origins of fear/hatred of disco

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

Its interesting to often see otherwise open-minded forward thinking people dismiss the entire category of dance music including old disco, house, etc., IDM (even the term suggests that regular dance music must be dumb), and all sorts of electronica. Origins/reasons for this behavior? And how much does it annoy you?

XPOST to the person who asked how to define "disco":

The origins we've been speaking of so far are mainly the late 70s glutton of disco produkt... however, since she did bring up dance music in general.. feel free to interject in whatever context of dance music you feel is worth noting, since Susan opened it up so.

lots of xposts

Sorry to say. I'm just saying that out of taste though. I still manage to find the gems in the very large haystack, but that wall of old used disco records is still, to this day, a very large haystack.

i think drew daniel talked about his Disco awakening after an adolescence revolving round the hardcore scene in his Invisible Jukebox.

That's because there has never been any credible evidence that these have ever really existed, any more than hatred of any other random genre. They were never an organized movement like Disco Sucks was; in fact, I'm a little confused about why they're even on the same thread (despite the fact that I believe a lot of techno and house IS disco.) Hatred of Ashlee Simpson has more in common with Disco Sucks than, say, Eminem pretending that "nobody listens to disco" does.

Most common rock song for teens in the '70s: "Stairway to Heaven"!

Today, "Authenticity" means "being able to play one's instruments and sing live and write one's own songs"... whereas in the Disco era, "Authenticity" meant "being able to showcase one's musical talents outside this very specific circus of fashion and flash that was mostly gawdy".

Because no one can say musicians who played on disco records lacked talent..

Then again "talent" is a highly mutable term as well...

etc.

I wrote a pice sorta related to this a couple years ago. I remember Ewing liked it so I maybe it is ILM-worthy.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/columns/resonant-frequency/08-14-02.shtml

(archive messed up but text is there.)

Because no one can say musicians who played on disco records lacked talent..

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).

I guess, but why would they say that when there's so much evidence that that's complete bollocks?

Maybe more interestingly, why would they say that when Born in the USA, which sounded exactly like the large machines in the factory I was working in at the time, was less than 10 years away?

True. Although the Studio Hack Guitar Solos so prevalent at the time now seem much, much more faceless than synths.

x-post

My grandparents and mom were the ones who INTRODUCED me to "I Feel Love"! They thought it was cool and exciting.

Walter Hughes' "In the Empire of the Beat" (from Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose's Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture anthology) has loads to say about the intersection of gay culture and machines (particularly in re: gyms and working out and clones and whatnot).

Bizwise, disco helped sink the music industry for a few years--there was such an excessive supply comparative to the demand of the audience. Labels figured they could print money by putting out loads of the stuff and there were enormous financial setbacks as a result. This is discussed in detail in Love Saves the Day by Tim Lawrence, which is a key book for all discussions of '70s disco.

This is interesting (and I'd admittedly never thought of it before), but I don't know what it would have to do with how, say, straight midwesterners *viewed* gays. The claim that "there are a host of reasons why some people don't like machines which are related I think to why those same people don't like homosexuals" sounds completely absurd to me; believe me, at a time when mid-Americans had no idea the Village People or Queen were gay, I doubt it occured to them that some gay people might have worked out a lot on bench-press machines. But maybe I'm missing something; if so, I'd like to know what. (I mean, obviously, lots of album covers by Silver Convention or Bionic Boogie or whoever juxtaposed machine visuals with gay visuals, but these were pretty subcultural records; Bob Seger fans never saw them.)

I heart this book.

BTW, another great book I just read: The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson, extremely well written and full of amazing, deeply researched detail about black drag in L.A., San Francisco during the '70s, and how people in the disco world dealt with the fallout. Similarly, there's a new book about Chic called Everybody Dance that's not so well written but has a lot of great info.

And I mean those LATER Silver Convention albums (e.g. *Madhouse*), after they stopped having # 1 pop hits (though I doubt very many people bought the albums with those #1 hits on them either, actually.)

xp

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