Three words: Polyester. Leisure. Suits.
C’mon, nothing could long survive close association with that.
Yep, that’s pretty insane. I can think of no music “whiter” than Disco. I don’t know what you’d have to be smoking to think that people hated it because it was “black” music.
But those are reasons why a select few people claim to hate it- I’m referring to the sweeping, middle america cultural trend of “disco sucks.”
You could also argue it was because mainstream rock was at (arguably) its weakest when Disco was king, so it was natural for rockers to feel threatened. I mean, they had…The Eagles and Journey? on their side.
I turned twenty-one in 1977, and I resented the hell out of the fact that nightclubs were hiring a single dj to entertain the patrons, instead of paying an entire band of live musicians. For myself, I simply valued live music over recorded.
Also, I couldn’t do the dressing, and the dancing, and the general hooking-up.
Beach cities suburbs of Los Angeles, CA, in case anyone wonders about the particular milieu.
Are you aware of the homophobic origins of the slang word “sucked”? Just asking.
I see a lot of mention being made of disco’s repetitive and less-than-profound nature. But if that were the source of all the vitriol, why isn’t there a similarly vicious reaction to techno, electronica, etc?
For what it’s worth, I’m too young to remember disco’s hayday (turning 24 in a couple of weeks), but I like it. Sometimes I want music with a steady beat, and I enjoy listening to Chrome (the all-disco XM channel) as much as the three main techno/dance channels (The Move, BPM, and The System). In fact, I find Chrome’s playlist to be more varied and less repetitive (in the sense that I don’t hear the same songs being played over and over, something both BPM and The System are guilty of).
Wow. Oughta check up on my threads a little quicker.
Thanks for all the responses. Very enlightening, especially considering that I never got to learn this stuff in school (there was an entire course on just the Vietnam War, but nothing about any music trends). Not surprised to hear that overkill had something to do with it. (This is probably the real beef against the “boy band” craze. And Celine Dion, come to think of it.)
I am a little puzzled that anyone would object to disco being used in American Idol, however. The songs they pick have to be easy to sing and remember, especially in the early rounds…what better choice than disco? I’d think that anyone who has a problem with the music would be far more likely to have a problem with the complete blandness, banality, and overfamiliarty of the entire selection. not just a single genre (I’m one of them, BTW).
As for my music tastes…well, you can go to http://home.hawaii.rr.com/dkwff/other.html and have a look at my complete mp3 collection. As you can see, I’ve never believed in limiting myself…and luckily, I haven’t lived long enough to develop lots of painful memories from too many songs. 
One caveat, however…if I ever, ever hear YMCA again, it’ll be too freaking soon. Geez, is this like the only song the Village People ever did or something??
Hell yeah, they suck too… for many of the same reasons. The reason they don’t suffer the same kind of backlash is that the music scene is much more factionalized these days than it was in the 70’s. There’s nowhere near as many people into techno as there were into disco… ergo, not as annoying.
WHAT? I don’t recall any controversy linking disco to homosexuality, but what do I know, I was only there at the time…
What planet were you on, where the percentage of black artists performing disco was higher than that of blacks performing other forms of music? Blacks were certainly less prominent in disco than they were in early R & R or pop.
The ideas you posted above don’t survive a reality check.
Planet Earth.
Disco numbers that became Billboard #1 singles in 1974:
Love’s Theme, Love Unlimited Orchestra
The Sound of Philadelphia, MFSB featuring The Three Degrees
Rock the Boat, The Hues Corporation
Rock Your Baby, George McCrae
Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe, Barry White
Then Came You, Dionne Warwicke & The Spinners
Kung Fu Fighting, Carl Douglas
Every single #1 disco song that year was by black artists.
