origins of fear/hatred of disco

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sorry--the "above" at the end was meant to refer back to something I deleted from the post. I'm just thinking about the people I grew up around (people in their early-mid-20s at the most, my mother had me as a teenager), and realizing how completely racist, sexist, and homophobic a lot of them were. all of which factors in, to me, as part of the disco backlash when in fact much of the era's rock had many of the same exact musical qualities (or lack thereof) that the anti-discoids detested.

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:20 (twenty-one years ago)

Does anyone remember "no synthesizers were used on this recording" stickers? I seem to recall seeing it on some vinyl rock records (maybe a Boston record - but I'm guessing).

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:25 (twenty-one years ago)

Queen! (until they started using synthesizers)

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:25 (twenty-one years ago)

Tesla's actaully always used to say "no machines were used on this recording"! Which is pretty weird, seeing how they were named after the guy who invented the alternating current motor, and their albums all had names like Mechanical Resonance and The Great Radio Controversy.

― xhuxk, Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:30 (twenty-one years ago)

Boston would be pretty weird too, since M.I.T. genius Tom Scholz was clearly the biggest techie in the history of rock music (he even inented the Rockman, so you can walk around playing guitar without plugging it in or something).

― xhuxk, Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:32 (twenty-one years ago)

Sweet were totally a MAN's band. What are you talking about, Matos?

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

― donut debonair (donut), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:32 (twenty-one years ago)

I think hatred of synths had nothing to do with homophobia (who knows how many disco haters even were aware of its roots, anyway) and everything to do with an aversion to/fear of assembly-line, mass-produced, soulless music.

― ()ops (()()ps), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:35 (twenty-one years ago)

you could say that about string sections, too, but the point is that rock = masculine for a lot of the people I'm talking about.

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:37 (twenty-one years ago)

There's always this pop glam rock bridge between disco and rock in the mid 70s that's always grossly overlooked.. mainly in the UK.. Sweet, Angel, Heavy Metal Kids, Johnny Kongos, Gary Glitter, etc. that sort of invented what we call "American Sports Rock".. Queen fortified it. It's an interesting paradox.

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

― donut debonair (donut), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:37 (twenty-one years ago)

get one prog rock!

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:38 (twenty-one years ago)

so anyway, all this is adding up to is that rock was conflicted and contradictory about its impulses toward presenting itself as "real". but then again, so was disco -- at least once "soulfulness" of vocals (loleatta holloway, etc) became an on-again off-again obsession. (cheryl lynn and sylvester had big hits ABOUT feeling real.) and so is every other kind of western popular music. maybe rock in the disco-sucks late '70s was just more *neurotic* about it. but it was hardly alone. (disco sucks basically IS hair metal sucks, when you get down to it. sylvester was a poison fan; he would totally agree with me.)

― xhuxk, Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:40 (twenty-one years ago)

well then why the "no synths used" stickers? it's not as if "rock circles" is this monolithic entity, and every person who bought a rock album in the 70s liked and thought the same things.

― ()ops (()()ps), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:40 (twenty-one years ago)

are you guys all still here???? yikes!

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:41 (twenty-one years ago)

the post disco-sucks era is, of course, when things got REALLY interesting and the robots took over completely. things always get so good when nobody is looking.

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:47 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah but Chuck my sense is that while obviously disco divadom goes back before disco solidified as a genre, back then it was more like "church-bred R&B singing" or whatever; the "disco diva" as a vocal type didn't really come into its own till Donna Summer or so, and I'd say it didn't become solidified into an archetype till around the time "disco died," just like the Grateful Dead's music didn't become really psychedelic until after they'd left Haight-Ashbury. (and Scott is basically otm, but there's been loads of discussion and agreement about that on ILM for years now!)

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:49 (twenty-one years ago)

>eah but Chuck my sense is that while obviously disco divadom goes back before disco solidified as a genre, back then it was more like "church-bred R&B singing" or whatever; the "disco diva" as a vocal type didn't really come into its own till Donna Summer or so, and I'd say it didn't become solidified into an archetype till around the time "disco died,"<

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.

