Disco was a medium of expression rather than an idea or artform itself, and thus subject to evolution into some other medium when the participants became bored or when their pasttimes become overdone and mainstreamed. Like line dancing, break dancing, swing, etc. after it.
Yeah, it’s amazing that this would ever cease to be popular.
Who says disco died? Disco was simply the dance music of the time, and we still have dance music. You can call it “Dance” or “Techno” or whatever but it’s just newer disco.
And it still sucks.
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Yeah, it’s amazing that [this]
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8pse9Gixh4) would ever cease to be popular.
[/QUOTE]
OMFG
Im with ya!! I followed that damn link and just wasted 20mins of my life watching old Brady videos.
“My eyes! The goggles do nothing!”
My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!
That video is almost as bad as the Star Wars Holiday Special.
It was a fad and it died when something else replaced it. I was about 10 at the height of it so not a big disco kinda dude, but seems to me that disco became a parody of itself and just wore out.
Musically there was a lot of cool punk and new-wave kinda stuff starting to happen in the public eye (Ramones, Talking Heads and tons of others) and it was new and exciting and different.
So disco went away and that polyester winged suit was something to be ashamed of.
And then about 25 years later it became retro-kitsch-cool again…enough time for the teenagers of the time to hit their midlife and get nostalgic for those days, and enough time for the current crop of teenagers to be a generation removed and find it sort of old and funky (mostly because they didn’t have to live through it to begin with).
Same thing happens with all kinds of music…1980s hair metal died at the end of the decade, collapsed under the weight of it’s own ludicrous image (Motley Crue - cool; EnuffZNuff - uncool) and people turning to other, more serious music (grunge).
Why did disco stop? One word: Newsweek.
During the early summer of 1979, Newsweek put Donna Summer on the cover and proclaimed, “Disco Takes Over!” The accompanying article had the publication stating rock was on its way to the cultural dustbin and that the future of popular music belonged to disco. With that prediction (much like the infamous *Sports Illustrated * cover curse), disco was mortally jinxed. By the end of the year, disco songs were falling off the charts like overripe apples.
(BTW, doesn’t this thread belong in Cafe Society?)
I’ll own-up to having had a few bell-bottom pants – in fact, even today, I keep at least one pair of “boot cut” jeans in my closet – but polyester shirts with wilds prints/stripes? Hell no. Funny thing is, I remember my mom buying a couple of “designer” polys for my dad (big collar and all) and the poor guy wearing them.
Worst fad ever: Platform shoes! Anyone remember those? They were supposed to be the perfect complement to the bell-bottoms/elephant pants. One of the nuttiest things I ever saw on my first visit to NYC – I must have been around 17, circa '74 or so – was some guy in a poly, wine-colored suit, accessorized with a navel showing, huge collared, multipatterned shirt and, get this…huge white platform shoes with tiny aquariums in each heel! Yes, there were actually minuscule fish swimming around in there!
And yes, I was totally straight at the moment thought it certainly diodn’t feel like it.
The 70’s and Disco. Likely the worst decade ever in terms of fads and ear-piercing, thumping tunes. Barry White, Donna Summers, The Begees…do the hustle…gag!
OTOH, outside of the whole disco environment, best decade ever. For me anyways.
Lots of dance clubs still exist and the dance music still thumps almost exactly the way it did in the 70’s. In some (but not all) cases the energy level and creativity is better than ever and there are better light shows and “effects” that keep people on the dance floor for hours. The songs just don’t make the regular “playlist” or “top 40” like they used to back then.
maybe disco died suddenly, because it was born suddenly.
The movie Sat Nite Fever was the big bang that made disco famous, but disco was basically born out of social trends. The hippie sixties lasted from 1966-1973, and suddenly stopped. (I’m defining the ‘hippie sixties’ as the period of the big violent demonstations of students vs the war, the use of the word Pigs to define policemen,etc. During this period, torn jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts were in fashion. Young people shopped at “head shops” selling records, smoking paraphenalia, and fringed vests)
Then, suddenly, everything change. Young people decided to go to the new malls being built all over America, and buy nicer clothes. Nicer, but silly-lookin and overly-flashy.
