No, no, no. Aren’t you listening to acsenray? It was racism and homophobia, dammit! And disco’s demise was all the fault of those horrid rural people!
Look, it simply makes no sense for an art form that was merely disliked to draw such extreme antipathy, with bumper stickers and riots at Comiskey Park. It was part of a culture war. And it’s the same kind of extreme reaction that you see with rap music. We have at least one poster on this board who regularly posts a “Our culture has gone to crap; just look at rap music!” type comment.
And furthermore, disco didn’t die. Disco became the basis of pop music into the 80s. Popular music today is pretty much based on disco and hiphop. The only thing that died was the word “disco” itself.
And for the record, I’m no fan of either disco or hiphop. But the cultural phenomenon of anti-disco hysteria is undeniable.
I was a teenager during the late 70s, and will gladly admit that I liked disco, and I still do (though I rarely hear it nowadays).
They say that the music you listen to in your late teens is the music you think is the best all your life. Well, for me that’s disco and new wave.
So fie on the rest of you.
Oh man, I love Two Doors Down, and Dolly’s other disco records like Baby I’m Burnin’. It should be noted that this move away from country wasn’t just because of disco - she was pushing further into pop music, starting her movie career and attempting to be a massive crossover icon, not just a country star. It all lined up nicely for the progression of her career, and I think it says a lot about her versatility. She of course eventually went back to bluegrass and country anyway.
As for Loretta and Tammy, who I love, you could easily also say that the rise of modern country was just as much as part of their slight dip in popularity. The same thing happened to Johnny Cash - in the eighties and nineties radio wouldn’t touch his new songs, and he had to reinvent himself with American Recordings to regain popularity. Loretta did the same with Van Lear Rose in 2004, but apart from the KLF collaboration ‘Justified And Ancient’ Tammy never really got the chance.
So disco probably had something to do with it but I wouldn’t say it was the sole reason that the country stars of “yesteryear” were forced to make some changes.
I’ll add to those saying homophobia had nothing to do with it. Disco was never as gay as Glam, and guys in the early 70’s were really into Glam.
And these were they guys who hated Disco. During Glam, guys could walk into parties and concerts with their girlfriends, and people would look at them: its adherents really adopted an “everyone is a rock star” persona. And it wasn’t just Glam - you could be fabulous as a Country Rock rebel, or Heavy Metal Biker’s pride; or whatever. Disco just turned everyone into anonymous meat in a dark, noisy room.
I was in high school in the late 70’s. In my school it really came down to cliques. The jocks and the popular kids liked disco, the stoners and the outcasts liked rock. The two groups hated each other.
The idea that there was homophobia behind antipathy to disco is ridiculous. The people most likely to call other kids “fags” were the disco crowd. The idea that Tony Manero was some kind of gay icon is baffling.
In wasn’t just New York, that happened to the AOR station where I lived in Spokane. They held out a bit longer though since as late as 1980, they were still playing album cuts from Sly & the Family Stone, the Isley Brothers, and Stevie Wonder. Yet, shortly thereafter they ended up whitening up their playlist like everyone else.
I knew it! I knew it! It wasn’t the gays, it wasn’t the blacks, it was the lizard people who were behind disco!
astorian is right - it wasn’t just that we didn’t like it, it was that it completely took over the culture so that you couldn’t get away from it. Every night club was a disco night club. Every jukebox in every bar was full of disco. Every radio station was mainly disco. TV cop shows had disco soundtracks. You just could not avoid disco unless you didn’t engage with the world at all and just stayed home listening to your old Beatle records.
Was it Allan Sherman’s The Twelve Gifts of Christmas? Am I cool?
MiM
and a Japanese transistor radio!
There are people who resent(ed) the introduction of drums and electric instruments into country music–all music turning into rock, they thought. They might point to mainstream country radio today as exactly what they were afraid of. Dolly has often performed songs like “Jolene” backed by electric bands, with a drummer.
Yet the older school was never killed off; at worst, you just had to know where to look. My tiny town has a somewhat famous music venue that still excludes drums and electrics from its stage, a stricture that the Grand Ole Opry has long since abandoned. The newest form you’ll hear is traditional bluegrass. Roni Stoneman turned up a few years ago, played an unscheduled set with a local band, had a great time. I think it reinvigorated her. It’s a great place.
But cross-pollination between styles isn’t some kind of perversion of musical integrity; it’s where all the styles come from in the first place, at least as far back as we can see in musical history. Rock began as a melding of melded traditions and has rarely paused in its accretion of new influences.
My town has another venue that hosts performers of every stripe. It’s sort of a cliché that every act requires a dozen-plus-word explanation of their sound in the billing, like “new wave of uptempo Afrobeat music, fusing West African rhythms, song forms, and instrumentation with funk, improvisation, and straight-ahead dance beats.” It’s a great place.
I like Dolly. I really like “Two Doors Down.” My favorite albums of hers may be the oldest-school acoustic stuff–some of which came out long after that single.
