origins of fear/hatred of disco

Don't know really.

As someone who grew up on dance/disco music, and later discovered rock music in college, I feel I'm in the minority -- in brief.

Matos should DEFINITELY interject here.

yeah i personally think that has something, maybe everything to do with it.

(right. by praising so much of it in print in 1986-87-88, apparently.)

As a resident of Detroit during the Detroit Rockers Engaged in the Abolition of Disco (DREAD) card years, back when Steve Dahl was building bonfires at White Sox games, I'd posit that the album-oriented rock stations started the disco sucks thing mainly because they felt *threatened* -- like, financially, maybe, but also, it just made a good crypto-racist/crypto-homophobic (but also, just plain anti-city-slicker, and anti-morons-who-spend-way-too-much-money-on-fashionable-clothesto-wear-on-Saturday-night) gimmick to rally around.

Good point, but... Disco experienced a mainstream presence, and (more to the point) mainstream backlash that Death Metal never really went through.
There was never a "Death Metal Sucks" rally where people were encouraged to donate their Deicide back catalogs they could be blown up - Christian Youth outings excepted.

Susan, no offense, but it seems like you asked a question with an agenda ready to go, having just ignored some already cogent refutations here, many of which bypass the taste issue.

While I'm not going to even think about flying the flag for the "Disco Sucks" cry, maybe you should hear the rest of the thread out before declaring one facet to be "everything" about the hatred?

That's the conventional wisdom, which is as much as I know.

I had a similar experience yesterday. A room full of nice enough, seemingly smart enough people talked about how they liked all sorts of music, rattling off many different types of music, then said "I don't like rap, though," as though that made perfect sense.

Here's a thought -- maybe some people just don't like it! Why doesn't everyone like Death Metal?
-- Alex in NYC (vassife...)

Plenty of people simply don't like disco, but a lot of people go a lot farther than that. I've never seen any "Death Metal Sucks" T-shirts. I don't know of any nights where people blew up death-metal records in the middle of a baseball stadium. I don't know of anyone who doesn't like death metal who uses profane slurs when describing people who do like it. I think the vitriolic hatred is what this thread is about.

Fair point. Instead of some global misogynist/homophobic/racist agenda, however, mightn't the whole "Disco Sucks" campaign simply have been the backlash of an overexposed trend?

Chuck's onto something here. Given Studio 54's notoriously fickle door policy, along with being sick of the trend, might it also have been an ANTI-ELITISM movement?

xhuxk onto something ... remember the economy and the overall tone of the nation at the time. Feelgood party music, glamor, and Studio 54 snobbery did not sit well with blue collar midwesterners.

I think both parts of your sentence, Alex, are correct. Also, detractors are less patient with the genre's supposed superficiality than they would be in accepting the superficiality of, say, Led Zeppelin or Rush or (to choose a contemporary example) Radiohead.

To me, Donna Summer and LCD Soundsytem has a lot more to say about ecstasy and release than the rock groups I mentioned.

An old thread that's really just peripheral to this issue, but might provide some useful fodder as to the cultural aspects of "Disco Sucks".

Also, see threads on the triage of "disco is the future is the past" movies from 1980.. Can't Stop The Music!, The Apple, and Xanadu...

I think it's one of those "A little from column A, a little from column B" scenarios. Disco absolutely was overexposed as both a musical style and a fashion trend, but the resentment behind the disco backlash did have some very real underlying schisms.

What I find interesting is the number of late 80s naysayers who predicted that rap would have just as limited a shelf-life as disco. Nowadays, rap music is quasi-respectable, but dance music is still something of a redheaded stepchild, at least in North America.

(Incidentally, I love me some disco, hip-hop, and house.)

yeah, but my point is that disco sucks had as much to do with class (which is rarely mentioned) as with race or gender preference (which are always mentioned.) (and in fact, travolta playing a WORKING CLASS tough white straight male clearly OPENED UP some mid-American ears to disco, at least temporarily; it gave disco a context that seemed more down to earth and less pie in the sky. But really, if I'm working on the Ford line and blasting *Night Moves*, why the hell SHOULD I care about a bunch of rich new york idiots snorting coke with no shirts on? Fuck 'em, you know? How hard is it see why they would be hated?)

The "fear of looking like an idiot while dancing" thing is a red herring tho.

x-post

I grew up surrounded by metal kids in a conservative Canuck military town, so, yeah, homophobia ahoy.

tell that to those kids in west memphis

I don't think so .. With disco, everyone, even your grandma, was learning how to do the Hustle.. Anyone that was pro-rawk/ anti-disco (that I knew) rejected the whole package of music & compulsory dance moves. I may be extrapolating, but I think a bit of that dislike was due to not feeling able to fit in to the scene.

See also: Achy-Breaky, Macarena, etc...

x-post

This reminds me of a story I may have already told, but it bears repeating:

Summer of 1996. Downtown Toronto is having its annual street festival, and a Large Truck is set up outside A Large Chain Record Store for an "outdoor rave". A local "cred" DJ duo (known for their electro/breakbeat/tech-iness) come on and do their thing. Glowstick-and-backpack kids dance merrily in the summer night air, as do I, lacking both glowstick and backpack.

Then there's a schedule change. Outdoor Rave becomes Outdoor Dance Party. The cred DJs leave, and two local club "personalities" come on.

