were the Number 1 dance singles of 1979. I guess it's always a matter of taste, but anyone who thinks "Le Freak," "I Will Survive," "We Are Family," "Ring My Bell," and "Bad Girls" are played out or a joke has musical tastes I do not understand.


There's no doubt those were the cream. But if you don't think they were on the trailing end of the wave, well we'll have to disagree. A look at the list you provided reveals those gems, but also some not so well remembered numbers that may not be as well regarded, and/or quite dated these days. A list of dance singles from any year could very well be held up as proof that disco was never out of fashion. I wouldn't expect a dance club chart from '79 to have much in the way of Styx or Black Sabbath.
posted by 2N2222 at 12:57 PM on September 26, 2016


I was soured on dance music in general when I learned that it is meteorlogically impossible for it to rain men.
posted by dr_dank at 1:06 PM on September 26, 2016 [8 favorites]


Just watched the Twisted Sister documentary We Are Twisted Fucking Sister.

There's a big chunk devoted to how TS really pumped the disco sucks tires when they were a club band. They had a lot of time to fill night after night and so (they explained) to kill time they'd do two minutes disco hate; smashing records, ranting, and burning / hanging disco artists in effigy.

The point where Past Dee and Jay Jay realize just how shitty this is is actually pretty great.
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:11 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Anybody who says they hate disco hasn't listened to this, which is amazing for many reasons, not least of which is David Byrne spending the last three minutes basically mangling his guitar.
posted by koeselitz at 1:11 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Nile Rodgers has said, in his book and in interviews, that the Disco Sucks backlash killed Chic dead in its tracks. But he was poised to produce anyone, with his Chic Organization and his genius bass player and his brickhouse drummer, so he still had a career, which worked very well for him!
posted by thelonius at 1:15 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


If you ask me, the worst thing about disco was the spectacle of older R&B and soul artists being forced to attempt disco albums, like beached whales breathing their last. Little Beaver and those type dudes were shit out of luck, very suddenly.
posted by thelonius at 1:18 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Can we all agree at least that "Thriller" is a great song?
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:20 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


For no particular reason, Abba's "Voulez-Vous" album has always been my favorite of theirs. It's quite disco, but I just like the harmonies and such.
posted by Melismata at 1:22 PM on September 26, 2016


If you haven't had a chance yet to listen to the CBC's excellent podcast series "20 Pieces of Music That Changed the World," the episode on I Will Survive is a great way in.
posted by Mchelly at 1:43 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Disco doesn't suck.

You just can't dance.

Some aficionados of live music seem to hate on dance music because it's not "live" and it takes place in the "wrong" setting. Which is much like hating a carrot because it isn't a trombone.
posted by 1adam12 at 1:44 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm way late with this, but I think the main market for Classic Rock FM Radio is carpenters and other tradespeople. Almost everyone likes to listen to music on the jobsite, not many people have the kind of personal music collection that would sustain them day-in-day-out, streaming music over cellular for 40 hours a week is a non-starter, almost everyone has some kind of jobsite radio, and FM Classic Rock is the only genre that pretty much everyone can at least tolerate (Country is an option in some parts of the US) and which is guaranteed to not piss off the homeowner if they are around.

That, incidentally, is why Classic Rock stations play a lot of ads for things like pickup trucks and work boots.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:45 PM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


lmfsilva: “In terms of quality, like with all periods of music, what survived was the good stuff. I once listened to a playlist composed by no-name disco 45s a guy found, and... yikes. Most of it was a basic four to the floor, with some boring synth strings, a bass doing something and some piano rolls, with a would-be Disco Diva singing (apply air quotes on a few cases) on top . Some of those sounded like they were recorded in a few takes in the afternoon of a night club to make a quick buck. Very much like the mid 90s had all sorts of terrible grungey bands because labels were signing every flannel-wearing band with guitars or terrible rap records after signing every kid with a mixtape, etc.”

Good lord – this is absolutely the worst musicological method ever described. Would you do this with any other music? You do not understand and appreciate a music by listening to apparently random 45s you find somewhere. Go listen to Nicky Siano, go listen to Arthur Russell, go listen to Walter Gibbons, go listen to Larry Levan, go listen to Francois K. New York disco in the 1970s was an amazing scene filled with brilliant artists twisting new sounds into raw, beautiful music, and these people were at the forefront of doing it. There were crappy disco songs. There are crappy songs in every genre; at least the crappy disco songs weren't guilty of much besides being a bit drab on the production side, although that might not mean they were bad in an actual dance context, in the hands of a skilled DJ.

