Wrong. “The Harder They Come,” which popularized reggae in the USA, came out in '73.
And just like with disco, almost all of the classic rock acts had at least one reggae song from 1973 onward.
But you have to admit that there was a significant bump in mainstream awareness of Reggae around 1980 thanks to the Clash and the Police. Surf and Rockabilly also had a resurgence at the time. Mainstream Rock took as much of a hit by that time as Disco with the whole pop scene splintering into a multitude of genres and revivals.
And in 1969 Desmond Dekker hit the Top 10 in the US with “Israelites”.
Getting back to my previous post, the “cult of authenticity” had a lot to do with disco’s sudden decline and subsequent period of hatred. According to the doctrine, disco was “artificial,” “overtly commercial,” “inherently superficial,” and “inorganic.” Hip-hop, in contrast, didn’t get the same backlash that disco got, because it was considered “organic” and “from the streets.” Not surprisingly, the upswing in disco’s reputation has coincided with the dissipation of the “cult of authenticity” as this LA Times article from 2009 demonstrates.
Clapton released his version of I Shot the Sheriff in 1974, only a year after Marley’s original. The British ska revival was also revving up by the late-1970’s.
This was well before my time. I will ramble nonetheless.
Hating music is a prerogative of youth. Maybe if you loved punk rock and identify with that, you hated, say, Bob Seger. Decades later, this hate is likely less pronounced. I doubt disco was all that hated.
I thought disco was not just mediocre music, but crazy fashion and fun dance moves. The disco era did not last long. It did not fully occur in every boondock. There were likely a few fanatics, some who liked it, many who scorned it at the time. Now, it’s just another phase that happened in their youth.
Some of the music is objectively okay. The best music of the 70s includes little disco, the rock and other genres are just way better. I do not think rock stars briefly trying to capitalize on a then current trend or try something new would have made much difference at all. Prove me wrong!
I disagree fundamentally with the notion that authenticity in music is important. The value of a song is the emotional response it creates within you, the listener. You don’t have to know anything about the origins of the song or the artist to get that response.
I don’t get this topic. Disco had good songs and bad ones, just like every other genre.
I would say something like Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love” laid a blueprint for music for decades to come. Hell, I was blasting it in the car a couple days ago, and it still sounds fresh as hell. Maybe a lot of disco was disposable – but it strongly shaped the music we hear today. Was it Brian Eno who said to Bowie, I’ve heard the sound of the future, and this is it – or something of that nature – upon hearing “I Feel Love”?
I like Donna Summer a lot, and even a few Beegees songs. Certainly any genre as distinctive as that will have influence. Is it the same influence as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bowie, Queen, the Stones, the Eagles, Stevie Wonder or many others? No.
I agree. Yet large numbers of critics and writers have yelled loudly about authenticity for decades. None of them ever asked me to set them straight.
Have you listened to Top 40 radio in the last 20 years? Almost nothing sounds like Zep and so on, but the influence of Disco is alive and kicking in modern pop music. I love Rock with a passion, but for most young folks it has been stone-dead for a long time.
A band can influence future musicians in many ways. Queen, The Beastie Boys, Madonna and many groups claim Zep as an influence, not just metalheads. Artificially limiting things to Top 40 or the last few years is going to limit any band nearly fifty years old. Even if you grant that for Zep, the argument is weaker for sone other bands. Not many Top 40 bands sound like the Beegees, I presume. Top 40 is not my preferred listen.
I would argue with that one particular record – “I Feel Love” – absolutely yes. Music stemming from that lineage/influenced by that is more alive in today’s popular musical culture – from what I can hear – than Zeppelin or Floyd or Queen. Casting no aspersions on them – I love all those artists and grew up on 70s classic rock. But Brian Eno was right when he told Bowie " I have heard the sound of the future. This is it, look no further" upon hearing that record.
I understand that’s just one particularly influential record, but the general sounds of disco live on. Listen to Daft Punk. Bruno Mars, Dua Lipa. Pretty much any kind of dance music, even indie rock with a dance flavor, and you can trace some of the lineage back to disco.
Both “The Harder They Come” popularizing reggae and a post-Disco rise in popularity can be true.
Listen to some electronic dance music sometime. It’s at least as influential as most of the bands you mentioned.
Yes and no. Daft Punk and Kraftwerk are influential, sure. In academia, they measure the influence of a study by how many others cite the paper. I wonder if there is a good way to quantify musical influence, maybe the number of successful bands (with a minimum sale) that quote an older band as an influence? Influence is hard to measure. It is not everything.
I don’t think you can quantify that scientifically, but as a music lover and a radio listener, I have a hunch that Kraftwerk was more influential for modern music than Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones, for instance. Not that I prefer any of them to the other, I like them all .
As for Daft Punk, they may be influential, but they predominantly were derivative and never shy about it. They transformed their paragons’ music like Giorgio Moroder, Chic, Kraftwerk and countless others into their own sound. Listen to their last album “Random Access Memory” (which now is almost 10 years old), which is both a homage to and a collaboration with their precursors.
Without getting into the history of EDM or techno, Daft Punk was around almost thirty years and so tried on a number of different styles. I agree they were influential but derivative, but you could say the same thing for many in that genre. Yes, I could have named many other long-in-the-teeth technos who were probably more influential, but why bore you?
I’m sure there must be a way to quantify musical influence. Never seen it done though.
I was watching an old episode of Soap from the 1970s and there’s a scene with aliens who announce, ‘Yes, we speak English and we can also disco!!’
Just goes to show how much disco permeated the culture during the disco era.