Fade down on Electro-Tech. Fade up on... Black Box. Cue a dozen or so rave kids, who run screaming for fear of contamination (I swear, I am not making this up). I shake my head in disgust, and stick around to dance to Culture Beat, Deee-lite, etc, etc.

x-post

Its interesting to often see otherwise open-minded forward thinking people dismiss the entire category of dance music including old disco, house, etc., IDM (even the term suggests that regular dance music must be dumb), and all sorts of electronica. Origins/reasons for this behavior? And how much does it annoy you?

XPOST to the person who asked how to define "disco":

The origins we've been speaking of so far are mainly the late 70s glutton of disco produkt... however, since she did bring up dance music in general.. feel free to interject in whatever context of dance music you feel is worth noting, since Susan opened it up so.

lots of xposts

Sorry to say. I'm just saying that out of taste though. I still manage to find the gems in the very large haystack, but that wall of old used disco records is still, to this day, a very large haystack.

i think drew daniel talked about his Disco awakening after an adolescence revolving round the hardcore scene in his Invisible Jukebox.

That's because there has never been any credible evidence that these have ever really existed, any more than hatred of any other random genre. They were never an organized movement like Disco Sucks was; in fact, I'm a little confused about why they're even on the same thread (despite the fact that I believe a lot of techno and house IS disco.) Hatred of Ashlee Simpson has more in common with Disco Sucks than, say, Eminem pretending that "nobody listens to disco" does.

Most common rock song for teens in the '70s: "Stairway to Heaven"!

Today, "Authenticity" means "being able to play one's instruments and sing live and write one's own songs"... whereas in the Disco era, "Authenticity" meant "being able to showcase one's musical talents outside this very specific circus of fashion and flash that was mostly gawdy".

Because no one can say musicians who played on disco records lacked talent..

Then again "talent" is a highly mutable term as well...

etc.

I wrote a pice sorta related to this a couple years ago. I remember Ewing liked it so I maybe it is ILM-worthy.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/columns/resonant-frequency/08-14-02.shtml

(archive messed up but text is there.)

Because no one can say musicians who played on disco records lacked talent..

But I think the anti-disco lobby would point out that those musicians were playing in a robotic and repetitive way - approximating "machines" and/or synthesizers, which is part of why the disco debate is a specific product of it's time (and not just another example of logocentrist values at work).

I guess, but why would they say that when there's so much evidence that that's complete bollocks?

Maybe more interestingly, why would they say that when Born in the USA, which sounded exactly like the large machines in the factory I was working in at the time, was less than 10 years away?

True. Although the Studio Hack Guitar Solos so prevalent at the time now seem much, much more faceless than synths.

x-post

My grandparents and mom were the ones who INTRODUCED me to "I Feel Love"! They thought it was cool and exciting.

Walter Hughes' "In the Empire of the Beat" (from Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose's Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture anthology) has loads to say about the intersection of gay culture and machines (particularly in re: gyms and working out and clones and whatnot).

Bizwise, disco helped sink the music industry for a few years--there was such an excessive supply comparative to the demand of the audience. Labels figured they could print money by putting out loads of the stuff and there were enormous financial setbacks as a result. This is discussed in detail in Love Saves the Day by Tim Lawrence, which is a key book for all discussions of '70s disco.

This is interesting (and I'd admittedly never thought of it before), but I don't know what it would have to do with how, say, straight midwesterners *viewed* gays. The claim that "there are a host of reasons why some people don't like machines which are related I think to why those same people don't like homosexuals" sounds completely absurd to me; believe me, at a time when mid-Americans had no idea the Village People or Queen were gay, I doubt it occured to them that some gay people might have worked out a lot on bench-press machines. But maybe I'm missing something; if so, I'd like to know what. (I mean, obviously, lots of album covers by Silver Convention or Bionic Boogie or whoever juxtaposed machine visuals with gay visuals, but these were pretty subcultural records; Bob Seger fans never saw them.)

I heart this book.

BTW, another great book I just read: The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson, extremely well written and full of amazing, deeply researched detail about black drag in L.A., San Francisco during the '70s, and how people in the disco world dealt with the fallout. Similarly, there's a new book about Chic called Everybody Dance that's not so well written but has a lot of great info.

And I mean those LATER Silver Convention albums (e.g. *Madhouse*), after they stopped having # 1 pop hits (though I doubt very many people bought the albums with those #1 hits on them either, actually.)

xp

please don't go - kc and the sunshine band
rock with you - michael jackson
call me - blondie
funkytown- lipps inc
upside down- diana ross
another one bites the dust - queen

so disco ws displaced by, um, disco, basically

----

king's x, faith no more, janes addiciton, and living colour had already displaced hair-metal on MTV and the charts before grunge came along, michaelangelo. the cause and effect thing was a total myth...

"The disco department was renamed the dance music department. It was an issue of semantics. All this music was happening, but we couldn't call it disco." Caviano started giving interviews saying, "It's dance music! It's dance music!" while simultaneously blaming the media for disco's decline.

Xhuck, Lethal, you're also forgetting Kano's "I'm Ready" which was more disco than anything listed above, which became a big hit in 1981.

Matos is right, Chuck. I was 16 in 1991, a big metal kid. Obv. there had been little inklings of things that we liked that started to get us out of hair metal, like Faith No More and Janes...and Metallica's Misfits covers - which are totally underrated as a big thing for getting metal kids like me into punk - but after Nirvana, things were DIFFERENT for us...we all totally jumped on the alternative bandwagon....it was a big thing to us, just typical small town (pre Internet!) kids with little in the way of exposure to punk and alt stuff before that.

