Oh, they certainly exist, though I think it’s unfair to characterize all four-on-the-floor dancers as necessarily vapid. Locking in on an absolutely rigid beat can have the effect of freeing the music and the dancer’s mind in other ways. Of course, the drugs help. Simon Reynolds talks about this–both the beat and the drugs–at considerable length in Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, which is about essentially disco-based forms (some vastly more aggressive than classical disco) between 1980 and 1998.
Can I have some of that stuff you’re smoking?
Boy, do I disagree - man, when I first heard Donna Summer’s I Feel Love (youtube link; forgive the 10-second opening blurb), produced by Giorgio Morodor, I had to stop in my tracks. I may have been a simple surburban hard rock dude, but I knew that the song totally rocked. I just didn’t know how to file it in my brain so I could be cool with my friends :rolleyes:
Well, a strong two-step connection, at least. The basic beat of disco and funk is largely the same, and funk is R+B-influenced.
I was a little kid during the disco thing. My mother loved it. My dad hated it. Dad was a hobby musician, played guitar and tended toward liking the singer/songwriter types: Cat Stevens, Lobo, John Denver… all that crap.
So last weekend, I was sitting around the house and Saturday Night Fever came on. First, I’ve always seen the watered down TBS version, but this one was the HBO version. :eek: My god, I never realized what a misogynistic, vile movie that was, nor what a despicable character John Travolta played. Dude was a classic guido douchebag. :: shudder ::
Anyway. I’d forgotten. That soundtrack was amazing. Most of the Bee Gees’ stuff still holds up. That afternoon, I downloaded the album they’d put out just before SNF came out and was blown away. I hadn’t heard it since I was about 7 or 8, but my BF and I spent the afternoon dancing to Bee Gees songs in my living room. (I think I love Latinos because they tend to like to dance.)
Anyway. The people I knew who hated disco when I was a kid were either 1) nondancing types. If you were not into dancing, there wasn’t a lot of value to disco for you. Or 2) just really, really sick of hearing it all the time. And really sick of legitimate rock bands putting out disco albums just to try to stay relevant (or cash in). KISS and Rod Stewart both sprang to mind there. Some really good artists put out some complete crap just to stay in the spotlight. I don’t begrudge that now, but I think disco completely killed Rod Stewart’s career because it changed his image from being one of the blues-based British invasion artists tobeing that cheeseball, sexually ambiguous disco guy. I don’t think he ever really shook off the cheesy image until he started doing showtunes.
Now, as I grew up, I became a huge New Wave fan and then really got into the early electronica, which spawned what is now a gajillion different electronica/dance genres (House, Ambient, Trip Hop, etc.) So I think there was a lot of fear that Disco would become like the Beatles where everybody would only be listening to disco. Sounds like that would have been a stupid prediction even back then, but I doubt the cultural pundits at the time had any idea how splintered popular music would become, with little subgenres spinning off the mainstream stuff all the time.
That’s incorrect. Disco is four to the floor, where funk is on the 1 - emphasizing the first beat of the bar.
People who simply don’t like some form of art just ignore it. They don’t hate it.
That was it for the future kaylasmom, who worked as a bar/lounge/nightclub singer during the era. It was putting musicians out of work. As her boyfriend at the time, I stood in solidarity with her as a matter of principle; I also noticed that the musical output of practitioners was not particularly estimable.
I hated disco in the '70s because the bumper stickers told me to.
Going back, I find it a lot more interesting than the commercial ROCK AND ROLL© that I believed was the only music worth listening at the time, and now wish people could be arsed to burn en masse so I didn’t have to be reminded of its banality every time I’m within earshot of an uncontrolled radio.
Disco was well before my time, but I listen to albums like Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday (which had ‘I Feel Love’ on it) and Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall and hear utter brilliance.
I think there is good and bad in all genres and it’s likely that the really bad disco stuff has been lost to the sands of time, so what I’m hearing is the nostalgia-filter-good-stuff-only version of disco, but still, I find lots to enjoy in the genre and appreciate that it set the pace for much of the pop and dance music that would come in the following decades. Disco never really died, it just evolved.
