I’ll trot out my assertion about this, shared in other threads: Music as a cultural and generational signifier was going through the tail end of its American Golden Age then. Music mattered culturally in a way it doesn’t as much now. That spot is now occupied by the Internet, with Music one example of content that is being revolutionized by the Internet.
I think there’s some truth to this, but I also think the critics writing for the few music publications that existed back then (as well as the fans of prog or rock) were the guys you couldn’t have gotten onto the dance floor for love or money…disco represented an intimidating lifestyle to them, and it’s easier to sneer than admit your fear.
I like me some funky dance music as much as the next guy, and I don’t expect the lyrics to stand up to a straight reading. But Disco’s greatest sin is their overuse of synth strings. Synthesizers allow you to do just that, synthesize sounds. They can make noises no other instrument can. Why have them badly reproduce sounds you could actually go get? Equipped with some of the nicest machines in the business, Disco producers would go and pour synth strings all over anything, getting it all sweet and sticky.
Funkytown probably is my threshold for a synth string part in a dance song. Anything more than a counterpoint, and I’m starting to see if I can find something else to listen to.
But then again, every genre is probably overrated, with underrated individuals within each. Even in the genres of music that I like and follow, at least 90% of it is forgettable.
Two things:
Not a big fan of disco, but when people say how simplistic it was–have you tried to play disco? Bass lines were busy as hell, drums may have been static but, again, busy as hell, and guitar parts could be rather intricate and, yeah, busy, busy, busy–I, IV, V on the guitar was not gonna cut it.
The Bee Gees, admittedly, produced some decent songs, but they always sounded like three cats being pureed in a blender. I had a music teacher in junior high say you could not sell records featuring falsetto singing. Who had the last la-la-la-laff on that one, teach?
I agree - this is basically the point I was trying to make in my post. Looking at the top rock songs for 1977 (arguably disco’s peak year):
The Eagles - Hotel California
Foreigner - Feels Like The First Time
Rod Stewart - Tonight’s The Night
Jimmy Buffett - Margaritaville
Steve Miller Band - Fly Like An Eagle
Manfred Mann’s Earth Band - Blinded By The Light
Fleetwood Mac - Dreams
Peter Frampton - I’m In You
James Taylor - Handy Man
Bob Seger - Night Moves
Kansas - Carry On Wayward Son
Boz Scaggs - Lido Shuffle
There is nothing remotely “revolutionary” or “world changing” there - it was just as bland and corporate as people accuse disco of being. Really, it’s difficult to try to make the point that anything other than conservatism was at the root of the rockist hatred for disco.
I’ll take Moroder or Chic over Journey any day.
Don’t Leave Me This Way by Thelma Houston never will get old to me. It topped the charts the year I was born, so maybe I imprinted on it as a neonate.
Disco is totally underrated. The bad stuff might have been awful, but the good stuff was like sushi for the ears. It offered something that rock at the time did not. Joy, humor, and sexiness.
Stomp is disco
You Dropped the Bomb on Me (by the GAP Band) was simply early 80s soul.
Disco was fine until the record companies decided that ANYBODY could do it. As with rap, they were completely wrong in this assessment. That’s when the quality took a nosedive and the artform began to stink.
Frankly, even 40-45 years later many of the so-called “disco” songs stand out as some of the best popular music made during 20th century. Disco is underrated because the mainstream was told that it was terrible and they believed that.
It was also quite rebellious. I mean, look at Sylvester. What a proud, fierce man he was. As gay-progressive as we’ve become, I can’t think of anyone contemporary who is as “out” as Sylvester was. Disco was also quite racially integrated in a way that rock wasn’t, but that rock and roll has always been.
That said, glam rock was all about the humor and the sexy! But it started to wane as disco reached its fever pitch, like they were feeding off the same energy source or something.
ME. TOO. I’ve wasted a lot of time this morning jamming to the links here, and others on youtube. A couple of my favorites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMbty5vEBGU Shame, Evelyn Champagne King
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e1Lz829grk Tragedy, Bee Gees 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFrGuyw1V8s ABBA, Dancing Queen
I could go on and on.
Yeah, I look at those top chart lists, and I have to ask: Wasn’t anyone listening to punk? The late 70s is when the best stuff came out, for Christ’s sake. I don’t think I could have survived growing up in the horrible 80s without 70s punk.
As for dancing? Come on–I look at those old disco movies and I’d hardly call that dancing. Give me Colombian or Cuban salsa and then you can talk about dancing.
Holy crap that sucked. I agree that there was a base of homophobia and racism for much of the Disco Sucks attitude, but holy crap. The crappiness of *much *of the music didn’t do disco any favors, either.
(This is coming from a Rory Gallagher, Motorhead fan who can’t seem to get Pherrell Williams’ “Happy” out of my head.)
No, at least not in relatively large numbers. Selling 100K copies in the total run of a punk record was very hard, the folks on the top of the charts often sold that many in a week.
