With the occasional bit of genius.
MacArthur Park! MacArthurfreakingpark!
You have a lot to answer for, Ms Summer. That, and the five minute orgasm song.
eta:
Which that was.
You don’t have to tell me. I have my credentials. I saw The Full Monty on Broadway.
(researching) Oh, he’s still alive. I was never a fan.
Back to the topic, Disco was hated long before rock stars discovered it.
Goodnight Tonight was definitely a dip into the Disco pool. It came out in ‘79 while Disco was still going. Coming Up came out over a year later when Disco was beginning to gasp it’s death rattle. The album version of Coming Up was just McCartney having fun in his basement with a tape deck. The live version that charted was more of a pop-rock version. It made number one but I never heard it played in a club.
If it wasn’t mentioned “I Was Made For Loving You” by KISS had Disco influence written into it, IMHO.
I think some rock artists just wanted to cash in a bit on the musical flavor of the day. Interesting how something that was so huge was also so hated and when it died it died quick. Few stragglers.
A couple of Blondie songs had previous versions that were not Disco.
Disco may have sucked but going into a Disco didn’t. Right smack in the middle of the sexual revolution, no herpes or AIDS pandemics. Girls were fast and loose with the lovin’. Memories.
Weirdest song I ever heard in a Disco was a full floor dancing to “Another Brick in the Wall”. Weird. No way did Pink Floyd imagine that!
Fortunately, rock fans are genetically and culturally incapable of doing this, amirite?
Just want to say that is a great podcast.
And the pervasiveness wasn’t generated by the music, it was generated by 40-something white male entertainment executives who weren’t really all that good at their jobs and took a ‘the kids seem to be into this’ approach to their jobs. ‘It worked for the Beatles’ the line writers would tell themselves as they incorporated a disco plot into their CHiPs teleplay because, dammit, that’s what Tartikoff wanted.
I think a lot of the backlash was also led by music critics and publications like Rolling Stone and Creem. When all you can say critically about a song is that “it has a good beat and you can dance to it” you either ignore it or attack it. And Disco was too in your face to ignore.
I’ve always found it interesting that after New York’s lowest low point in 1975, punk was founded by disaffected Whites, disco by disaffected gays, and hip hop by disaffected Blacks.
What I’ve never been able to decide is whether New York should be congratulated for that or a-bombed.
Just a WAG, but I am wondering if rock was losing its rebellious nature by the end of the 70s, and rock fans were looking for something to rebel against. And disco became their target.
Could be worse. Could be a punk rock episode.
All this says is they were not able to criticize the music on its own merits, akin to someone telling me ‘I like classical music, it’s so soothing’ while Mozart’s 20th piano concerto is playing.
And yes, disco is Mozart in this analogy, and I love both. Deal with it. 
It’s also interesting that New York played such a small role in the Fifties and Sixties compared to cities like Memphis, Los Angeles, London, and Detroit. It’s like they took these small kernels like The Velvet Underground and the Sugar Hill Gang and incubated them into this epidemic of new music at the end of the Seventies.
We HATED it, and there was an undeniable malevolence to that. Disco favored Black and Latino guys who had moved us white kids never could pull off, and the glamour empowered the girls who had been regulated to this role in the age of cock rock.
But disco was pretty vapid, regardless of those issues. When Roy Cohn and Henry Kissinger show up at Studio 54, it’s not about cool anymore. Disco was for dance floors (if you even danced), but sucked for road drinking or keggers in cow pastures. Disco-dipping dinosaurs like Mick Jagger or Rod Stewart were our older sibling’s musicians no matter what. Punk hadn’t come to rural America yet, so we made do with proto-punk transgressives like Cheap Trick or the New York Dolls.
Not really true. The Brill Building (actually several buildings full of music-related firms) was the dominant sound on the charts in the pre-Beatles era, with hundreds of hits. The folk music boom of the early 60s was mostly centered in New York, with the Greenwich village folk scene generating Dylan, Baez, Simon & Garfunkel, Peter, Paul & Mary, and people in the Living Spoonful, the Byrds, and the Mamas and the Papas. The hip scene moved elsewhere for a decade but New York utterly dominated the record world for the Fifties and early Sixties.
Yeah, this was part of the issue. In the mid 70s you’d have the pop media become dominated by disco and what we call in this thread disco-ish plus what we’d later call “light pop” material. Now, as mentioned, this was merely a market matter – popularity breeds popularity, and sales are sales.
(When you look at the history of the charts you notice one thing: they never were an “all ‘real’ rockers” thing. But then there were travesties like the producers of the Donny & Marie Show having him sing “I’m a little bit Rock&Roll” every week… which was patently ridiculous to any demographic younger than Lawrence Welk’s. I can imagine some Rock fans may have felt… defensive, about such a claim.)
Like Crafter_Man mentioned, part of that had to do with the notion that Rock is supposed to be rebel music that upsets your parents. And by then it was starting to evolve into other things. But then you’d have the critics getting all olympian about what is or is not rock and what is or is not pop or disco and the relative superiority of one or the other. Many people (including magazine writers (*) ) were kind of in a mood to fight over in what direction should the genre move.
((*) Then Billy Joel wrote a lyric about that, and everyone was like “HA! What does HE know about Rock&Roll??” )
I was rockin’ out with an Astraltune years earlier. Astraltune Stereopack Information Page (justabuzz.com)
Sony… buncha Johnny Come Latelys!
Billy Joel was tainted by New York. Besides do-wop and CBGB, New York was always too proud to embrace rock as its own as it had Gershwin.
Even before disco, rock had split into tribes. Classic 1970s high school triad: Jocks (hard rock, or Marshal Tucker/Ozark Mountain Daredevils etc. if you were rural like me); Nerds (Prog), and freaks (Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, etc).
When you went to college you met new tribes like WASPS who had Carly Simon, Black kids with funk, early boomer associate professors with soft/yacht/retirement rock. Everyone had perhaps a few LPs of another tribe’s in their orange crate (plus make-out bait like Yes/America), but their own tribe’s was their mainstay.
Disco wasn’t like that. Freaks loved George Clinton’s Maggot Brain, and Ozark Mountain Daredevil fans might have one Kool and the Gang LP, but disco was totally alien.
I was thinking about the scene in “Stripes” where the recruits get in trouble. Judge Reinhold is wearing a “Death Before Disco” tee shirt. Apparently this merch is available, including face masks…