I always listen to WZAZ Chicago, where disco lives forever!
I never even heard of a Walkman before 1981. Personal portable music was a transistor radio with a thing on one end that you can stick in your ear (and a thing on the other end that you can’t stick anywhere, because it’s bent).
Two SDMB points for whoever gets that first. 
I was a teenager during the 70s, and was never a fan of disco- I’m probably the only kid in my high school who didn’t see “Saturday Night Fever”.
But on the brilliant CBC radio series “20 Pieces of Music that changed the World”- there was a very interesting discussion about the importance of Disco.
The Disco discussion is number 11- it’s about 27minutes long. It did give me a new way to look at the era. (BTW the rest of the discussions are interesting too)
I found a karaoke cd of disco music at a rummage sale and played some of the music that wasn’t as well known to a bunch of my younger gamer friends who are into techno and trance, and they liked it and wanted to know who the new bands were :smack::dubious:
Some disco was extremely good, and some was extremely bad, and there was a vast majority that was corporate pablum, much like rock is, was and always will be.
And yes there is something viscerally built in to people to respond to a bass beat by wanting to dance. I would be more than willing to bet that if you stripped everything away from a variety of rock, disco and techno, you could barely tell the difference between most of it. Why do you think the commentary on music almost the entire time of American Bandstand was “it has a good beat and I can dance to it”?
I liken it to the same kind of cultural panic on the part of rural white men that is behind the tea party movement.
I’m sure someone with more anthropology in their background than I have will point out something insightful about how tribal this is and probably from an evolutionary standpoint, useful in some way. I think there’s something about a good backbeat that appeals to our lizard brain.
I think I disliked disco more for how it crept into other genres, usually for the worse. Honest rockin’ acts like Alice Cooper, Rolling Stones, KISS & David Bowie started infusing disco flavor into their music, to the distaste of many fans.
That had a lot to do with for me. There’s a reason why the stereotypical disco listener/lifestylist became Leisure Suit Larry?
I’ve made almost this exact same post before, so I apologize i nadvance of it sounds awfully familiar.
Those of us who were hard rock fans in the Seventies were almost BOUND to dislike disco, but it wasn’t a foregone conclusion in 1975 (when disco was beginning to take off) that we’d hate it passionately. In 1975, it was just another type of pop/top 40 music that we didn’t like. And if disco music had stayed confined to pop/top 40 radio, we rock fans would have ignored it, just as we ignored Waylon Jennings, James Taylor, Barry Manilow and Barbra Streisand.
Problem is, disco kept creeping into OUR favorite radio stations! When I was a teenager in New York in the Seventies, WPLJ FM and WNEW FM were the favorite radio stations of rock fans. I swear, even THOSE stations started playing the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack incessantly! And even acts that rock fans had long embraced (including the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and Kiss) began recording disco-flavored songs.
Get the idea? Disco was EVERYWHERE, and you COULDN’T just turn the dial to get away from it. That’s what made rock fans so angry and resentful- it seemed as if the disco crowd wasn’t content to live and let live. They were hell-bent on forcing their music down our throats.
The backlash against disco was, eventually, successful, and most rock-oriented stations dumped the Bee Gees from their playlists. On the negative side, they pretty much abandoned ALL black music. Seriously, i nthe Seventies, New York’s rock stations played Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye and the Temptations right along with Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. But in the overreaction to disco, a lot of excellent soul artists were dropped completely by rock stations that USED to like them.
Ironically, WPLJ eventually abandoned the rock format and turned to top 40/dance music!
And it wasn’t just rock. Disco crept into country music, as well. Musicians like Dolly Parton (who proved her country chops writing songs like My Tennessee Mountain Home and Jolene) were suddenly putting out pap like Two Doors Down. Bill Anderson, second only to Eddie Arnold as a country crooner, released a country disco single. Legends like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette were pushed off the radio and back into touring.
Aretha Franklin – the undisputed queen of soul – put out a disco-flavored album.
I didn’t hate ALL disco music. But I did hate all music turning into disco.