At the time, I hated that those nice balladeers of such songs as I Started a Joke, Massachusetts, and New York Mining Disaster 1941 sold out to disco. Now I realize they didn’t “sell out” so much as create the whole thing. 
(The first album I bought was Bee Gees Gold)
The Bee Gees in no way created disco.
Toddlers like Baby Shark. That doesn’t make it good music. For a short period of time coked out adults liked Do the Hustle. That was equally bad. I stand by my statement.
Disco wasn’t just a genre of music. Disco was a fad in which music was one aspect. Fads fade quickly. And fads have haters. The better aspects of the music were absorbed into broader styles of music. Talented people like Niles Rogers were able to change as the landscape changed. The fad of disco died quickly just like any other fad.
It makes it good music for toddlers.
What’s the relevance of this?
In a thread about the hatred of disco why wouldn’t it be relevant? People who buy into a fad like it for as long as it remains fadish. Those who don’t buy into a fad hate it.
I was a young teen when Disco emerged and it had two things going against it in my weird little Beatles/SciFi/Comic Book/Rocky Horror tribe. 1) It was massively popular, and 2) our parents in their late 30s and 40s loved it.
Even the most racist and homophobic oldsters didn’t seem threatened by it, which makes me leery of claims that those things motivated the backlash. They loved the Village People in the same way they loved Liberace and Little Richard in a half clueless / half wink-wink way. Disco people weren’t the blacks and gays they were afraid of.
On top of that, it looked like, with Disco, our parents were stealing our generation’s turn at the hedonistic table. The Boomers were double dipping after already enjoying the free love and drug culture of the Sixties.
When disco was “peaking,” so to speak, I was a young, single guy hanging out primarily with a group of prog heads. So my exerience would not have been typical. But I’ll also argue that it wasn’t unique.
We spent a lot of time getting all smoked up and playing progressive rock records, San Francisco psychedelic, free jazz, various flavors of avant-garde and experimental music, and anything else that might have some appeal to such a group. Good times.
To my knowledge, no one in our group spent much time paying attention to, or thinking about, disco. The general feeling, to the small extent that anyone said anything about it, was simply that if you weren’t going to dance, there was no payoff. Nothing to reward attentive listening (to be fair, there might have been; the point is that that was our perception).
Personally, I never “hated” disco. I could deal with a disco track if it came on the radio or television, and if someone else liked it, well, I wasn’t going to tell them they were wrong. And I knew full well that if I were to play my Henry Cow records for disco folks, 99 percent of them would say, “What is this crap?”
Lots of great disco. On my drive up to Milwaukee this weekend I was blasting Slayer, disco, and Daft Punk the whole way. Disco has lots of kickin’ tunes, even if you think they all suck. And disco’s musical influence is ubiquitous and heard not only in pop and dance genres but in indie rock. It was hardly the nadir of American music.For me, that’s the hair rock of the 80s, or the slow jams of the early 90s, but I get their appeal.
See, one man’s inspired minimalism is another one’s simplistic repetition. I think Disco created some very fine examples of musical minimalism, like for example “Funky Town”.
I’m not old enough to remember the 70s very well, but I do remember Madonna’s “Vogue” from her I’m Breathless album in 1990. The bulk of her audience had no idea Madonna’s inspiration for the video and song came from the gay scene. How many Americans didn’t get what Frankie meant when he told us to Relax in the 80s? I did poke fun at my mother several years ago about how she didn’t know many members of the Village People were gay.
If the rejection of disco was predicated on homophobia and racism, how did disco become so ubiquitous to begin with?
TSOP is a great record but it wasn’t the start of disco, and neither was Philadelphia.
https://socialdance.stanford.edu/Syllabi/disco_lifestyle.htm
Rarely does a dance movement fit so precisely within a decade. Seventies Disco was born on Valentine’s Day 1970, when David Manusco opened The Loft in New York City, and it rapidly faded in 1980. When the Disco movement peaked in 1978-79, the demographic was predominantly white, heterosexual, urban and suburban middle class. But it didn’t begin that way. For the first eight years, Disco was an underground movement. Then the film Saturday Night Fever (December 1977) helped turn the simmering subculture into a mainstream fad, resulting is a 30-fold increase in disco clubs. …
Significantly, the discos also offered a taste of freedom and self actualization for three other subcultures during the seventies: Gays, Hispanics and African Americans. After decades of marginalization for each of these minorities, they all found a supportive home in the discos.