And I'll be damned if I can understand how blatant Eurodisco moves and Chic songs sounded nothing like "anything resembling what was considered disco in the 70s," but I've argued with that bizarre perception repeatedly on other threads, and don't have the energy to do so again here. Suffice to say that disco encompassed many, many different sounds in the '70s. The idea that it suddenly turned some drastic sonic corner in 1980 (or '81 or '82 or '83) is completely absurd. It changed it name, basically, or rather, it had a name change thrust upon it. And it continued to change, like it always had.

Which reminds me to mention, we seem to be talking strictly in the context of Top 40 here. R&B radio was far less trigger-happy to drop disco off their playlists just yet. (Probably because all the musicians behind those disco platters already joined new R&B/dance/funk bands that were less anonymous, and just carried the disco/funk along with them...)

obviously the big differential re: disco dying is terminology, because 1980 was a HUGE year for disco. but 1980 was also the year when disco "died"--and turned into a verboten word if not sound.

Disco definitely lived on, just incognito and a bit more mutated into what we now call 80s funk/R&B.

I think it threatens to sort of ruin a genre really, this "this is the old stuff, yes sir" sentiment. I remember Simon R saying something about how difficult it was for him to enjoy Aretha Franklyn because he kept thinking of the stuffiness of the language used around soul and I empathised alot with that.

This is a bit of a tangent perhaps, sorry!

the funk vs. disco wars were not at all unlike the rock vs. disco wars. maybe MORE heated because funk got stigmatized as "disco"--"fake, phony, mechanized bullshit" rather than "live, played by people," etc.--by white media. when disco fell, funk fell with it--it's one of the major reasons for P-Funk's collapse (that, and all the drugs)

Heh, I wasn't saying the MUSICIANS were embracing the abandoned disco puppy. Just R&B radio. In this one Rick James greatest hits CD, he describes "You and I" by basically saying "Yeah, we hated disco, but our record company wanted something disco-ey, so I made the first 10 seconds of 'You And I' disco-ey, then brought on the funk."

Rick James's success in 1981 with his fifth album Street Songs (namely "Give It To My Baby" and "Super Freak") was a major milestone, as, acc. to Bootsy Collins, it really brought the funk back into Top 40... given your prelude there, Matos. (Then again, i thought the Gap Band did that a year before, but I guess they didn't strike it as big as James did.)

This brings up the Mojo Chic article...did you read that? Nile and co. were totally about the "real musician" thing...they wanted to be respected like a great rock band and Nile has this anecdote about having Kurtis Blow open for them and being totally disheartened because (as he saw it) Chic's brand of pro muscianship was being usurped by the drum machine, etc....

good on Quincy, this has always been GLARINGLY obvious to me, and MJ lovers seem to hate it when I point out this rather obvious cop.

And again: MORE GAY ROBOTS k thx (where did Spencer go?)

OTM I think it was Dan Selzer on that other thread who would not call anything after 1980 "disco". he had been brainwashed!

Why exactly? This is a pretty old idea. I guess I should clarify that the discomfort is not necessarily conscious and people probably would not even make the connection in their own mind - but the causes are similar.

This whole discussion has got me craving the new Daft Punk album for a number of reasons!

now I can go back to fantasizing about my new, healthy, all-natural gay robot-a-go-go band, the Sperm Trees.

There were several other good reasons for people to dislike it though:

- Rockers felt threatened by the polished sound, completely free of noisy guitars
- Prog fans disliked it for the same reason they had also disliked bubblegum and the teen oriented glam stuff, and would later dislike punk: It was too musically simple
- People preoccupied with rock ideologi disliked the fact that there were people behind caring more about constructing hits to bring them money rather than about making good music.

YET.

x-post

(By the way, straight males might have listened to Sylvester and Chic's "Real People" album more carefully if they'd realized they would have gotten laid if they'd danced to those hits. Most indie boys nowadays know that dancing - well or badly - makes you 10 times hotter. Here in Miami we have the swishy mid '90s Britpop to thank for that development).

xpost that proves my point!

What is cryptic about it? For the record, I do not think that homosexuals and machines are 'unnatural'.

he did kind of hate machines, now that i think about it.

and all this talk about disco, machines and gays cannot lumber forward another step withour a mention of "There But for The Grace Of God Go I" by MACHINE which is, in and of itself, a version of this very discussion...

Chorus:
There but for the grace of God go I

Poppy and the family left the dirty streets
To find a quiet place overseas
And year after year the kid has to hear
The do's the don'ts and the dears
And when she's ten years old she digs that rock 'n' roll
But Poppy bans it from home

Chorus

Baby, she turns out to be a natural freak
Popping pills and smoking weed
And when she's sweet sixteen she packs her things and leaves
With a man she met on the street
Carmen starts to bawl, bangs her head to the wall
Too much love is worse than none at all

Chorus

x-post

challenge of origin myths

privileging

logocentrism

obsession with authentic

(i get the idea you might be taking an interesting idea and turning it boring; i just have no idea what the idea *is*, because you haven't remotely explained it.)

"ALRIIIIIGHT FELLA-TH, LET'TH GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

()ops, synths were the absolute shit in rock circles in the 70s.. as were vocoders. Get one Frampton Comes Alive!

this completely makes sense -- just like how, in the pre-sgt. pepper's '60s, none of the rock bands ever had to bill themselves as "real rock bands"; in fact, nobody had to do that until, when, springsteen? something like that. (maybe the band or creedence or flamin groovies did; I dunno -- but if your point is that the alleged authenticity doesn't have to advertise itself as such until it has sort of reduced itself to an *homage* to authenticity, i think I agree.