The biggest mistake people make with disco is believing that it was a pop culture phenomenon, and that therefore they understand it if they were alive when it "happened." But it's a genre of music, not a pop culture phenomenon. If all you heard of disco was the few songs that made it onto pop radio in 1977, 1978, and 1979 – some of which happened to be kind of boring – then you don't know anything about disco. As with any music, if you want to know about disco, listen to people who really like disco talk about the music, listen to the stuff they're talking about, and try to see what it is they like about it.

philip-random: “Seriously, I was there and it sucked. The upside, of course, was that it tipped me well out of the mainstream, got me seriously questioning what the corporate types were force-feeding me. And I never really went back.”

Ah – and what were the corporate types force-feeding you? Mostly rock shit: homophobic, sexist, racist, rape culture music. As I said, any music has its problems, but these are largely the household names of rock, the well-known groups and the hit songs. Rock has to a large degree been a force for evil in America, and it's hard to deny it. So when I see footage of people in the late 1970s destroying records and insisting that rock's hegemony be restored, I don't like what I see very much.

And when I think about how some of the great artists of the time – say, Prince – had to fight against disco's enemies in order to have a place in popular music that wasn't segregated by race or sexuality, it all starts to seem a little ominous, frankly.
posted by koeselitz at 1:52 PM on September 26, 2016 [5 favorites]


I started out by claiming: this fresh new sound went from being a nice part of the overall mix that made for the pop music stew of the time to THE OVERWHELMING DOMINANT ingredient, to the extent that you couldn't really taste anything else (kind of like a recipe with way too much cilantro). Add to this the fact that, as always with pop trends, the stuff that got the most exposure was usually the thinnest in terms of genuine quality, and you ended up with a perfect storm of SUCK by about 1978.

That's so hopelessly vague that it means little beyond a statement of personal taste, or a general observation that dance music was a successful mode of popular music in the mid-70s. In the US, at least, it simply didn't dominate the pop charts like you claim.* The year end US Billboard #1 singles from 1975-1979, respectively, were "Love Will Keep Us Together," "Silly Love Songs," "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)," "Shadow Dancing," and "My Sharona." Of the four, "Shadow Dancing" is the only one that's remotely "disco," unless you're calling "disco" anything that isn't hard rock. (Which is probably exactly what "disco" meant to people who thought "disco sucks.") And while there were truckloads of by-the-numbers dance music produced for faddish discos, much of that never charted anywhere except the dance charts, if at all. Unless your local station played nothing but dance music, or you went to the clubs or bought the records, your chances of hearing the really "common denominator" (for some value of "common denominator" we seem to be disagreeing on) wasn't as OVERWHELMING as you claim.

*Darkness On The Edge Of Town hit #5 on the 1978 Billboard Album chart and "Prove It All Night" and "Badlands" charted at 33 and 42 on the Pop Singles chart.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:57 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


well you know what they say about statistics.
posted by philip-random at 2:00 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


That there are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up?
posted by maxsparber at 2:02 PM on September 26, 2016


I think we just had this discussion recently, but from my point of view there's a lot of revisionism in these arguments that the anti Disco thing was about racism and homophobia. It's seeing it through the eyes of 2016.

People liked to get rowdy and fuck things up. There was not some sort of real hate like Trumpsters going on. This event was viewed as a silly spectacle.

People around me didn't view disco as some sort of inclusive movement as people seem to now. Disco music was all over the place, like anything else, some good some bad. I still have many tracks in my music collection. The Disco scene on the other hand was about being cool, clean cut, having money and the right clothes. It was very excluding, and we mostly associated it with White middle aged coke heads with money. Most people I knew literally couldn't get into most of those clubs.