Gays were the first, right from the beginning, when David Manusco opened The Loft, closely followed by The Gallery and the Paradise Garage, all in New York City. After the counter-culture revolution of the sixties, there was now a relatively wider acceptance of gays in the media, followed by some legal freedoms in New York City in 1971.
Then New York City Latinos, largely Puerto Rican and Cuban, quickly joined the party with their couple dance traditions of Latinized 1950s rock’n’roll swing. American popular culture had mostly given up partnered “touch” dancing in 1960, when the Twist changed the dynamic of social dancing. But Hispanic dancers in New York had never stopped partnered dancing, partially because it was considered masculine for Latino men to dance, and had been for generations. So for them, partnered couple dancing was preferred over solo dancing.
How about the music in 1972? If you were transported back to an early seventies disco you might be surprised to hear only pop, soul and Motown music from the sixties. Then a new sound hit New York in 1973, imported from Africa — the Soul Makossa single by Manu Dibango, which charged the Manhattan disco scene with a new energy. It was stunningly unlike anything else at the time — a repetitious motif with no melody line, or story in the lyrics, and with a steady dance beat. Soon this new sound was filled out with a larger Philly-style orchestral version, funky rhythms, and the next generation of Motown soul, all of which were primarily African-American. Combined together, this became the definitive sound of the disco era.
This.
I was in my early teens when disco came out, and I don’t recall a racial or homophobic component to the anti-disco movement. I think this assertion is baloney for the most part. I suspect it’s revisionist history by people who want everything to be about race and sexual preference.
I forgot to mention brain damage.
“Liberty Liberty Liberty” is a direct lineal descendant of “Funkytown”*
*I admit to a slight residual fondness for “that’s the way (uh huh uh huh) I like it”. But KC & the Sunshine Band were anomalies in a sea of dreck.
I suspect it is by people that loved disco music and the whole disco scene, and got picked on/beat up by the rock fans, and now they are getting their revenge. “You all only hated disco because you’re racist homophobes!”
If they themselves were also gay that just adds a bonus layer of victimhood to the equation.
The fact that there were other aspects to the disco fad is irrelevant to the question of whether disco music was objectively bad.
I’ve suggested earlier that some of the backlash against disco was due to it being polarizing, in that the people who didn’t like it tended to dislike it, and thus resented its popularity.
But FWIW, I think a lot of the antipathy is cultural snobbishness. Rock music is associated with certain qualities that many people like to associate with themselves (e.g. edginess, rebelliousness etc., as noted by many in this thread) an image which disco did not have. I think by disliking disco, people are reinforcing their own bona fides as regards to these qualities. Claiming that disco is “bad” music is thus a form a virtue signalling.
Or it’s just bad music.
Obviously, it’s subjective. But I know I’m not alone in thinking that.
I’d speculate that the attitude was, subliminally, disco is for pretty people, rock is for ugly people. The latter outnumber the former by a considerable margin and really, really resent them.
. . .
Y’know, y’all… it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Or even predominantly one or the other
You can have people who just disliked the music per se. De gustibus…
You can have people who hated the disco social scene and the music incidentally.
You can have people who were just upset that this music and scene were catching all the publicity while feeling their preferred music and scene were being ignored. Either sincerely or for economic interest.
You can have people who just tribalized along jock/nerd/richkids or beautiful people/schlubs lines.
You can have people who were reacting based on their race/gender/class issues, either overt OR non-conscious/institutional.
They all existed.
Insofar as the musical content quality, Strugeon’s Law applies to commercialized music as well as any other medium, and as much of prog or metal or country are bad-to-mediocre as of disco.
I was coming in to say exactly that. I like a lot of dinosaur rock, prog rock, and “alternative” rock. Indeed loud guitars are probably my preferred…hmmm…thing. Listening to a lot of older Smashing Pumpkins lately and it is slightly surprising to me how metal they got at times.
But I’d rather listen to KC and the Sunshine Band than Winger. Heck I’d rather listen to Chic or Heatwave than Mötley Crüe. I like The Who, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, or on the other end of that generation, The White Stripes. Or The Pixies, Dead Kennedys or Sonic Youth. Or heck, 3Mustaphas3 
.
But I have no problem with disco as a genre. Some of it is fun.