Well, basically, the hatred against disco ended because the same people suddenly felt even more hatred against synthpop.

There were more signs of homophobia in the hatred against boybands during the late 90s, although that too, was mainly just a hatred against corporate mass-produced commercial pop.

"musically inferior" eh? inferior to what, exactly? If you have a logically clear, non-circular, non-question-begging definition of what constitutes musical "superiority" and "inferiority", I would love to hear it.

Damn you sir, I was growing up in middle America and though employed we had no coke. You are a drugophobe. (Maybe.)

xpost to Geir

So I'm assuming that by your "quantity (of talent) X complexity (of form/composition) = overall superiority index" formula (which I rather charitably assume you to have though through in such a manner), you would then agree that composers of symphonies are then "musically superior" to the composers of symphonic rock, who are in turn "musically superior" to the composers of poor old disco, correct? And if so, that would mean that composers who write works that require multiple orchestras (Ives, Stockhausen and Xenakis all come to mind) are "musically superior" to people who limit themselves to just one measly old orchestra, correct? So then, I'm curious, maybe you could help me out here as I'm not quite as confident as you seem to be about gauging musical superiority-- which is "musically superior", Stockhausen's "Gruppen", Xenakis' "Duel" or Ives' "Universe Symphony"? Who is *truly* superior?

scott, they were still teaching the hustle in gym classes in the 90s!!!

coke = high end (disco hi hats, snares, strings, synths)

weed = low end (reggae, dub, hip hop kicks and basslines)

theory.

that's what i'm saying. it's like saying people who don't like rap hate it because they hate jamaicans who immigrated to new york city.
you can never say for certain why a disparate group of millions of people hate something. i'm sure many did hate disco cause of homophobia (many others probably didn't like it cause "it sounds gay, man", which is not the same), but that doesn't mean everyone had that at the root of their hatred, and we can now wipe our hands and close the book, the mystery of why disco became hated now solved.

xpost making perfect sense doesn't make something true though

http://www.anchorbayentertainment.com/files/013131156195.jpg

This, in particular, doesn't make sense. The hatred is and always was aimed at the people who were enjoying a particular style of music alien to the anti-***** faction, not the musicians/singers/bands themselves.

Speaking as someone who was 18 and gay in London in 1980, and working with a whole bunch of people who loved mainstream disco, I have to say that nobody - nobody - was pinning the music as "gay" music, Village People/Sylvester notwithstanding. The whole point of mainstream disco culture was as a backdrop for heterosexual courtship rituals.

And that was one of the main reasons why it was hated - not because it was "outsider" music, but because it was precisely the opposite: music for ordinary joes to consume uncritically. Music for lobotomised thickos, if you like.

From where I was standing, the decline of disco stemmed simply from the commercial end of the genre being flooded out, running out of ideas, and going stale. ("Disco sucks" had no impact over here at all.) It was also the usual generational turnover thing - disco meant your newly divorced auntie in her late 30s, whereas the next generation of clubbers were coming through new wave/synth-pop. (Pivotal genre-straddling record: Blondie's "Atomic"; early Spandau/Visage also had clear disco influences.)

So all that happened is that the "good stuff" continued to evolve in more limited circles - Solar records, Vandross, Gap Band, jazz-funk, Evelyn King, West End, Prelude - as the word "disco" was quietly dropped owing to its "wally" connotations (Boney M, Lipps Inc, Liquid Gold etc). Then along came D-Train, Arthur Baker, the assimilation of electronic influences, and also the emergence and - for the first time - wider recognition of a specifically "gay" dance music (first known as "Boystown"). But for 99% of the population, there was no conception of a "gay" music until late 1982 at the very earliest.

I always assumed it was led by Rolling Stone, but it can't have been a magazine wide policy because I'm looking at their Record Guide from 1980 and Saturday Night Fever gets a five star review - Chic only get three, mind!

I'm not questioning the existence of the campaign - it's been a cornerstone of my thinking about the US for 25 years so it had better have actually happened - but looking at this thread I realise I have never read the key texts. Does anyone have a bilbiography of the bile, or is there a great disco sucks website?

That certainly doesn't make sense. The boyband haters (at least the younger ones out of them) were really hot for those girls (because most of them were girls) who were into the boybands. They didn't hate them in anyway, they just hated the music they enjoyed.

Believe me, some of us got the drift...it was as obvious as that flashlight in Freddy Mercury's front pocket. I was no sophisticate in 1978, unaware of the "gay clone" image, but when that first Village People LP came into my record store I sensed something vaguely homosexual at play. Of course the people I sold VP albums to -- mostly moms with 12 yr old boys in tow -- had no idea. But in the wake of Bowie/glam etc Queen was no mystery to most, and paradoxically were huge (hehheh) w/ the disco sux/AOR radio set.

The infamous "Disco Demolition" rally, 7/12/79 at Comiskey Park, began as a protest against DJ Steve Dahl's former employer "going disco." A pyre of disco LPs was ignited during a double-header break, the kids stormed the field and the rest is history. As Chuck points out, a lot of the anti-disco fury was rock radio feeling threatened by the Saturday Night Fever-inspired disco fad.

In my estimation, disco was the first fad that the music business mis-calculated and failed to exploit. Flooding the marked with disco albums when consumers wanted to buy 12-inch extended versions of the hits resulted in the crash of 1979. Two years later cassettes started outselling vinyl records, the hometaping controversy flared and CDs waited in the wings. Disco was the turning point for the music biz (see the Casablanca chapter in Dannen's Hit Men) and I suggest the start of disillusionment w/the album format and desire for SONGS. Not to mention the moment when technology reinvented the music-making and recording process. Hiphop took it to the next level.