― xhuxk, Tuesday, 5 April 2005 23:57 (twenty-one years ago)

hey spencer c. if your thesis has to do w/ this issue i'd really like to read it, please do post

― gor gor the hill giant, Wednesday, 6 April 2005 00:16 (twenty-one years ago)

I think you can get at the gays/machines connection without having to strain yourself to make the "people who dislike the one also dislike the other" claim. With *electronic music* making (so this shades into but is not the same as disco, obviously) part of the imagery or rhetoric around it as an activity is that it is somehow *unnatural* because it is mediated by technology whose novelty makes its mechanical / thinglike qualities show up as marked in some way. Acoustic guitars are obviously manufactured technological artifacts too- but they don't *code* in that way, while drum machines and synths do- that's just how our culture has tended to see these things. This capacity of electronic gear to signify as more technologically mediated than other instruments is compounded by the imagery and sound design contexts (Forbidden Planet sdtrk, sci-fi films and TV shows in general) in which these instruments were first used in pop culture- a context and imagery bound up with the future. So if electronic music making is associated with the unnatural AND the futuristic, it is going to appeal to people who somehow feel themselves to be 1) "unnatural" in terms of their identity, their gender, their ability to fit in 2) have a stake in imagining a future society precisely because they feel ill at ease in the present society. I think this is a partial, maybe sketchy explanation for why proportionally gays are over-represented in sci-fi fandom, and also why there seems to be an associative link in the culture's imagination between queerness and electronic music making. You could compare this interface between the inhuman, the unnatural, the futuristic, and the queer with, say William S. Burrough's cultivation of the inhumanity of the junkie as one way of negotiating his queerness, routing it through a celebration of the artificial in terms that make it seem both repellent and yet powerful, compelling. What drag does to the authenticity of gender as something you can simulate, electronic instruments do with the capacity to create simulations of acoustically immediate "natural" sound: it reveals the "real" to be something you can manipulate and chop up and reconstruct- this is appealing (maybe falsely so) to people who regard themselves as shut out from access to a membership in the sanctioned collectivity of people who celebrate their real love with real legal marriages etc. This may or may not convince you, but it's one way of trying to connect these things together.

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:11 (twenty-one years ago)

the post disco-sucks era is, of course, when things got REALLY interesting and the robots took over completely.

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

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Which reminds me of something I was thinking about when trying to answer the "songs about gayness" thread. The closet is still the founding experience of most gay adolescents, and I reckon it makes you less likely to be the kind of person who grows up to be the "lead singer of rock band"- the closet is all about inhibiting yourself, not expressing or giving away what you think and feel, etc. It conditions your reflexes in ways that would probably hold you back from being a charismatic confident hey look-at-me kind of person, and from feeling comfortable taking up the first person and singing "I feel X . . . ". On the other hand, it would give an emo singer plenty of fodder for endless navel gazing self-analysis and complaining, so maybe the closet is PERFECT. But I reckon the closet would probably produce more bass players, you know, the one in the background who's not flashy, who just holds it down. Okay now I've probably totally derailed this thread so I'll shut up.

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:23 (twenty-one years ago)

I still think these links to homophobia and/or rascism are still clueless, and just pathetic attempts to defend a style of music that was simply musically inferior.

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.

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:26 (twenty-one years ago)

Geir, if you cannot honestly comprehend how "disco sucks" was homophobic (and please keep in mind that "sucks" wasn't a widespread epithet back then--it's mostly due to the "disco sucks" brigade that it became one), please stick your head back in the sand.

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:34 (twenty-one years ago)

xpost

"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.

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:38 (twenty-one years ago)

Disco was musically inferior to, for instance, symphonic rock - a style of music that was musically complex and required a lot of talent to play, not to mention compose.

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:40 (twenty-one years ago)

it really was all these things. overexposure, tons of mediocre stuff put out by the majors, homophobia, the economy, etc. plus, it was 70's (love)hangover time by 1979. middle-america had lost its job and couldn't afford coke anymore.

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:41 (twenty-one years ago)

which was okay by me, cuz then rap and hardcore and new wave(disco) came around for me to listen to and i still had my donna summer 45s.

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:42 (twenty-one years ago)

middle-america had lost its job and couldn't afford coke anymore.

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

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:45 (twenty-one years ago)

haha I have a job and I can't find any coke!