The 70's reaction to radio rock was Disco and Punk, they were polar opposites. Disco was "we want to get dressed up in nice clothes and have a nice night dancing to nice music, and not be around those grungy kids making so much noise".
posted by bongo_x at 2:07 PM on September 26, 2016 [6 favorites]


To be fair, I guess: I think one thing we tend to forget is that there was a time in the mid-1970s when it really did feel like rock was becoming passé. The rock groups were going prog, using synthesizers and writing epic album-length suites about Ayn Rand and other nonsense. Pop radio was veering hard away from rock – which had only been the solid heart of pop music for about ten years anyway. If you're staunchly rockist, as many critics and music fans were, it might have seemed like music was becoming a wasteland; you might be tempted, as the deeply influential Lester Bangs was, to hitch your wagon to people like Iggy Pop and the burgeoning underground garage/punk movement. Or if you were maybe more democratic or rootsy you might hitch your wagon to Bruce Springsteen, and tell everybody you knew that you thought he was "saving rock and roll." But one thing was for sure: the pop radio stations were not playing the gritty rock music you might have hoped they'd play forever. octobersurprise's year-end Billboard singles attest to that: "Love Will Keep Us Together" may not be disco, but it sure as hell isn't rock, and that's what bothered a lot of people: this music they loved seemed like it was dying. Which in turn helped fuel the obscure British subculture that was the NWOBHM – which itself in turn gave birth to all the metal of the 1980s, hair metal and arena metal and all the rest.

I'm still not sure how I feel about how that worked out. I really like some of those NWOBHM groups, but I don't know if I'd have agreed with them at the time that the pop dial (and the reggae and ska that were making in inroads in the UK at the time) were devoid of worthwhile substance.
posted by koeselitz at 2:14 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


That there are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up?

and how you use them.

Look at one bongo_x just said about revisionism. That's more or less my position in all of this. That is, I was there, it happened on my watch, I didn't see everything, just my limited angle, but I saw what I saw and, though I'd never say there was no racism/homophobia in the anti-disco backlash, to put the emphasis there is to get it wrong.
posted by philip-random at 2:21 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


bongo_x: “Disco music was all over the place, like anything else, some good some bad. I still have many tracks in my music collection. The Disco scene on the other hand was about being cool, clean cut, having money and the right clothes. It was very excluding, and we mostly associated it with White middle aged coke heads with money. Most people I knew literally couldn't get into most of those clubs.”

Heh. I... actually don't know if this is at all what the "disco scene" was "about." You can swear up and down that that's really how it was, but this is just what you and your friends (and myself, to be honest) thought the disco scene was – but we weren't there.

In point of fact, The Loft, Paradise Garage, and other clubs in New York where this music flourished often did have a pretense to exclusivity, although that exclusivity was apparently more pretense than reality. The pretense existed to protect black and gay dancers from the very real threats of harassment and police raids. By all accounts, coke-addled straight white dudes in bad clothes were at most the outlier in this scene.

But who knows? Disco was a lot of things in a lot of places. Maybe this is exactly what disco was in some places. The point remains, however, that you can't really judge disco by what we and our friends thought of it back then when we were on the outside looking in.
posted by koeselitz at 2:27 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


thelonius: “If you ask me, the worst thing about disco was the spectacle of older R&B and soul artists being forced to attempt disco albums, like beached whales breathing their last. Little Beaver and those type dudes were shit out of luck, very suddenly.”

This debate is always too serious, so maybe it's time to point out that I unironically adore Ethel Merman's disco moment.
posted by koeselitz at 2:30 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


I know enough now to realize that most of my impressions formed in the 70s were wrong, but I agree with others that at the time it felt like "we" (true rebels) were fighting against corporate shills to get "real" music back. I thought of disco as the fancy white people who went dancing to "party". Black music was Motown (we Were in the Detroit area) or Funk; I had no sense of disco being better integrated than other genres. It felt like disco crept in to everything - rock and roll, country music, funk, and wasn't making them better, it was just trying to market everything as "popular".