One more time, with feeling: the definitive book on this subject is Albert Goldman's Disco. A decadent coffee-table book that's way out of print and hugely overpriced now, Disco delivers about 10,000 words worth of a)social history of the nightclub scene b)musical history of the DJ and development of turntable techniques c)the most thorough analysis of technology and its effect on pop music ever. Goldman's flowery, over-the-top style is perfectly suited to the excesses of the late 70s and here his contempt for rock/hippie culture is totally appropriate rather than annoying. Search!

Oh, I know, but sheesh - five years later, a lot of these same people were grooving to "Glory Days" and "Dancing in the Dark," no?
-- Rick Massimo (rmassim...), April 5th, 2005.

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Do you think those songs are sound like or are arranged like "Funky Town" or "Le Freak"???
-- Spencer Chow (spencercho...), April 5th, 2005.

They don't sound alike, and neither are they arranged alike (I personally greatly prefer the latter two), but my point is anyone who liked "Born in the USA" or the two Springsteen songs above (or for that matter, a whole lot of early '80s non-new wave, non-New Romantic top-40 rock) has no business calling anything robotic in its production or arrangement.

I think "robotic" and "machine-like" were used by people searching for musical terms to describe music that they don't like for non-musical reasons. Among the real disco-haters in my high school, sure, some people really didn't like it for musical reasons, but in many cases "robotic" and "machine-like" were often far down the list of reasons they hated disco, after terms like "it's n***** music" and "it's f***** music."

Don't forget about the clothes, either.

Geir is right. This is bullshit.

Not at my (Michigan) high school. Bowie, Elton, Rod Stewart, Alice, maybe even Mick Jagger were pondered as possibly being homos all the time. With Queen, I don't think the subject ever even came up.

OT, I remember reading that Bronx hip-hop was a *reaction* to disco. The Manhattan MCs were disco-oriented, but the B-boys found the sound too sterile and wanted the funk back. (They did use the word "disco," but as a synonym for "club".)

They didn't hate them in anyway, they just hated the music they enjoyed.

And typically just about anything else the girls are into, if I know preteen boys...

My point is that it's not just merely the music.

which, again, is blatantly false. Hatred is OFTEN aimed at artists.

But obviously, disliking certain kinds of music does not necessitate hating either the artists themselves (as people) *or* their audience. In the late '80s, I was actually accused of homophobia by another *Voice writer (who I wound up later being friends with), after I compared some lame-assed Wire comeback record (*The Ideal Copy*, I guess) to a short laundry list of crappy quasi-decadent art-disco acts who apparently (though unbeknownst to me at the time) were largely gay-identified. The gay identification meant nothing to me, no more than the gay identification of lots of bands I loved; the fact that they all made shitty music (that took the life out of disco, if anything) did matter. (I later answered in an A Flock of Seagulls review that I'm biphobic - meaning, scared of *everybody*.)

Which is to say that "not sharing a gay sensibility" (I think drag shows tend to be idiotic, too, or at least the ones I've been too -- sorry, but men dressed up was women spouting retarded sex puns that would have made me laugh when I was a 10-year-old boy don't exactly strike me as the epitome of cleverness now that I'm a grownup) is not the same as "being homophobic." (Though anybody who's seen my Hi-NRG and Italo collection would be in AWE of my gay sensibility, actually.)

Somewhere there was a thread devoted to the gays and Lacanian principles of being unable to accept other people's happiness and reacting with revulsion. The fact that most disco music seemed to be conveying a message of utopian happiness (a bliss that our Lacanian test cases would have been locked out of) is what, I think, has me looking beyond Geir's equally "blatantly false" reduction of this phenomenon of hatred as being a reaction against "too simple" beats.

Plus, anti-disco cretins dreaded the extended dance 12" because it mocked their inability to get it up for more than three minutes thirty seconds.

I guess if we wanted to get extremely self-limited, it could be a question of angry tension (straight rock fans) vs. jouissant catharsis (gay disco fans)...

Of course, I wouldn't choose either. The very best disco usually came from heavily dischordant (not to mention pretty straight) places (bands who cut their teeth on funk): Funkadelic's "(not just) Knee Deep," Brass Construction's "Movin'"

Pretending rock is mainly "angry tension" is, uh, somewhat reductive (to be nice). (Have you ever actually *listened* to rock music, Eric?)

uh, yeah -- kinda like a Grateful Dead concert.

I'm glad we cleared that up.

Kinda sucks having to wait for the tour to come into town to have great sex, though, huh?

(Have you ever actually *listened* to rock music, Eric?)

I think it's clear that I haven't. I hate teh anti-gays.

has anyone found a meaningful common ground between prog and disco?

I mean, let's be honest. This whole discussion stems from the suppositions placed upon an already undiscerning demographic in the first place, right?

As for Rocky's training music--you mean the Rocky theme? Well then that's perfect, you get to deconstruct...

Personally, I think the backlash had more to do with a percieved exclusiveness to the genre... you know the whole Studio 54 red rope business.

Then again I'm not sure what rock musicians were "openly gay" rather than toying with androgynous and perhaps bisexual images, and that mostly in the glam/glitter i.e. more theatrical (read European) rock genres. Those burning disco records probably preferred Journey to Bowie. Not that there's no queer subtext to arena rock, but y'know...