My point is, the streams of influence feeding into each other need not take anything away. It’s an essential dynamic to have at work, even when you’re not into this or that particular movement. Just keep supporting the stuff you like, regardless of the waxings and wanings of popular attention, and it’ll always be there. And maybe your ears will be opened to something new and different too, somewhere along the way.
THIS!
I was an unabashed disco fan then and still am now. I understand all the reasons to have hated it – most of my friends back then did for basically the same reasons people have stated in this thread.
For every song I liked, there were probably a half dozen I didn’t like. Hey, I can say the same thing about every other genre :shrug: But I don’t hate them now. It’s my nostalgia 
I will agree that it was WAY overplayed back then. If you tuned on any radio station for a bit, I’m willing to bet you would have heard “Disco Inferno” at least twice, if not three times.
The lines were pretty well-defined in my high school: If you liked to dance, as I did, then disco was your kind of music. If you didn’t, you hung out with the smokers and listened to punk or any of the more popular rock artists of the time. MOR groups such as the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac were ignored, although it was difficult to do since “Hotel California” or anything off the Rumours album was played probably as much as disco on the radio.
And that was one of the big problems – everywhere you looked, there was disco.
Cross-pollination is one thing, but disco in the 70’s was more like kudzu, overtaking and choking out everything else.
Remember, there was no personal media in the 70s, no iPod, no computer streams, not even a Sony Walkman. If you wanted to hear anything that wasn’t already in your record collection, you listened to radio. And every radio station, whether it was rock, country or soul, was playing the same, hundred-beats-per-minute, heavy bass, overdubbed vocal, brass-section, producer-driven arrangements.
There was a musical Gresham’s Law at work, with bad music driving out good. If Aretha Franklin could be reduced to being nothing more than a vocalist for a dance tune, I think that pretty much proves that disco wasn’t so much a musical movement as it was a pop culture phenomenon.
My dad was a jock in the 70s. His take was that a lot of savvy guys would try to like disco just enough to become familiar with it and be able to dance a few simple steps because, like these things go, it improved your odds with the ladies. His own LP collection is almost all rock - Hendrix, Steppenwolf, etc.
It makes sense to me. There were probably a lot more women that would rather go out dancing on Saturday night than smoke doobies in the back of your friend’s van. Isn’t that always the case? There’s DJs all over America today spinning dance and pop tracks so the women can have fun dancing, and the men can do their best to follow.
ETA: As a general reply to the thread. Yes, there were clearly elements of homophobia and racism involved in the hatred, but of course that doesn’t equate to *you *being homophobic or racist if you didn’t like disco. Duh.
I guess I wasn’t around for that time, but my understanding is that disco did start out in the underground, and was every bit as counter-cultural as punk was. I personally think disco is unfairly maligned.
There’s an intelligent, thought-provoking discussion of disco here from about 10:00 out. The conversation starts turning pretty interesting at around 20:00.
I accept that it seemed that way, for people who had been accustomed to having “their” music readily available.
But there’s no way this was even close to literally true.
I was a kid in the '70s, with relatively little awareness of radio, and even so I remember huge hits by people like Bruce Springsteen and Fleetwood Mac, as well as scads of older music that was still in heavy rotation. I remember some discoish hits but mainstream rock hardly disappeared from the airwaves.
Does that mean that you consider the punk and new wave that came in the late seventies (think The Clash, “London Calling”) a major step down from the look-at-how-clever-I-am-while-I-contemplate-my-own-navel stuff that some of the prog rock bands of the earlier seventies (think Camel, ELP, VDG Generator) were putting out?
In that case, I think you and I will have to agree to disagree.
I’m not sure if that’s the early 70s rock Ludovic was talking about. Even if you’re not a prog/art rock fan, 1971 was a particularly fruitful year.
<hijack>
It depends on how you define “early seventies”. If you define it as 1970-71 (i.e. the very early 70s), at least some of the great artists and bands from the 60s were still making music, but quite a few of the greatest ones, like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors and The Beatles had died or broken up. I define the “early seventies” as the first half of the 70s and the “late seventies” as the second half. IMNSHO, the early seventies brought less new and great music to the world that the 60s or the late 70s did (with a few exceptions, like David Bowie). Punk rock revitalized the music scene around 1975 and inspired the new wave, with artists and groups like the Stiff records catalog (think Elvis Costello, Ian Dury), Patti Smith, The Specials, Talking Heads, Blondie and Joy Division, and new wave again inspired the synth pop which took over for disco. So, in my mind, the late 70s were definitely not a step down from the early 70s.
But this may just be because the late 70s was the time when I really discovered rock and pop music 
</hijack>
No, it’s just as good, but pretty much is a different genre.
And anyway, I’m talking about the type of rock you could hear on the radio in the 70s, since my throwaway joke was in the context of why disco was so deeply hated by a large slice of the population. [ETA pretty much the only hugely popular mainstream rock stuff that’s just as good as the early 70s stuff is Pink Floyd] I was there as a child and didn’t hear any punk or new wave until 1982 at earliest. I don’t want to look at the charts to confirm this out of fear of depressing myself.