But then I didn't think of Michael Jackson or Prince as having to do with disco, either. So I guess folks are right, it was many things to many people. I've since come to appreciate some disco music (how, really, was the Depeche Mode I went on to love as a teen all that different from some disco?), but it is surprising to see how the backlash is portrayed. Given how racist and homophobic and sexist a lot of the rest of the 80s backlash was, I shouldn't be surprised they were involved in the disco backlash, but I still am.
posted by ldthomps at 2:30 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


That, incidentally, is why Classic Rock stations play a lot of ads for things like pickup trucks and work boots.

the one i listen to has lots of ads for testosterone and lawyers who specialize in drunk driving offenses

oh, what has happened to our rock n roll heroes?
posted by pyramid termite at 2:32 PM on September 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


Going back to the video, which is an amazing artifact, that's the wonderful Jimmy Piersall, former ballplayer and White Sox announcer, at around the 2:40:00 mark, bemoaning the fiasco from up in the broadcast booth. Anthony Perkins played Piersall in the film version of his life story. And that's Bill Gleason, one of the fabled Sportswriters on TV, with him.
posted by stargell at 2:33 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Heh. I... actually don't know if this is at all what the "disco scene" was "about." You can swear up and down that that's really how it was, but this is just what you and your friends (and myself, to be honest) thought the disco scene was – but we weren't there.


I think that's kind of the point though, that people in Middle America were much more aware of John Travolta than Larry Levan.

Also, you know, as much backward shit as there was in 60s/70s rock looking at it now, to a lot of people at the time I think "classic rock" giving way to disco, soft rock and prog symbolized rebellion, raw personal and political expression giving way to coke parties and glitz and overcooked studio production.

As I said upthread I don't actually disagree with the critique and I think it's good that we're beyond "haha no really disco sucks" (because it did not) but I just think "disco backlash, racist, homophobic, check" has become a bit of received wisdom among younger writers that doesn't capture everything going on either.
posted by atoxyl at 2:56 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


The point remains, however, that you can't really judge disco by what we and our friends thought of it back then when we were on the outside looking in.

Exactly, but the story and discussion is not what Disco really was, but the reaction to it. I was just a teenager in a White middle class suburb, I didn't now anything. But we didn't think Disco was bad because it was empowering gays and minorities, we would have been totally confused by that, we thought it was the new version of watered down music for adults that was filling the airwaves.
A new kind of Easy Listening. We weren't anywhere near knowing what it was really about, but that probably applies to most of the country.

I didn't hate all the music either though and thought the backlash was a little silly then.
posted by bongo_x at 3:05 PM on September 26, 2016


People around me didn't view disco as some sort of inclusive movement as people seem to now.

I think it's probably true that from the vantage point of a young person, probably white, probably a guy, straight or straight-ish, living in the 'burbs, a smaller city, or somewhere far away from New York, in 1978, disco is as likely to look like a fashion as a musical scene and probably more so. Definitely more Studio 54 and Saturday Night Fever and less The Loft and Paradise Garage. And if said guy grew up (just ten years earlier) listening to heavy rock or art rock of blues or r&b, then a lot of it might have sounded, well, unserious at best. But that's the thing about cultural histories: is it revisionism because now we can see connections and patterns that young guy couldn't?
posted by octobersurprise at 3:08 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


1979? by that time, some of us thought punk rock was getting a little old ... i kind of remember the disco sucks thing but you know that and all the classic rock on the radio didn't seem that relevant to me ...
posted by pyramid termite at 3:12 PM on September 26, 2016


B. Miss You was huge in the discos, particularly the 12-inch version which ...

No better evidence for the fact that disco had taken over than the Rolling Stones doing it...
posted by Mental Wimp at 3:27 PM on September 26, 2016


Relevant to the question of whether disco does, or does not in fact, suck: Lister Sinclair Presents the Masterpieces of Disco Music (seemingly lost to history but for this short excerpt.)
posted by sfenders at 3:28 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


But that's the thing about cultural histories: is it revisionism because now we can see connections and patterns that young guy couldn't?

I grew up (turned ten in 1969) amid one of the great phases of revisionist history -- that is, a period when very many of the great American myths were challenged in the popular realm, convoluted, turned on their heads (look no further than the revisionist westerns of the period). Indeed I will always credit Little Big Man (I saw it when I was eleven and General Custer was still one of my heroes) as forever ensuring my membership in the Everything You Know Is Wrong club.

I think there's an important difference though between stuff that happened before you were born (before your grandparents were even born) and stuff you've actually lived through. That is, the stuff that happened "on your watch" is part of a still incomplete record as all of the eye witness reports have yet to be filed, so it's a little early to be drawing clear conclusions as to the Truth. Which is what informs my rejection of the "People-learned-to-hate-disco-because-of-pushback-against-the-blurring-of-racial-gender-and-sexual-boundaries" Truth.