* = Was ABBA the only ones who could (subtly) put strings in a Disco song without destroying it?
** = That got old really fucking quick. I suspect I'm oversimplifying, and I'd have to relisten to every disco song I have all in a row, with a clipboard in front of me to prove or disprove the theory; but I bet the one thing that really splits the Great Disco Songs from the Utter Shite Disco Songs is the prescense of the Incessant Burts of Police Whistle!!! Fweeeeet! Fweeeet! Fwe-Fweeet! FUCKING GIMME THAT WHISTLE!.

-- Spencer Chow (spencercho...), April 5th, 2005.

guys, the arthur baker mixes of "dancing in the dark" kick ass.

But I think the anti-disco lobby would point out that those musicians were playing in a robotic and repetitive way - approximating "machines" and/or synthesizers, which is part of why the disco debate is a specific product of it's time (and not just another example of logocentrist values at work).
Hmmm. Kraftwerk and Devo did the "WE ARE BORG" thang, but somehow made it secretly funky. It was inevitable that the Funk crowd would latch on to this (I mean, shit, George Clinton loved him some science fiction) but somehow, after Clinton helped invent (Good) Disco, a bunch of hacks came along, sucked all the serindipitous joy out of the process and the addition of the incessesant blasts of police whistle.
did I mention the addition of incessesant blasts of police whistle?
Yes. But it bears repeating. Hallmark of Suckitude. For Real.

Anything in which the strings aren't stabbing, but instead holding sustained notes is to be used as counterpoint: "September," "I'm Every Woman"

and incessant burts of police whistle**

Counterpoint: "Funky Stuff" on one side of the decade, and "Love is in Control" on the other

Then there were what Status Quo once referred to as "Hondas and pea soups."

Honda = that rising bassline: "honda-honda-honda-honda..." (example: just before the chorus on Abba's "Does Your Mother Know").

Pea soup = that cymbal figure: "pss-ZZP pss-ZZP pss-ZZP pss-ZPP"

So, yeah, those cliches got pretty damned annoying.

(I liked the klaxons/air-raid sirens, though.)

I saw the trailer for this movie last night, from about '75, called, I think, "Night Train to Hollywood." Starring Bloodstone of "Natural High" fame, about apparently a troupe of star-impersonators (of Bogart, Fields, Gable) on a train where there is some kind of murder mystery, and Bloodstone are kind of the Greek chorus of this whole scene. Very '30s. It always struck me that part of the whole thing was this revisionist take on that decade, elegance and "deco" and so forth, same as Dr. Buzzard. I find the whole disco-sucks thing weird, but I remember being in high school during that era and everyone, down here in Tennessee, was into ZZ Top and the Allmans and so forth, disco never really entered anyone's consciousness except for its superficial aspects. Weird too because musically disco is so obviously descended from Willie Mitchell, the Detroit scene, like "Do Me Right" by the Detroit Emeralds, funk music in general, Thom Bell...so much of it was just basic post-soul shit. But I guess it was hard to make that connection back then, from Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood" to Amii Stewart, I think it was, who did the disco version...or Isaac Hayes, that always seemed to be part of the vocabulary too. So for someone like me, who didn't grow up in a particularly big city (Nashville), disco did seem like something all furrin, Tru and Andy dancing the night away...in any case, I always liked it, that era was so confused and rich, hippies arguing against the Clash, bluegrassers agin glam, everybody dismissing something like "Good Times" as just superficial, which it was so obviously not...

Just one of the ways to look at it would be to look at the context in which each of these musics was received, at least in the North American suburbs. At the risk of caricature: a night out dancing at a disco meant getting dressed up, probably blow-drying one's hair, maybe splashing a bit of cologne. Not only did you have to think about how you'd look, but it would be obvious to others that you had thought about how you looked.

On the other hand...if you were going to be "partying" with your friends (with rock, naturally, as background music), or even going to a concert, you could just show up in your jeans, a six-pack, and a bag of weed (the fact that even here you might have arranged your locks in the most favorable fashion --as Page himself was wont to do--doesn't matter, because such grooming was not advertised).

but machoism != homophobia

That's very interesting if true (about it coming into common usage as a result of that campaign).

Yeah, problem with that is, so much of the Disco Sucks thing wasn't written down. The opinions of professional critics weren't necessarily so important to it (particularly since there weren't blogs back then). And sometimes it was sublimated: for example, rock and disco kids got into fights at my high school, but they obviously weren't fighting about records; hey were fighting because someone bumped into someone or stepped on their foot or some other trivial thing that would pass unnoticed if someone from their own tribe did it.

()ops is right: There might have been some actual homophobia, but more of it, as far as I could see, was machoism. "The Village People are gay" was something I learned from probably-gay kids who liked them, not Aerosmith lovers denigrating them.

Thanks to this thread, I've been thinking more about high school in the past three days than I have since I graduated. This is both good and bad.

The first one may be partly true (except it doesn't fit with 90s indie electronica) The other two are BULLSHIT and there is absolutely no truth in any of them!

This thread is on day 4, and taking the thread title and mentally substituting a comma for the slash still makes me smile. Which is my problem, I guess.

To say that there is "no truth" in the claim that gay men like disco is, um, ridiculous. I have been dancing and or DJing in gay bars in San Francisco for the last sixteen years. If the DJ puts on a disco song, people dance, end of story. So . . . . cool it. You're making yourself look silly by denying the obvious. Duh, not ALL gay men like disco and, Duh, plenty of straight people like disco (in fact I'd say it's the square office party music of choice). But neither point negates the fact that gay men be loving on some disco, ok?

What is absolutely untruthful is to imply that people disliking disco had anything at all to do with homophobia OR rascism.