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:46 (twenty-one years ago)

i just realized that i've been having a continuous disco party in my room for over 30 years. first sly & the family stone, then donna and the rest of that kool gang,then bananarama, then new order, then madonna,then raphouseelectrotechno, then whatever weird shit i find lying around today (which is plentiful and rewarding.) i feel sad for discosucksers.

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:48 (twenty-one years ago)

when i was in "high" school in the 80's i think we paid, like, 100 dollars for a gram of coke. and it wasn't always very good. now it's like, what, ten dollars? okay, it's probably not that cheap, but it's cheaper isn't it? kids today don't know how good thay have it!

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:52 (twenty-one years ago)

Um, isn't coke really cheap nowadays? I reckon Middle American can afford it.

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?

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:54 (twenty-one years ago)

Ives! Cuz he is OG Danbury hardcore and Connecticut hardcore rulz!!!

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:56 (twenty-one years ago)

Drew, no. Don't do it. For real. No one has made it out of the abyss, don't let it happen to you.

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:56 (twenty-one years ago)

i learned how to do the hustle in gym class in 1976

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

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 01:58 (twenty-one years ago)

Has anyone written a book yet about how a lack of cheap coke hastened the demise of disco and increased the demand for crack which invented rap which started out as disco?

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:02 (twenty-one years ago)

really, rosemary! How about the alley cat?

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:03 (twenty-one years ago)

Scott, I have always had a

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

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

theory.

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:04 (twenty-one years ago)

Scott, read the Jeff Chang book--there's a whole section about how crack came to be, really interesting stuff.

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:06 (twenty-one years ago)

questlove in his Believer interview talks about the crack invented rap thing.

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:10 (twenty-one years ago)

those disco books you mentioned up above sound really interesting. especially the Sylvester one.

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:11 (twenty-one years ago)

Matos, is there a lot of Patrick Cowley info in that Sylvester book? He is my hero.

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:12 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm way late to thread, but must point out that in the spring of '79, the biggest AOR station in my town started mixing disco hits in with the usual rock fare. I imagine they felt they couldn't ignore it.

― Rickey Wright (Rrrickey), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:16 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah, homophobia definitely had something to do with the death of disco, but you gotta remember how MAINSTREAM disco was at one point. I suspect that the majority of those tens of millions of people buying the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack didn't associate the music with homosexuality (was there a gay character in the film, by the way? Been about ten years since I've seen it.) It's not like it was on the way up and was beaten down; it really couldn't get any bigger.

― Mark (MarkR), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:23 (twenty-one years ago)

i think the fear of machines = fear of gays thing makes perfect sense and as other folks have already elucidated (something which bears repeating) i think it's about the supposed unnaturalness of machines and homosexuality. even if we midwesterners (i count myself among those ranks) spend our lives with machines, they still can take on a very macabre quality especically if they are job-replacing-machines or machines that deal with surveillance. similarly, homosexuality's unnaturalness (to some) stems from these same kinds of fears - fears about the undermining of the traditional family unit, promiscuity, another equally valid way of life that is threatening and other. disco may have been about halston and cocaine (it still is to a very large extent obsessed with fashion and drugs, but so is a shitload of other genres of music), but it also represented a (somewhat hidden?) upward mobility for minorities be they of race or sexual orientation. so the backlash against disco, if it was ostensibly against travolta and the glitz of saturday night fever, was also against these very real societal changes that the disco phenomenon itself represented.

― tricky disco (disco stu), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 02:58 (twenty-one years ago)

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

― ()ops (()()ps), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 03:02 (twenty-one years ago)

yeah of course not

― basquiat (disco stu), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 03:08 (twenty-one years ago)

so fine then, the fear of disco comes from american self-hatred resulting from the innate understanding of the culture of death and materialism which advanced capitalism represents.

― disco basquiat (disco stu), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 03:13 (twenty-one years ago)

i was afraid of Yul Brenner in Westworld.

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 03:24 (twenty-one years ago)

and the Fembots. actually, i wasn't that afraid of the Fembots.

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 03:25 (twenty-one years ago)

A friend of mine had a band when he was like nine years old called Slophead (pronounced "slope-head" -- with an umlaut over the "o"). They were a metal band, but instead of guitar he twanged on a venetian blinds cord. They had a song called "Burning Electric" which was about setting fire to a synthesizer. (I have a tape of this.)

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Wednesday, 6 April 2005 04:08 (twenty-one years ago)

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