I beg to differ.
posted by philip-random at 3:28 PM on September 26, 2016


Another voice testifying on behalf of those whose disdain for disco had nothing to do with gay culture.

A lot of us who came of age in the 60s associated music with social change (even when not specifically addressing social issues, music was expected to inherently challenge the old ways/attitudes). So much popular music of the 70s seemed to declare an end to those ideas/that time and this crappy music (eye of the beholder, I know) was everywhere, e.g., from above comment "...Billboard #1 singles from 1975-1979, respectively, were "Love Will Keep Us Together," "Silly Love Songs," "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)," "Shadow Dancing," and "My Sharona"; the insipid Eagles filled stadiums; the annoying Stevie Nicks was twirling around, singing about witches, and stealing attention from the excellent musicians behind her; and too often disco sounded as though any life in the music had been forced out in over-production.

That said, Steve Dahl was (is?) kind of a jerk who whipped his fans into a frenzy. I suspect that most participants in Disco Demolition would fit within the Trump supporters circle in a Venn diagram.

(Fwiw, in the mid-70s, my friends—gay and straight—and I often drove an hour to the gay bars in Champaign-Urbana on the weekends. Not for the music, but to be with people who were less judgemental/more accepting/more fun than the folks in our town.)


RE a comment above: "Miss You" is as disco as it gets. Heard it referred to as "Disco Mick/Stones"shortly after it was released.
posted by she's not there at 3:35 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


I should say that my response to this does not come from living through it. I've just read a lot of stuff from punks, disappointed counterculture people etc and I kinda feel like among people my age (20s) an overly pat version of the revisionist narrative has just replaced the old rockist narrative whereas I wish there was a more thorough understanding of different factors coming together.

the annoying Stevie Nicks was twirling around, singing about witches, and stealing attention from the excellent musicians behind her

this ain't helping your case though (also you are my enemy)
posted by atoxyl at 3:43 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


is it revisionism because now we can see connections and patterns that young guy couldn't?

I'm speaking to assigning motives, connections. This happens a lot. A happened and B happened, we can see C now, so A caused B because of C. It's also likely though that people didn't like Disco for completely unrelated reasons, but that attitude also hurt a scene vital to some people. The connection is definitely there, the motive is not.

I'm not meaning to carry on so much, It's just a fascination of mine how social events in history are always viewed through the present, and usually simplified to fit a story. We're always looking back and trying to figure out why something happened, but we're usually assigning motive based on how people were then through the lens of how people are now. I've read that stories about the future are always about the present, I think the same is true of the past. Knowing what people thought is tricky. It's interesting when you get old enough to be one of the people discussed.

I'm always saying that in a few years you will be hearing about how the early 2000's was all about the Tea Party, that's the big story and the one that will stick even though it was only a minority of people in reality. Young people today will argue with their grand kids that they were not in the Tea Party and didn't listen to Justin Bieber all the time and didn't support the Trump destruction of America. The kids will know better, it's obvious in retrospect.

(Fwiw, in the mid-70s, my friends—gay and straight—and I often drove an hour to the gay bars in Champaign-Urbana on the weekends. Not for the music, but to be with people who were less judgemental/more accepting/more fun than the folks in our town.)


We didn't do this until the very early 80's. Kind of a dick move in retrospect, but no one seemed all that upset and there was nowhere else to go. And we liked the music by then.
posted by bongo_x at 3:47 PM on September 26, 2016


atoxyl...and that nasal voice grates on my last nerve.
posted by she's not there at 3:48 PM on September 26, 2016


Also I think it provides an interesting example of a tendency among young, counterculturally-identified males to view their rebellion as bound up with masculinity, repression by the establishment as feminization. C.f. the Afrocentric but culturally reactionary wing of rap dudes.
posted by atoxyl at 3:50 PM on September 26, 2016


Fleetwood Mac had three great songwriters - I'm including Peter Green, some people might include others - but Stevie is probably the greatest of them.
posted by atoxyl at 3:52 PM on September 26, 2016


Good lord – this is absolutely the worst musicological method ever described. Would you do this with any other music?
Well, listening to a playlist called "crate finds day/month/year" or whatever musicological method is quite a stretch. It's not like I decided to be a shitbag and make up my opinion of an whole genre based on totally random pickings but it helps to put the backlash to a genre in context - as Disco became dominant, a lot of half-assed crap started appearing. Plus, sometimes it had good stuff, some I wish I could recall who made it.

