Odd then that disco inspired such hostility. You’d think that if people didn’t like a type of music, they’d just not listen to it. The only other time I remember people getting this upset was when white people complained about rap which also presents a threat to white hegemony.
I mean Disco inspired a riot.
critic Dave Marsh described Disco Demolition Night as “your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead”.[1] Marsh was one who, at the time, deemed the event an expression of bigotry, writing in a year-end 1979 feature that “white males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they’re the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium.”
Nile Rodgers, producer and guitarist for the disco-era band likened the event to Nazi book burning.
Heh, I misread that wiki page. It was Gaynor who said the quote I cited. Either way, it isn’t an obvious racial issue, considering that the disco tracks that were dominating the charts in the years before the event were mostly white.
I don’t know about that. IME there wasn’t a white kid in any major city who didn’t know exactly where the “Negro” radio station was on the dial, and had probably secretly programmed a radio pushbutton on his dead’s Chevrolet to it. Even my totally whitebread, suburban, Catholic school-going self could dial to those stations without even looking down at the radio.
I’m not quite that old. However, I know there wasn’t a single “Negro” radio station on my dial. Let’s say that some kids knew the originals. But if you check Billboard’s website, you won’t see any real success on the mainstream charts for Chuck Berry or Little Richard in the 1950s.
OMG, the idea that the hate for disco was about racism or homophobia is ridiculous. Disco was loved by the jocks and the popular girls who sneered at me and my friends. It was music for people who weren’t into music. My friends who were into Rock and prog were very anti racist. I can’t believe this myth that gives shitty bands like the Bee Gees or KC And the Sunshine Band credit for being progressive. All the rich white bullies in my high school loved those bands. My weird and cool friends loved Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead.
No, not where I lived. At the height of disco, I worked graveyard shift in a convenience store, and night after night I watched the drunken detritus flowing home from the discos. The guys went largely because that’s where the girls went, because the girls loved it. This was West Texas, so I heard plenty of anti-gay hate talk, and I can’t think of it ever having been related to disco. Believe me, the locals would have embraced any new reason to hate gays, and they just didn’t pick up on disco in that manner.
This statement is just complete BS. “The White Hegemony”. Sounds like a punk band.
No one cared that disco groups were black or gay. They cared that disco was ubiquitous, inescapable, and shitty.
It was hard to avoid. Aside from pop radio playing it all the time, it showed up in school dances, shopping malls, AB, and even CHiPs episodes. Hell, we had “disco dancing” as a segment of HS phys ed. Yes, our Wisconsin liberal communist socialist public school indoctrination system made it possible for me to know how to Do The Hustle. And I haven’t forgiven them yet.
Eh, no. Your quote is from Gloria Gaynor, not the person I quoted, who did indeed liken it to a Nazi book burning. On edit, I see that you caught your mistake.
Threads like this are why I hold that the Dope is actually a deeply conservative institution. Any position that isn’t the conventional wisdom of white boomers is considered fringe and invalid.
Or just possibly that we also lived through it and had different experiences.
I hated disco because it was gawdawful music. I was too young to fully understand what homosexuality was. I was raised in a home where racism was not an issue and any hint of it from outside the home was thoroughly condemned. I liked other music with no regards to the race of the artist. I had no idea what the subtext of the Village People was. I could tell that the music and fashion that went with it were horrible. You can make academic arguments about the connection between racism and homophobia and anti-disco sentiment. What you can’t do is say it was good music. Because other than a few outliers performed by talented artists the genre was a low point in American music. Possibly the low point. Some people may have had bad reasons for disliking the genre. There are many good reasons to dislike it.
Racist and homophobic people don’t have to restrict themselves to hating completely innocuous behaviors and expressions of the marginalized minorities they hate and start deriding those expressions. Instead, they can focus on the low-hanging fruit. Any easily criticized and vapid cultural expression, any genuinely socially worrisome behavioral pattern, those are the one’s they’ll zero in on and complain about THOSE PEOPLE’S music or social practices or other behavior.
