origins of fear/hatred of disco

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

please don't go - kc and the sunshine band
rock with you - michael jackson
call me - blondie
funkytown- lipps inc
upside down- diana ross
another one bites the dust - queen

so disco ws displaced by, um, disco, basically

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king's x, faith no more, janes addiciton, and living colour had already displaced hair-metal on MTV and the charts before grunge came along, michaelangelo. the cause and effect thing was a total myth...

"The disco department was renamed the dance music department. It was an issue of semantics. All this music was happening, but we couldn't call it disco." Caviano started giving interviews saying, "It's dance music! It's dance music!" while simultaneously blaming the media for disco's decline.

Xhuck, Lethal, you're also forgetting Kano's "I'm Ready" which was more disco than anything listed above, which became a big hit in 1981.

Matos is right, Chuck. I was 16 in 1991, a big metal kid. Obv. there had been little inklings of things that we liked that started to get us out of hair metal, like Faith No More and Janes...and Metallica's Misfits covers - which are totally underrated as a big thing for getting metal kids like me into punk - but after Nirvana, things were DIFFERENT for us...we all totally jumped on the alternative bandwagon....it was a big thing to us, just typical small town (pre Internet!) kids with little in the way of exposure to punk and alt stuff before that.

And I'll be damned if I can understand how blatant Eurodisco moves and Chic songs sounded nothing like "anything resembling what was considered disco in the 70s," but I've argued with that bizarre perception repeatedly on other threads, and don't have the energy to do so again here. Suffice to say that disco encompassed many, many different sounds in the '70s. The idea that it suddenly turned some drastic sonic corner in 1980 (or '81 or '82 or '83) is completely absurd. It changed it name, basically, or rather, it had a name change thrust upon it. And it continued to change, like it always had.