And yes! When I worked on a britpop article a few years ago, I tried to find as many small-time pub rock bands trying to make it as the new Oasis as possible between 94 and 97. Bland. Most of the bands featured on the "upcoming stars" on the stack of magazines I have from that era? Bland. Didn't change how I thought of the sub-genre in itself, but helped me realize why later in the decade there was an upswing in popularity of electronic music again. For a while, traditional guitar-based had nothing new to offer, and on the other hand, you had gloriously bombastic Big Beat peaking in popularity, and French House emerging into the mainstream. Then both started becoming too common and turning into background music for the goals of the weekend, adverts and car montages, and the cycle begins anew. To me, it's an exercise in perspective.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:59 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Not saying this reflects the views of anyone on here, but something I've heard a lot from musicians is that they consider disco as "lazy".

It's funny, because I've heard that in passing too. The actual old-school disco-beat rhythm itself sounds simple, but it's fickle and kinda tricky to work with. I've experimented with it, and I find it a real challenge to pull off smoothly. Makes me respect the cats who can really bring it together. The best disco productions are sonic masterpieces; You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) is one of my faves.
posted by ovvl at 4:01 PM on September 26, 2016


We didn't do this until the very early 80's. Kind of a dick move in retrospect, but no one seemed all that upset and there was nowhere else to go. And we liked the music by then.

As it happens, in our little group the gay folks outnumbered the straight folks, so it's not like we were intruding on their space. However, I don't think it would have been a huge issue if straight people with an appropriate attitude (non judgemental/accepting, counter-culture oriented) came without gay escorts. Back then, in relatively small towns, "outsiders" of all types tended to share spaces as a matter of economy.
posted by she's not there at 4:04 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


"Miss You" is undeniably "disco", but do the Stones get a pass from the cool kids because they're doing disco ironically? (and also cashing in on it.) It's one of the few Stones albums I bought back in the day.

My wife, who's cooler than I will ever be, used to drive into Toronto to dance all night at the underground (and often gay) clubs.

I haven't been to that many good dance clubs, but in the few I have, both then and more recent... it's a whole nother thing. A good DJ, a responsive crowd, some insanely good dancers... makes me wish I was any kind of dancer, and less intimidated by crowds (even nice ones).

It's easy to mock the schlock orchestral disco like "A Fifth of Beethoven" that polluted the airwaves... much harder to mock disco when you've actually experienced a good club.

Also, Nile Rogers (and Chic and his other projects) are seriously tasty.

- sigh -

Now I have to go trim my ear hair.
posted by Artful Codger at 4:16 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


I regret how into the whole 'rock vs dance music' thing (here on the Blue and elsewhere) - until very recently I was super-dogmatic about being anti-dance music, and wondered why Australia hadn't had a similar backlash. It took lots of people pointing out the sexist and homobphobic overtones of the conflict to get me to change my mind (even though Springsteen said he wrote a song for Donna Summer 'cause the disco backlash bothered him).
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:22 PM on September 26, 2016


Some aficionados of live music seem to hate on dance music because it's not "live" and it takes place in the "wrong" setting. Which is much like hating a carrot because it isn't a trombone.

I'm sure there are trombone afficionados that dislike carrots too. Of course people who are massively into music that does all the things disco does not will hate on disco, much like you get dance music clubbers hating on 'guitar music' or punks finding ambient boring, or metalheads thinking smooth jazz is tame while smooth jazz fans think metal is noisy.

What I fail to understand is why this is a problem. If you're really into brass bands but not vegetables, it makes perfect sense to hate on a carrot for not being a trombone.
posted by Dysk at 4:39 PM on September 26, 2016


Back then, in relatively small towns, "outsiders" of all types tended to share spaces as a matter of economy.

So true. When I was hanging out with young punks in a provincial town in the early 80's, we seemed to end up spending a fair amount of time with their fellow misfit buddies in gay discos. The only thing everyone had in common is that everyone liked David Bowie. For me, punk + disco was like a kinda Hegelian thesis + antithesis that resulted in interesting 80's English post-punk-dance style music which I really loved, and still do. Meanwhile, the harder punk + metal instantly fused into hardcore, while another branch of metal + pop turned into hair-metal. Hilarious times.
posted by ovvl at 4:47 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yeah no, mattdidthat. No matter how you carve a carrot, it is not made of brass and does not have the resonance or tonal qualities of a brass instrument. The insistence that because I like trombones I ought to also like carrots is puzzling in exactly the same way as the assertion that rockers ought to be into disco.