This was largely due to problems distributing independent records to record stores back then. The Ramones and the Sex Pistols both had gold records during this era, and they were on major labels.
Hey, I’m Living History! I was there, man! Some observations:
- We females living in a mid-sized city got to get dressed up on a Friday night and go to a beautiful club with a light up dance floor, comfy sofas and seats, a great light show, and often great dance music. There was a beautiful place that had white stucco arches and palm trees and little table, like Ricks in Casablanca. Meet our friends, mingle, DANCE. Who do you think was getting laid in disco days? Jerkwads guzzling beer on the sidelines and sneering like insecure babies, or guys who asked us to dance? We had such good times!
- Music was variable, of course! Lot of junk, lot of classics, lot of danceables. Funky Town. Freak Out! You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). To this day, I can hear Good Times by Chic and be taken right back to those good times, dancing (or roller skating) - not a care in the world. The Bee Gees were my favorites of all time. For a reason.
- I never saw anyone snorfing coke or doing drugs. They do that NOW. We only drank white wine, or sangria. Even beer.
- I will never forget The Midnight Special with Wolfman Jack came on one night and that punk rock new wave stuff just took over like a virus. I think WJ actually explained there was a new regime starting. ??? “Pop Music” was the first video, and it was gross. WTF was that? where did it come from? Why? … I got used to it, of course, and even grew to kind of like it. But that was the end of disco. The clubs were starting to wind down anyway. You can’t dance to that shit,
or get dressed up. The stinking shitkicker clubs with mechanical horses, the beer bars with southern rock and holes in the floor and filthy bathrooms took over. I was done! But disco did not die, it just went underground.
I had to live through the Disco era. It was excruciating. If you like Disco now then you …weren’t …there. Praise Jesus for college radio and Punk.
I thought it had been a thing of the past for a long, long time. I remember in the early '90s (around '93 I’d say) being startled at a Minneapolis dance club to hear “Disco Inferno”. After that moment of shock, I was like “whoa, this is actually a really awesome song!” Then a few years later, it was amusing to see the scene from Ghostbusters again when the Rick Moranis character is playing that song at his party. This time the disconnect went the other way, as it took me a few beats to realise that it was meant to be hopelessly clueless on his part, rather than a sweet-ass, funky groove.
Almost the whole SNF soundtrack still holds up if you ask me. Three other disco songs I’m especially partial to: “Good Times” by Chic; Abba’s “Dancing Queen”; and the radio song that inspired me as a kid to run down to the record store and buy my first LP, “Heart of Glass” from Blondie’s classic (otherwise non-disco) album Parallel Lines.
My big giggle was owning the Moroder soundtrack for Metropolis. I frequently would play it in the car and had more than a few headbangers love the music. They ended up self sorting into 2 categories after being told it was Moroder and disco - either then loved it and would borrow the album to dub a copy off, or they got all offended at being ‘forced’ to listen to disco. Back in the 80s when I finally got a vcr I bought a copy and would use it as background at parties and almost invariably it got positive attention [and then people would self sort again … sigh]
I have a playlist of good disco on my ipod - and yes there is some quite good disco from various eras and countries [I have one dance tune that is a disco’d up tarentella.] Of course disco is now called ‘house’ or ‘party’ or various other terms, but it is just plain disco for headbangers who want to get out on a floor somewhere and party out.
Look, to put it plainly, driving beat designed for dancing, designed to get people on the floor and do stuff to while fried out of your brains and hopefully end up getting laid at the end of the evening. Disco.
I don’t know if this link will work outside Canada, but it’s part of a series that played on CBC radio a few years ago. The Disco discussion is #11. The whole series is interesting- but the wonderful Robert Harris almost convinces me that disco did NOT in fact, suck.
One factor underrated in the history of Disco is that along with the Rock ‘turf wars’ there was an issue on the Disco side wherin someone who did not like Disco could not physically escape it. At least in the city
This was the era of the Boombox, or ‘Ghetto blaster’ and jut walking down the street you could encounter multiple people carrying one of these on their shoulders and they weren’t likely to be playing ‘Stairway to heaven’.
Although these days you get a car tricked out to be a speaker on wheels every now and then, but most people listening to music are using smartphones or iPods with earbuds. At the time Disco hit its peak, the Walkman hadn’t really taken off yet. So instead people walked around with boomboxes on their shoulders. It wasn’t as common as you see people with earbuds today but it was enough and it was intrusive enough that it annoyed people. You even had people on the bus blasting these things (they hadn’t set rules for it yet) and I can recall some overenthusiastic fans yanking the stop request cord to the beat.
The bus scene in Star Trek 3 (where Spock nerve pinches a punk rocker) is not entirely fictional (OK the nerve pinch is) but at the time the movie was made Boomboxes had given way to the Walkman so it was a bit late to the game.
As a result a lot of good music got a very bad rap. I enjoy most disco tunes these days, with a few exceptions - usually the cheesiest ones that its hard to even grant nostalgia value.