The ladies liked to dance and liked to dress fancy for the disco. The guys couldn’t dance and liked jeans and t-shirts.
If you wanted to pick up the chicks, all of them were at the disco. They had a dress code. No jeans, shirts with collars, your shoes had to be shiny, your clothes had to be ironed. Disco sucks.
To me, it seemed unimaginative.
Little or no lyrics.
Beat, with almost no melody.
For disco, you need a drum machine, a bass or synthesizer, a 4 girl backup group, & two lines of lyrics, chanted endlessly.
<snore>
The last disco hit(Good Times by Chic) begat the first rap hit(Rapper’s Delight by The Sugarhill Gang). Suckers!!!11!
ETA this link: http://www.racialicious.com/2009/07/17/disco-inferno-revisited-disco-demolition-night-30-years-on/
I had a hardcore punk-rocker roommate during the disco craze. You can imagine how much disco got played in the house.
I like Rock the Boat (a lot), and don’t consider it disco. Critic Robert Christgau regards it as ersatz gospel. I’m not sure how I’d classify it, “pop soul” maybe.
Rap has its detractors but the degree of antipathy (especially from music critics) was never as high as it was for disco. Early rap and hip-hop was considered both authentic and embracing a do-it-yourself ethos because it came from the streets as opposed to the glitzy, materialistic, celebrity-driven superficial world of disco.
There were many posts I was going to quote here, but I think this is the most relevant. Some folks have pointed that Disco was everywhere, you couldn’t avoid it except by staying home. Others have pointed out the culture war of Disco vs. Hate-Disco. The reason the haters had to fight the culture war by being haters is highlighted by Nunzio’s quote, above. Dance music styles have come and gone and come again. Disco was dangerous to the haters because it became so popular that they were given a choice: Dance with the Disco people or don’t socially interact (i.e. date) with them. It’s easy to say that is a generalization, not all women require you to dance to date them, and I am sure there are plenty of exceptions. But the general trend (especially at the time) was that if you wanted to find, hit on, and pick-up women, you had to go to a dance club and dance to Disco music.
I think you will find that most of the haters also don’t like dancing, and Disco became so popular and widespread that the choice became accept it and join in or don’t date. It couldn’t be ignored like some other styles that have come and gone.
ascenray pointed out that today’s music is based on disco and hip-hop and I don’t necessarily disagree. But I bet most of the Disco-haters from 30 years ago also dislike today’s music (and hip-hop). However, they aren’t quite as strongly identified as haters because they have given up the dance/non-dance battle as lost, so they don’t bother hating on it as much. They stay at home and listen to their Beatles records on a hi-fi like old-fogeys.
P.S. this is all in addition to the haters viewing disco music as crappy.
There may be some truth to this, but not entirely.
I liked disco just fine, but I didn’t like to dance. I was such a nerd that I had no hope with the ladies whether I danced or not. And actually, I was too young to go out by myself for most of the disco era – I turned 18 in 1980.
Disco was just the music that I was used to. As a teenager I just didn’t listen to much more than Top 40 – and classical.