origins of fear/hatred of disco

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.

This whole discussion has got me craving the new Daft Punk album for a number of reasons!

now I can go back to fantasizing about my new, healthy, all-natural gay robot-a-go-go band, the Sperm Trees.

There were several other good reasons for people to dislike it though:

- Rockers felt threatened by the polished sound, completely free of noisy guitars
- Prog fans disliked it for the same reason they had also disliked bubblegum and the teen oriented glam stuff, and would later dislike punk: It was too musically simple
- People preoccupied with rock ideologi disliked the fact that there were people behind caring more about constructing hits to bring them money rather than about making good music.

YET.

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(By the way, straight males might have listened to Sylvester and Chic's "Real People" album more carefully if they'd realized they would have gotten laid if they'd danced to those hits. Most indie boys nowadays know that dancing - well or badly - makes you 10 times hotter. Here in Miami we have the swishy mid '90s Britpop to thank for that development).

xpost that proves my point!

What is cryptic about it? For the record, I do not think that homosexuals and machines are 'unnatural'.

he did kind of hate machines, now that i think about it.

and all this talk about disco, machines and gays cannot lumber forward another step withour a mention of "There But for The Grace Of God Go I" by MACHINE which is, in and of itself, a version of this very discussion...

Chorus:
There but for the grace of God go I

Poppy and the family left the dirty streets
To find a quiet place overseas
And year after year the kid has to hear
The do's the don'ts and the dears
And when she's ten years old she digs that rock 'n' roll
But Poppy bans it from home

Chorus

Baby, she turns out to be a natural freak
Popping pills and smoking weed
And when she's sweet sixteen she packs her things and leaves
With a man she met on the street
Carmen starts to bawl, bangs her head to the wall
Too much love is worse than none at all

Chorus

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