So, yeah, racist and homophobic people were pretty quick to start hating on disco (and rap) for reasons that were racist and homophobic as well as more legitimate reasons we’ve brought up upthread here.
The fact that they did so does not rescue disco from being vapid, crappy, repetitive, uncreative music (it really does suck), and does not mean that anyone who shares my opinion of disco is homophobic, racist, or both.
It’s important to remember that there was a huge backlash against rock music when it emerged in the 1950s, although that was more generational than the hatred for disco.
I was playing in rock bands at the time, and I admit that my hatred for disco was largely tribal, in the way it seemed destined to replace rock. And to its ubiquity–it felt like the entire entertainment industry was on board, along with the clothing industry and venues. I have since come to like a few disco songs, but I don’t care for the genre as a whole.
A trend which roughly coincided with disco’s rise was the broad acceptance that the music business existed to make money, as opposed to the artsy pretentiousness that prevailed in the decade or so before. This increased commercialism occurred with all genres, but it was easy to associate it with disco because of the timing.
Ironically, this commercialism may have contributed to disco’s sudden implosion, because the genre was inherently prone to poor record sales. Whereas rock fans bought their own copies to listen to at home, the disco experience was focused on going out to dance to it in clubs.
I believe you may be confusing inspired minimalism with vapid simplistic repetition.
I don’t recall being resentful because some established rock acts dipped their toes into the fetid disco vat. The problem was loathsome pap by newcomers that took over the radio dial. And there were no satellite stations in those days. It was like a plague of bad Xmas music year-round, amplified by idiotic clothing styles and coke spoon jewelry.
There’s no objective way to measure what’s good music. Good music is what people enjoy listening to. At that time, many many people enjoyed listening to disco. Many people still do.
People who enjoy one type of music over another like coming up with reasons for their preferred type being “better” than the other type. But these reasons are purely about their own personal tastes, and carry no objective weight.
In the case of disco, the key question is why it is that disco would be so popular at one time and then so unpopular such a short time later. Saying “it was bad music” doesn’t even begin to address the question.
I would guess that even in it’s heyday it was disliked by a lot of people, which created a lot of antipathy. Then once it fell out of style, those negative sentiments prevailed.
I’m surprised that there’s so much consternation about the linkages between the anti-disco movement and racism and homophobia. Certainly it’s possible to dislike disco on its merits, but the origins of disco are firmly entrenched in Black and Latino gay culture. Some of the resistance comes from that, as well as its ambassadors like Sylvester and Village People. So while many folks can dislike disco just because they don’t like the aesthetic, much of the momentum about “disco sucking” came from those roots.
As a young kid during this era, there was a lot of aggression from older kids into hard rock. I remember a kid in our neighborhood who religiously listened to AC/DC and KISS who would beat up little kids who said they liked disco (this was around '78 or '79). Because I grew up in the UK where Radio 1 played everything, it was odd to me to find people who claimed to be music fans but only knew one genre - in NW Florida, there were stations that played country or AOR, but one station that was more of a mix. The divisions in music formatting I think exacerbated the tensions.
And because people weren’t likely to hear the breadth of the genre, they only saw the most outrageous versions of it. It can be both great (Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby”) or awful (Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”) - not to mention there were aspects of the culture that could be easily troped and mimicked (Barry Gibb’s falsetto, Travolta’s white suit, etc.). And of course those horrendous Disco spinoffs (dance videos, outfits, Mickey Mouse records) made it ridiculous.
If you’re a fan of great music and production, it’s hard to not appreciate Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers, Bernard Edwards, the Bee Gees, and other disco “legends.” In fact after the “disco wave” I think there was a reassessment of their contributions (like Dave Grohl doing an album of Bee Gees covers). It was the ubiquity and cheesiness that damaged the movement, and when the novelty records came out we were all sick of it. But those are some great records. I just watched the Robert Stigwood documentary on HBO and opened a Spotify playlist with Moroder and Cerrone; musically those are pretty exciting tracks, but I couldn’t listen to it all day.
Hi-NRG is fun music and it does the job of getting people to dance. I don’t think it’s great background music when working in a factory, though.