But . . . .

If you are looking for direct evidence of the overlap between hatred of disco, love of rock music, and homophobia, I would direct you to the cartoon illustration on the cover of the 60s garage punk reissue compilation "Back From the Grave Vol 2"- a gay man in an effeminate outfit is being spitroasted by male and female Frankenstein/Vampira ghouls, who are also burning disco albums and copies of the Village Voice- this illustration conflates gayness/new york/disco into a "all things we HATE" mixture and openly expresses the desire to torture and kill NYC disco homos, though it's unclear whether their crime is A) their bad taste, B) their gayness, or C) the circular rondelay in which sexuality and aesthetics reinforce each other. I can't find a link that has the artwork in a large enough size so you'll just have to trust me on this one. I recall flipping through records and seeing this image at 16 as a punk rock closet case teen and seeing my fears confirmed- disco was for fags, I liked punk, so I had better stay in the closet as i would rather party with the punk rock ghouls than get down with people with mustaches wearing tight white pants. Homophobia is real, and punk/rockist snobbery about disco is real, and sometimes (gasp) they even overlap. But this doesn't mean that all people who don't like disco therefore ARE homophobic. OK?

Just to refute a claim above by Xhuck.. surely, people in the midwest LOVED working on machines and technology, no doubt. But people working with machines, and people liking music that sounds machine-made isn't a one-follows-the-other type of thing, necessarily. Obviously it was with the few folks who helped get Chicago and Detroit electronic dance music off the ground, but I stress "few".

I've worked and been to many, many software programming and computer hardware companies for the last decade, and I can tell you that many of the people working there completely ABHORED any form of dance, funk, or mostly electronic music. They were all about Steve Miller, Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, and the holy grail, Pink Floyd. It was a common stereotype for programmers (at least in the L.A. area) to have long dark hair, have zits, and wear very large black Pink Floyd t-shirts. Rush was as "techno" as those guys got. Yet, these guys could give you full dissertations about the Fourier series, DFTs and FFTs, and any algorithms used in generating digital sound synthesis.

I think this is a city-to-city phenomenon though. To refute myself, i think about a third of the people at the Dizzee Rascal show I saw last weekend were Microsoft or Amazon employees. In fact, from first hand experience, many people at Microsoft like ELECTRONIC music, not even electronic POP music. It's pretty funny. (Then again, my first ever boss at MS turned me onto Erykah Badu.. so it depends really.)

I guess my point is.. the "Disco Sucks" dynamic and (not really detrimental, just a taste issue) the dynamic of people hating on electronic dance music differed/differs from region to region in the U.S.. L.A. certainly reacts differently than the way the folks in Detroit do, and in a different way than in NYC, etc.

Never said it was. But disco and techno are not the only musics that sound like machines! The Stooges and Black Sabbath TOTALLY sounded like machines (or at least everybody writing about them in 1969 and 1970 seemed to think they did), and the fact that they came from major industrial factory cities probably had something to do with it. Pink Floyd very *consciously* sound machine like, I think. (And of course it's all relative -- as Edd suggested, lots of disco doesn't sound like a machine at all. Lots of it just sounds like soul music.) (Or funk music, of salsa music, or flamenco music, or....rock music!)

There may have been some sort of confusion regarding gender roles etc, but that doesn't necessarily have to do with homphobia. I mean, I consider the idea that gay people does necessarily have to be more feminine-acting than most males a quite homophobic idea in itself.

As I said, the fact that females disliked disco probably had something to do with it. Ever since the days of Bobby Vinton and Brian Hyland, males have hated acts that have typically been popular among females. Disco was much liked by girls, and that in itself would lead a lot of males to hate it. That doesn't have anything to do with homophobia though, in fact, I think most of those who disliked disco strongly didn't even know, in the late 70s, that gay people were more likely to enjoy disco than others were.

Still, most of all I react towards the idea that resistance against disco was rascist. First of all, disco wasn't really black music. It may have been based on black music (rock'n'roll originally was too), but most of the songwriters/producers behind disco were indeed just as white as most rock acts. Plus musical taste usually doesn't have anything to do with skin colour anyway.
The closest thing to rascist that the resistance against disco may have been is the fact that a lot of people would be very sceptic towards any kind of popular music that didn't originate from English speaking countries, and when people hated disco (European disco in particular), it may have been some kind of "rascism" against people from Germany, Netherlands, Spain or other typical disco-producing countries (Baccara's lousy English pronounciation was obviously a popular target in itself)

Still, most of all, the hatred against disco had to do with music, and you could say the entire hatred towards the increasing commercialism within the recording industry was particularly aimed at disco. The same people would usually aslo hate other "corporate" acts such as Peter Frampton, The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac though, only they weren't disco, so they didn't fit in with the anti-disco movement.

1) In Ben Hamper's Rivethead, he mentioned specifically that the problem with a local bar starting disco/New Wave nights (this was in the early '80s) is that nobody wanted to dance because they'd just spent an entire shift on their feet hauling truck parts and hoisting rivet guns and assembly line apparati in a noisy, clangy, factory environment -- they were just too beat to shit to dance.

2) First seeing those Back From the Grave covers in the mid '90s made me madder than anything I can remember, music-wise.

To re-hash tired old points. Only an idiot would claim that dislike for disco was exclusively motivated by sexual/racial prejudice. But only an idiot would argue that dislike for disco was never twisted up with those things. The fact that these prejudices are riddled with logical inconsistencies doesn't mean that they don't exist.