1979
Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?, Rod Stewart
I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor
Tragedy, Bee Gees
Knock on Wood, Amii Stewart
Hot Stuff, Donna Summer
Ring My Bell, Anita Ward
Bad Girls, Donna Summer
Good Times, Chic
Don’t Stop 'Til You Get Enough, Michael Jackson
No More Tears/Enough is Enough, Barbra Streisand & Donna Summer
8.5 of the 10 #1 disco songs that year were by black artists.
Correction, 7.5 of the 10 #1 disco songs of *1979 were by black artists.
I’m surprised nobody has leveled charges of anti-semitism yet. :rolleyes:
I had no problem with American Idol using disco as a theme. Good or bad, it was a part of American music history, and I don’t like revisionism. But what got me about it was that it followed Elton John when, ostensibly, it is supposed to go in order of difficulty. They considerd music from a man with a 2-1/2 octave range plus a liberal sprinkling of falsetto to be easier to sing than karaoke staples like Macho Man.
Nice bit of homework there, Walloon. I wouldn’t have thought that there was a year when all of the disco hits that made number one on Billboard were done by black artists. Thanks for fighting my ignorance.
Now to the point: Given your findings, do you think that disco music was/is somehow regarded as “more black” than other forms of music?
Do you agree with Freejooky’s statement that white male racist homophobes are responsible for the “I hate disco” craze, or is it only the white male racist part you agree with?
Do you agree with none of his statements but wished to point out that, like in other forms of music, a number of the successful disco artists were black?
Do the skinhead types see disco as different enough to warrant starting a backlash against it?
Do the skinhead types have enough influence in pop culture to start any kind of backlash, even if they wanted to?
I don’t think so. YMMV.
This needed to be thrown into the discussion:
-Excerpts from “Disco”, an entry in Jane and Michael Stern’s Encyclopedia of Bad Taste (1990)
Here’s something that no one has brought up - the Vietnam War and more importantly - the draft ended in early 1973. Now people could have the “luxury” of being unconcerned with everything except themselves. No one was going to send you to Vietnam to get your head blown off. Nobody had to worry about getting those all-important draft deferments. Nope - now the big worries were hairstyles, fashion and getting into the good clubs.
Yes, it was. And mainly, disco was dance music, and dance was not at all what male rock fans were into.
That excerpt from the article on “Disco” keeps referring to disco as being synthesized music, wrongly in my opinion. Memories deceive the author of that article. Back in the '70s, if you heard a string section in a disco number (e.g., A Fifth of Beethoven), it was a real, living, breathing human section of string players at work, not some synthesizer. Disco seldom used synthesizers, and when it did, mainly for special effects. In fact, that was one of the main contrasts between disco instrumentation and the New Wave dance music that followed it in the early '80s — the latter was heavily into synthesizers.
My sense of the use of the word “synthesized” in this passage is "created though something other than an organic process. Disco music was precisely produced. For example, since an actual human drummer might let the beat waver, and since this was anathema to disco, sometimes they would record some drum hits, then re-use them ad infinitum so that the tempo stayed exactly at 120 bpm, lending disco it’s hypnotic quality. Later, drum machines made this practice easier.
Disco was producer’s music, unlike the self-contained band music that had been popular for over a decade before Disco hit it big. This lent it more of a manufactured, or, if you will, synthesized quality.
This will probably look like petty nitpicking, but at least four of the seven songs you cited from the 1974 list (Love’s Theme, The Sound of Philadelphia, Rock the Boat, Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe, and Then Came You), while they were played at discos in 1974, weren’t strictly “disco” songs–they could also be classified as Philly Soul or (in the case of Barry White) smooth soul. Of course, the key word in these two categories of 70’s popular music is “soul.” When you suck the soul out of soul music, the result is disco. In the 1979 list, you’ll notice there’s plenty of disco, but (with the exception of the pre-wack job Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough) very little soul.
Also, I’m really tired of the implication being thrown around in this thread that if you don’t like disco, it’s because you’re a closet racist homophobe. Attack disco or defend disco but don’t make insinuations about the character of posters you disagree with. If you want to do that, take it to the Pit.