origins of fear/hatred of disco

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

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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.

Which reminds me to mention, we seem to be talking strictly in the context of Top 40 here. R&B radio was far less trigger-happy to drop disco off their playlists just yet. (Probably because all the musicians behind those disco platters already joined new R&B/dance/funk bands that were less anonymous, and just carried the disco/funk along with them...)

obviously the big differential re: disco dying is terminology, because 1980 was a HUGE year for disco. but 1980 was also the year when disco "died"--and turned into a verboten word if not sound.

Disco definitely lived on, just incognito and a bit more mutated into what we now call 80s funk/R&B.

I think it threatens to sort of ruin a genre really, this "this is the old stuff, yes sir" sentiment. I remember Simon R saying something about how difficult it was for him to enjoy Aretha Franklyn because he kept thinking of the stuffiness of the language used around soul and I empathised alot with that.

This is a bit of a tangent perhaps, sorry!

the funk vs. disco wars were not at all unlike the rock vs. disco wars. maybe MORE heated because funk got stigmatized as "disco"--"fake, phony, mechanized bullshit" rather than "live, played by people," etc.--by white media. when disco fell, funk fell with it--it's one of the major reasons for P-Funk's collapse (that, and all the drugs)

Heh, I wasn't saying the MUSICIANS were embracing the abandoned disco puppy. Just R&B radio. In this one Rick James greatest hits CD, he describes "You and I" by basically saying "Yeah, we hated disco, but our record company wanted something disco-ey, so I made the first 10 seconds of 'You And I' disco-ey, then brought on the funk."

Rick James's success in 1981 with his fifth album Street Songs (namely "Give It To My Baby" and "Super Freak") was a major milestone, as, acc. to Bootsy Collins, it really brought the funk back into Top 40... given your prelude there, Matos. (Then again, i thought the Gap Band did that a year before, but I guess they didn't strike it as big as James did.)

This brings up the Mojo Chic article...did you read that? Nile and co. were totally about the "real musician" thing...they wanted to be respected like a great rock band and Nile has this anecdote about having Kurtis Blow open for them and being totally disheartened because (as he saw it) Chic's brand of pro muscianship was being usurped by the drum machine, etc....

good on Quincy, this has always been GLARINGLY obvious to me, and MJ lovers seem to hate it when I point out this rather obvious cop.

And again: MORE GAY ROBOTS k thx (where did Spencer go?)

OTM I think it was Dan Selzer on that other thread who would not call anything after 1980 "disco". he had been brainwashed!

Why exactly? This is a pretty old idea. I guess I should clarify that the discomfort is not necessarily conscious and people probably would not even make the connection in their own mind - but the causes are similar.