By "increasing commercialism" of the recording industry I assume you mean a perception, not a reality. Because there was this place called Tin Pan Alley and I'm pretty sure that lots of those old composer blokes wrote music purely on a commission basis so it's hard to imagine how the level of commercialism in the industry could increase.

I don't buy that the hatred had to do with music, at least if by that you mean objective formal qualities in some types of music as opposed to others. At bottom, prejudices are ideological, even if they're started from something as material and banal as losing your job. People hate disco because of what they believe it represents, not what it is.

There was before The Beatles and there was after The Beatles. They brought the idea that the artist should write his own songs, have as much creative control as possibly, and try to make "art" in addition. Sure, this wasn't around during Tin Pan Alley or Brill Building, but that way of thinking was very much alive in the late 60s and early 70s. Disco was a rehash of the way things used to be in the early 60s, which provoked a lot of people.

Anyway, if the Beatles did effect this change in the nature of the music industry (and y'know, we keep coming back to that word industry. Could use business if you prefer) they did it by being hugely commercially successful. I'm sure Art for Art's Sake exists. People only find out about it through Commerce.

Well, personally, I feel like the best you can possibly achieve as an artist is if you are able to be both commercially successful and have artistic value in the same breath. From Mozart to The Beatles, the biggest acts are the ones who have managed to combine those two seemingly opposites.

Because most hits, particularly these days, don't have artistic value.

xp

they sure do.

xpost, no way, not when you're on ecstasy.

Replace "Yuppie" with "Religious Right."

If people judge Sister Sledge by We Are Family, is it my fault they are so mistaken? Frankly I dreaded the idea of even owning that song, but there's other stuff they did with the Chic guys that is 20 times better and goes unheard and uncared about, while Donna Summer gets all the accolades. A crime!

As a child I never realized that there was a "disco sucks" phenomenon. I only knew that people seemed to be saying it was a fad, that it would not last. Maybe it was my dad that said that. I begged to differ.

This is all I plan to say on the subject of disco for quite awhile.

light and love

http://www.myspace.com/chr_stopher

(almost typed "devil went down to georgio," someone do that remix plz)

xpost

Strangely enough, your post is actually less coherent and more babbling than many posts in this thread.

One of the reasons for sure. It's probably harder to make a good disco track and easier to make a bad disco track as opposed to say, rock.

Geir, earlier today.

i think the disco suckers were largely composed of AORers. Today's world of a million subgenres is a far cry from the way AOR dominated during that time. there was more of a common if orthodox culture of rock in suburban junior and senior highs back then. today there is no equivalent to led zeppelin in the same way there are no tv shows today with the household viewing % of e.g., Happy Days. so when disco went supernova due to a movie, something other than King Rock suddenly started getting too much attention and was perceived as a threat. of course backlash ensued. around the same time, punk and new wave i think were less threatening due to a combination of being more in the musical tradition of regular rock and roll, not having the glaring racial/gay cultural differences of disco, and simply not penetrating as deeply into the mainstream to the degree disco did.

'Lots of it just sounds like soul music.) (Or funk music, of salsa music, or flamenco music, or....rock music!) '

Exactly. How much of disco sucks is actual musical prejudice? People who hate all black pop actually make more sense to me as far as consistency than those who supposedly love funk and soul, but despise all disco. There's way too much overlap between the three for that to hold up to scrutiny. But as words, funk and soul don't carry the negative conotations 'disco' is burdened with.

'The main reason for the hatred towards disco is that 90 per cent of it sucked. ' Don't buy that--one could say the same thing about any style of music, but where's all the virulence toward them?

you're half right -- disco culture was decadent in the eyes of 60s veterans too, not an extension of the hippie thing but a rebellion against it, the next step on the cultural path to 80s conservatism.

"the bete noir of every Brillo-headed hippie" -- Goldman

My favorite contradiction in Rickey Vincent's otherwise-good Funk book is when he decimates disco for being a repetitive pointless-dance-craze genre with inane lyrics a few chapters after lionizing Rufus Thomas.

styx bassist chuck panozzo came out a few years ago. styx of course were faves of the hard-rockin' anti-disco crowd. later they'd get booed off the stage *at their own headlining stadium shows* for playing synth-dominated pop.

However, from what I've read about Mancuso's original parties, it seems like he was applying a very Zen-like tea ceremony approach to throwing the perfect dance event, which might be a product of hippie interest in such things. Also, in that book Last Night the DJ..., the rhetoric from many of the early DJs sounds quite cosmic: creating the perfect vibrations and flow, etc.

http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a221/hardstaff/rushdiscosucks.jpg

Well, I hate funk even more than I hate disco, but I do not hate soul. OK, I am not too keen on Stax/Volt, but I like Motown, and I really like Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson and a bunch of other black acts who have put sufficient emphasis on melody and harmony.

Now, disco was at times rather melodic, but it was extremely corporate as well, and I think that was the background for most of the disco hate (the same people will also dislike current white corporate trends such as boy/girl bands). And as far as the more prejudiced minority of disco haters went, I think there was more homophobia and sexism in there than rascism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_FXBkoYxMM

you're half right -- disco culture was decadent in the eyes of 60s veterans too, not an extension of the hippie thing but a rebellion against it, the next step on the cultural path to 80s conservatism.

think this is otm. pretty much what Steve Dahl, who was behind the Disco Demolition, has always said. In Chicago (and prob in most places that aren't NYC), disco was associated with rich white young downtown businessmen, not black or gay people. He also now says "lol yeah I was fat and couldn't dance, disco dudes were getting all the women".

aw this thread