(Participating in anything like the disco record explosion stunt is a different matter, though. Liking brass bands makes it reasonable to dislike carrots for not being trombones, but it doesn't make it reasonable to compost them all because they're not trombones. That just makes you a dick.)
posted by Dysk at 4:49 PM on September 26, 2016


anyone who thinks "Le Freak," "I Will Survive," "We Are Family," "Ring My Bell," and "Bad Girls" are played out or a joke…

I was a kid listening to NYC area FM radio when those came out, and a) disco was earworm x a million, b) ring my bell could induce madness in the sanest of listeners.

Here are the lyrics as I remember them, in a compact notation:

10 PRINT "You can ring my bell-ell-ell, ring my bell, ring my bell, ring-a-ring-a-ring."
20 GOTO 10


The actual lyrics would cause only a four-fold expansion to the above code, using variable substitution for 'bell' and 'ring my'
posted by zippy at 5:23 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Pips always told me that "Ring My Bell" would make a great jingle for Taco Bell. I think she may be on to something.
posted by jonmc at 5:38 PM on September 26, 2016


The Amii Stewart version of Knock on Wood has been my favorite since it came out. I make no apologies.
posted by bongo_x at 6:05 PM on September 26, 2016


b) ring my bell could induce madness in the sanest of listeners.

A few musician friends maintain that the chorus vocals (ring my bell-ell-ell) are just flat enough to set their teeth on edge.
posted by Artful Codger at 6:14 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


b) ring my bell could induce madness in the sanest of listeners.


I used to get panic attacks when I heard dance music... I made graphs and charts trying to explain how it was because dance/disco was 'sociopathic' - i.e 'didn't have lyrics that were directly about me that I could sing along to'.

Some aficionados of live music seem to hate on dance music because it's not "live" and it takes place in the "wrong" setting. Which is much like hating a carrot because it isn't a trombone.


It's not just that it's live. Rock and roll provides a focal point - a shaman-figure who takes all the emotions of the crowd, amplifies them, and channels them. Which is what I'm sure dance fans will day the DJ does. But the DJ is apparently meant to facilitate, so those emotions are channeled out among the members of the crowd. The rock and roll singer takes all those emotions into themselves and refines them into something cathartic. Whichi s why Kanye is the last rock star.

But yeah it's just a thing that never made sense to me - I grew up listening to classic rock, never considered dance music 'real music', and the cultural shift in the mid-2000s where suddenly Pitchfork took dance music seriously hit me hard. I've slowly came around to electronic music through the Drive soundtrack and chiptunes, but the change in critical conversation and attacks on 'rockism' left me high and dry. Apparently 'now' (now = the last decade) the Black Keys are working with dance producers and Kanye is remixing Bon Iver and all that.

I should probably finish that script where Ministry of Sound wants to buy Sydney and officially rebrand it as 'Sydney: The City, the Sex, The Music', and only a group of heroic garage rockers can use their mystical power and pure earnestness to stop house music turning everyone into cyborgs. At the end I plug a Guitar Hero controller into the AI mainframe running the dance music and destroy it by playing a Ramones song badly.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:52 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Of the four, "Shadow Dancing" is the only one that's remotely "disco," unless you're calling "disco" anything that isn't hard rock.

I used 'disco' as an insult for... anything you could conceivably dance to. Like when Pulp plays songs about going to raves.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:58 PM on September 26, 2016


I thought it was a class thing, back then minimum wage was about $2.50/hr. The ones listening to BOC, Zep and Floyd had problems swinging a bag of weed and a case of Bush for the weekend. We weren't very simpatico with people that had special clothes just for partying and were repeatedly dropping a C-note for a gram of coke that had been stepped on 4 or 5 times.
posted by ridgerunner at 10:23 PM on September 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


This is an interesting discussion - I wasn't old enough in the 70'S to have an opinion about disco. But for me the analogous period is the 80's and i spent most of that decade absolutely furious at the state of the charts. There was nothing that spoke to me and it wasn't until i found community radio in Adelaide and 80's punk & hardcore that i could relate to anything.

