origins of fear/hatred of disco

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.