I have always liked disco. Seems to me that if you enjoy dancing, the music is hard to resist.
Yet the whole genre has a horrible reputation in the annals of mainstream pop culture. History has it that music in the 70s was “dead” was until The Knack “rescued” it with “My Sharona”. Which I totally don’t get, but whatever.
Right now I’m listening to Machine’s “There But for the Grace of God, There Go I”, which came out the same year. IMHO the song is awesome. I don’t do the club thing, but I imagine it still brings the crowd out on the dance floor.
What are your favorite disco songs? I’m building a youtube playlist to boogie down to.
The way I remember it in the way back, we people of color had dance music. If you went out to dance, it was house music. It had a heavy beat and was repetitive but that’s what you want in dance music.
Then gay people, who know a good thing when they see and hear it, made house music fabulous, introducing it to people with less color. They grabbed it, ran with it and named it "Disco, got tired of it, hated it and disparaged it.
That’s not a really good example, the Bee Gees is like one of the first supergroups and they were all the same family. They kinda got branded as “disco” but they would have been great in any period.
Disco may have gotten a bad rap in the past but if you pay attention to current musical trends, it’s undergoing a big comeback right now. “Disco Sucks” is a thing of the past:
Nicole Atkins has two new kinda old fans. Hubby loved her hook and I loved how the song was the perfect background for the video. You could drop Get Lucky into the middle of any mix at The Latin Quarter way back when and it would not be out of place. People always gotta dance.
I was a bit too young to have been going out dancing when Fly Robin, Fly came out. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this song. I especially love it because it is the direct parent of the disco I clubbed with. Strike It Up is so it’s mother’s child.
It’s my firm belief that Martha Wash’s landmark lawsuit added legitimacy to dance music. Some of the most devastating (because it was true) criticism of disco was so “machine made”. Martha washed a lot of that off.
P.S. Come on! This thread is gonna be tonight’s soundtrack. More links!
Chic have a huge critical renaissance the last few years. It’s an odd person who dislikes Chic’s music. I’m sure those people exist but I’ve never met one. They were considered old hat I suppose for some years.
A large part of disco’s bad rap was that because it became so big so fast, it displaced rock and other pop music on FM radio. It seemed like a hostile takeover.
Looking back 40 years, yes I’d agree that as a genre, it didn’t suck nearly as bad as I thought at the time. In fact I have a moderate collection of it that I enjoy quite a bit.