So I think two things:
People are passionate about music.
Crowds of people burning things are bad.
posted by awfurby at 12:21 AM on September 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Ok, I had my DREAD card and remember that game. By the time "disco" came to my awareness it was co-opted and its image was very, very white. And so we could listen to the Electrifying Mojo and watch Soul Train on Saturday afternoon & still shout "disco sucks" and not be aware of any contradictions.

One of the biggest shocks when I came out was learning how much disco and gayness were intertwined.
posted by kanewai at 12:35 AM on September 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


"Miss You" is as disco as it gets.

It is slower, though, than 120 bpm, isn't it?
posted by thelonius at 3:36 AM on September 27, 2016


The rock groups were going prog, using synthesizers and writing epic album-length suites about Ayn Rand and other nonsense.

I have always thought this is hugely exaggerated. What prog rock bands even made it to radio? Yes, Kansas, Rush, I guess Styx, if you stretch the definition...to me, it doesn't seem much like they were dominating rock. What punk killed was pub rock, not prog.
posted by thelonius at 3:55 AM on September 27, 2016


It's not just that it's live. Rock and roll provides a focal point - a shaman-figure who takes all the emotions of the crowd, amplifies them, and channels them.

This is... not what I get out of rock music, or put into it as a performer myself. At all. I guess if you're talking strictly about rock'n'roll but not any other form of rock it'd make sense, but there is so much punk, post-rock, prog rock, hard rock, etc. that is entirely not focused on an individual, but in soundscapes.


I have always thought this is hugely exaggerated. What prog rock bands even made it to radio? Yes, Kansas, Rush, I guess Styx, if you stretch the definition...

...Roxy Music, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Genesis, King Crimson... There was a lot of them, even if you're only looking at those that history didn't forget.
posted by Dysk at 4:07 AM on September 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


What punk killed was pub rock, not prog.

Punk evolved out of pub rock. Look at Dr Feelgood, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, the entire Rough Trade scene in fact - pub rock, proto-punk. What punk was a reaction to was prog and probably more notably, glam rock - Slade, Bowie, Mott the Hoople, T-Rex, that sort of thing.
posted by Dysk at 4:21 AM on September 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oversimplifying it, punk killed the idea a musician had to be a virtuoso or have an expensive studio and producer to make a living in the music biz. It said you could - or should - learn three chords and start a band.
posted by lmfsilva at 4:38 AM on September 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


where "be a virtuoso" = you can tune a guitar?
posted by thelonius at 5:38 AM on September 27, 2016


I guess it varies from anything between that and Gilmour, Wakeman, etc.
posted by lmfsilva at 5:40 AM on September 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Anyway. It still seems to me like middle of the road treacle was far more dominant than was prog.
posted by thelonius at 6:02 AM on September 27, 2016


But did to-be punks really care about the middle of the road? Or they mostly cared about guitar music, and instead of energetic, early 60s garage rock like The Sonics, Dick Dale, Link Wray, etc the charts they cared about were dominated by folk, prog and soft rock? Also, I'm excluding the other dominating guitar genre of the decade - glam - because there was certainly some crossover from it to punk.

Can't speak for anyone else, but a few years ago seeing a totally derivative post-punk revival band like The Editors get so much acclaim pissed me off a lot more than whatever was happening on pop music at that time.
posted by lmfsilva at 6:36 AM on September 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


"Miss You" is as disco as it gets.

It is slower, though, than 120 bpm, isn't it?
posted by thelonius

That's true—and you've reminded me of a long-suppressed memory of the 6:00 am aerobics class choreographed to disco music. Naturally, the intensity of the routine increased with the bpm. For several months, the first 3 (i.e., warm-up) songs were Staying Alive, Miss You, and Upside Down.

I would have paid extra to sweat to Rosalita instead.
posted by she's not there at 8:14 AM on September 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Miss You [Special Disco Version] 1978

Should have linked to this a long time ago.
posted by philip-random at 12:50 PM on September 28, 2016


Obligatory mention that "Staying Alive" is the official song and tempo reference for performing CPR.

Proof positive that Disco Saves Lives!

This has been a public service message.
posted by Artful Codger at 1:21 PM on September 28, 2016 [5 favorites]


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