I would say so. But EDM is up there too.
Worse than some others, yes. Worse than all others, no.
I think Disco is one of the few musical genres from the 70s that is appreciated more now than when it was current. It lacked any artistic pretensions (the intent was “fun”) and the production on some of those tracks was the most brilliant of the decade. The association with coked up fashion disasters and creepy remnants of 60s free love are what drove many of us into the Disco Sucks camp back in the day.
They say the style of music that was around during your late teens is the style you like for the rest of your life. Well, for me my late teenage years were during the peak of Disco. So I still like it — at least some of it.
A couple years after that song was a hit, we had to sing that in junior high chorus. I’m still tempted to sing a lot with the soprano part, which was basically a descant.
For me the peak was in my tween years and it was de rigeur in Michigan in those days to despise disco in my age/culture bracket. If you ever watch the TV show Freaks and Geeks, it has an episode that covers it and was exactly the realm, time period and culture of my 5th-7th grade self (Paul Feig is a few years older than me). Disco of course being ignorantly extended by many white kids to funk as well, because the mildly to virulently racist little tykes of my acquaintance thought it was all ‘Black music’ (I knew better only because I had step-brothers half a country away in urban Oakland CA who had exposed me to the miracles of Parliament/Funkadelic and The Brothers Johnson 
).
I was compelled by peer pressure to officially despise disco back then. But though I’ve never been a fan of dancing, I do really like some dance music and later in life I bought the Rhino Disco Box as one more thing to keep me company on road trips 
.
That’s interesting. I never considered Disco to be a teenage fad. In my neck of the woods (Southern California) it was definitely a drinking age and above crowd that got into it with an age ceiling that went much higher than most genres. I think that is one reason my peer group (HS class of ‘81) universally despised it.
The music during my younger days was good enough, but I have no great predilection for it.
I listened to top 40 radio a lot back in those days, and they played a lot of disco. I honestly don’t know what my immediate peers listened to. Funny, but I rarely discussed music with my friends back in high school. Possibly because what I had actually been brought up in our house was classical music, which I loved, but which I was sure nobody at my school understood at all. That, and my first real pop music love was ABBA, which I knew was considered terribly lame.
In other words, I already knew that my tastes were very different from other kids, so I didn’t care what they thought.
Yeah, that’s basically how I feel about the music I listened to in my teenage years. It’s good, but what’s out there that builds on it, what takes the same or similar idea even further? I want the same high, but amped up with everything that has been discovered since then.
Fortunately, few of my fixations from back then have ended in dead ends or cul-de-sacs. And in the cases where they do, I can always decide to work backwards in time to the things that generated them. Those inevitably lead to similar parents, but that’s not too bad.
When I was in high school I knew the popular tunes and videos but was pretty ignorant about many genres of music. Fortunately, in university I had lots of music-loving friends (one who had his collection of cassettes insured for $5000!) who schooled me on the basics of jazz, reggae and classical plus a lot of pop, rock, blues, early hip hop and techno, metal and experimental stuff from previous decades. I pretty much schooled myself on country, grunge, Britpop, rap, world music and various types of dance music - much of which I did not initially like that much, but then did.
Well, to get back to worst songs, 1970 brought us our first (and I believe last) taste of cannibal rock with “Timothy” THE BUOYS "Timothy" HQ - YouTube
I have a soft spot in my heart (or my head, maybe) for the majority of the songs mentioned. The few remaining I’ve either never heard, or hated them even back then (MacArthur Park and Fly, Robin Fly, I plug my ears in your general direction.
My contribution will not be popular around here: pretty much any Carpenters song. The first one that comes to mind is Top of the World.Oy vey, what schlock, made schlockier by Karen’s overenunciation. I know many think she has one of the finest voices ever; that may be true in a technical ability sense but the sound of it makes my lip curl.
Nostalgia’s a powerful substance…
Even with a horrible song like “Julie, Julie, Julie, Do Ya Love Me?”. Hated it at the time, but if I hear it now, I remember eight of us packed into a convertible VW bug, singing along with Bobby Sherman on the only AM station that car could get. And reading gas station signs because we’re almost out of gas, but the driver won’t stop unless it’s “Twenty-nine nine or less!!!”
All right, tell me: Who was the bastard who shared my playlist? 
I’m not even going to talk to you disco haters. What the hell, it’s dance music to which you go and meet people to fuck. And we don’t like that? 
And Rivkah, you’re only out of my crosshairs because you managed to pick the ONE Karen Carpenter hit which did the absolutely worst job of highlighting her talents.
As noted in the Carpenter link, taste is a funny thing and there’s no accounting for it - as we see here, many of these songs have their detractors and fans, as it should be.
But you Silly Love Songs haters, while I can understand not liking the song, rock and roll’s absolute, all-time, number one “Fuck You” song doesn’t need to be on any list with the word “worst” in the title… unless it’s “worst burns delivered by song” or something. I mean, the original sin was so minor, but Paul’s response?
He went scorched earth.
John makes another catty remark about Paul’s music. The comment is not original, surely not the first time John had said it nor the first time Paul heard it, but this time, Paul gets pissed. And his response is nuclear, one of the biggest bombs dropped in music history, a MOAB of musical “fuck you’s”, blasted out with all the power the 1976 music industry, and one of its top players, had to offer:
- He first writes a song which speaks directly to the two complaints John has about his music: sappy love songs written by a guy who pumps them out like a machine. Paul introduces his ‘fuck you’ with literal machinery noises, then goes for 6 minutes about how some people don’t like ‘silly love songs’, his bass playing some of the best in his career and making up about 24% of the songs appeal.
- The song goes to #1 in America and hangs around forever, it’s that fucking contagious. (Remember, Paul is pissed - he’s not going to “My Love” his response).
- It becomes the biggest hit of America’s Bicentennial Year
- Paul tours America, with Silly Love Songs highlighting the tour. He then releases the first triple-album to hit #1 on the Billboard Album charts, Wings Over America. Take a guess which song was used to promote it?
- Paul’s F You to John was voted by Billboard as the #40 song all-time on their latest list. John was #68 (“Starting Over”).
And to cap it off:
- The song did nothing in Britain. But this didn’t matter to Paul, for John was literally trapped in the United States, a man who… had he lived a normal life… would not have been able to escape his ex bandmate chirpily singing ‘screw you’ on a daily basis for about 8 months.
Absolutely amazing stuff.
All right, enough on that…
Lastly… guys and gals… good job on not bagging on Philly Soul or funk. I get that the Spinners and the O’Jays and much of Gamble and Huff are disco precursors (and Disco originated as a Philly movement, not a NYC one, but this isn’t the thread), but I’m reading the above and… other than some of the disco… I’m not seeing a lot of soul/funk music bashing, i.e., the music which would be played on Soul Train. Congratulations!
I was in that camp when I was 15. I grew out of that nonsense.
Written by Rupert Holmes, the guy who wrote “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)”.
Great song in a great scene from an outstanding show. I think we had a thread about Derry Girls but I don’t recall if anyone asked (or volunteered) if this scene rings true. That looks like fun!
I couldn’t be intimate with someone that liked disco. It’s antithetical to my very being.
Here’s a lesson: women are like a hit song - there’s always another one coming along. And they aren’t all disco songs.