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

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