origins of fear/hatred of disco

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.