And they created a new social milieu to wear them–the silly-looking, overly-flashy disco.
Then, somehow, everybody woke up at once and decided that they were embarrassed by the silliness of it all.
So they invented punk.(and were proud of it, too. Geez)
Actually, the reason the “hippie sixties” seemed to stop in 1973 is because the U.S. pulled out of South Vietnam and ended the draft. Young people became considerably less rebellious when there wasn’t the threat of them being shipped overseas to fight an unpopular war.
The heyday of disco and the heyday of punk were both at the same time (i.e., roughly 1976 to 1978). Also, punk in the U.S. was not much more than a highly visible cult movement (kind of like the beatniks during the 50’s).
Easy answer. I give you Polartec Fleece
Your three year old daughter wearing the cute light blue and pink Polartec Fleece pullover while she’s apple picking this afternoon? Pal, yer looking at yer old disco shirt right there in front of ya !!
Cartooniverse
While the clothing styles and dance moves were eye-roll material, I think the music gets a bad rap (har). It seems to be the accepted norm to sneer at disco music, but truth be told, when the DJ puts on Donna Summer or Abba, the chairs still empty. The clothes and gyrations have changed, but the music still gets your feet moving.
And Flo Henderson was HOT, goddamnit.
To the extent that disco “died”–and presumably what you’re talking about is the culture of disco, more than the music itself, which just evolved into other forms of dance music–is because of the drugs and decadence of the Studio 54 culture, which led directly into the AIDS holocaust.
Disco, like most popular movements of the last 50 years, shifted when the Baby Boomers moved out of it.
The Boomers have been driving culture for a long time. In the 1960’s they were teenagers, so we had the hippy era. Then in the 70’s they were young adults, and disco was born. In the 80’s they were moving up the corporate ladder, and we had ‘the decade of greed’. In the 90’s, we had a huge stock market runup as the boomers moved into their peak earning years.
The next 20 years are going to be punctuated with movies about old people, commercials for old people, TV shows geared towards old people… The big debates in government will all center around Social Security, Medicare, and other old people issues. Expect a large boom in sales of Afghans, wigs, and cats.
Maybe everyone’s leaving with their hands clapped over their ears?
I was playing in rock bands when disco started displacing rock, so I know I have some prejudice against it.
But IMO, disco was more heavily-hyped than any music before it. All the different media seemed lined up to exploit it more than they could have, say, when rock and roll emerged as a pop form. The clothing industry was certainly onboard. And bazillions of musicians seemed to be making transparent attempts to cash in by “going disco” (remember “Saturday Night Fiedler”?)
I know that all popular music is hyped, but with disco, there was so much hype that when people weren’t being told to like it anymore, it died quickly.
I was also told ca. 1979 by our local musicians’ union chief that disco had poor record sales compared to other genres. (He meant total sales – there were certainly some big hits). Which made sense to me: whereas disco fans spent money paying clubs to play records, most rock fans bought their own copies. If this was true, I could see why the record companies would jump ship as soon as they noticed it.
I was going to write the same thing. It was a very “jumping the shark” moment when regular rocvk bands started to write songs with disco-inspired rhythms.
When I was a kid in the late 1970s, disco absolutely saturated the pop music scene, to an extent unmatched by even rap and hip-hop today. There was also a very vocal anti-disco sentimentality in popular culture of the day, far more fervent then the anti-rap crowd of the late 1980s.
Sex and drugs and rock and roll!
Disco sucks and so does soul!
Disco sucks! Country’s gay!
Rock and roll is here to stay!
Disco always struck me as an exaggeration of conventional 1970s fashion, arts and culture, while rap was something that was more original and fresh; it wasn’t a caricature of the culture of the times like disco seemed to be.
[Boldness added.]
Although I realize it would throw off the rhyming scheme of the poem, even then I wouldn’t have included “soul” in the mix. Even if it was still played in the discos, soul at least had authenticity and a harder edge to it. Disco, on the other hand, is what happened when you took the soul out of soul music.
One reason why the disco v. rock clash seemed more intense than anything you’ll find now is because the audience for popular wasn’t broken up into so many groups and sub-groups. There’s more cross-pollination between styles so there’s less friction between their listeners.