origins of fear/hatred of disco

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.