I have been in this discussion before, here is an article about what started the Disco Sucks backlash:
It was a catchphrase you couldn’t avoid hearing three decades ago when a backlash started to develop
against the ’70s dance music genre that dominated Top 40 radio stations.
The resentment culminated in an unexpected riot July 12, 1979 at
Comiskey Park in Chicago. It was there fans charged onto the field
during a promotional event called “Disco Demolition Night,” after
Chicago DJ Steve Dahl blew up a box of disco records.
Smashing up disco records was a stunt Dahl did at area bars, but he
got to bring his shtick to a wider audience when White Sox management
started arranging publicity stunts to boost attendance. Over the years,
the event has come to signify something larger in the culture — a point
at which the implicit musical divide between whites and
African-Americans became uncomfortably explicit. It also helped kill
disco as a viable genre.
The hostility towards disco came to a head less than two years after
the movie “Saturday Night Fever” was released, mostly because radio
listeners grew tired of how dominating disco had become. Additionally,
the music got associated with the lifestyle of the rich and famous
because of its connection with New York’s swanky disco Studio 54. That’s
ironic, because disco was forged much the way rock music was — by
people who were considered outsiders.
“Disco was gay, black and Latin in spite of the fact that probably
many of the people who made it happen in a very big way were white,”
says Vince Aletti, the first music critic to write about disco. “Many,
many people perceived it as a kind of undermining force, like rock ’n’
roll was, in a way.”
The music evolved in New York clubs (“disco” being an abbreviation of
the word discothèque), where DJs would get crowds moving with exotic
import records. When early club hits like
Manu Debango’s “Soul Makossa” crossed over to the pop charts, a trend began to emerge. Before long
American artists picked up on it and crafted music to fit the new
market. One such artist was Gloria Gaynor, who had two of the first
disco hits with
“Honey Bee” and
“Never Can Say Goodbye.”“(Those records) were a conscious decision to supply the
up-and-coming disco market,” explains Gaynor. “I was working in clubs up
and down the East Coast and Midwest, and I was seeing these cabarets
being turned into discothèques.”
Studio 54 feverSoon, white artists picked up on the music. The underground rose to the mainstream when artists like
KC and the Sunshine Band and the Bee Gees got Middle America to put on its boogie shoes. Even the sedate Barry Manilow was shaking it at the
“Copacabana.”“When black people dance, that’s regarded as normal, when white
people dance it’s regarded as a phenomenon,” explains rock critic Dave
Marsh. “Disco isn’t listening music. Disco is active dancer music.
That’s what it’s for.”
With the release of “Saturday Night Fever” in late 1977, the trend
became a craze. About the same time, Studio 54 became a tabloid fixture
when it became the playground of celebrities like Jerry Hall and Andy
Warhol and also barred non-beautiful people from entering. Disco was now
being associated with social climbing and posh fashion — not exactly
the qualities that brought smiles to the faces of metal heads or punk
rockers.
According to Paul Natkin, who was assigned to photograph Dahl on
Disco Demolition Night, disco became “a lifestyle thing — guys in white
suits with their gold chains around their necks. Rock 'n' roll was kind
of T-shirts and jeans.”
But Dahl (who did not respond to interview requests for this article)
also had a personal stake in the matter, Natkin and Marsh note. He had
been fired from his previous DJ job at a rock station when it changed to
a disco format. “Here he was out on the street on Christmas Eve,”
Natkin explains. “That’s the reason he hated disco as much as he did.”
In other words, one guy with a grudge changed the face of pop music
in one night. And yet, radio stations that went disco were just pleasing
the public. The “Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack” album sold 11 million
copies and the Bee Gees scored four number one hits from it.
Shakedown, 1979By the summer of 1979, disco was being supplanted as the music of
choice among younger listeners by heavy metal, punk rock and new wave.
The year started with disco hits by Gloria Gaynor, Rod Stewart, Blondie
and Donna Summer holding the top spots — and it seems significant now
that the Bee Gees scored their last-ever number one on June 9, 1979,
with
“Love You Inside Out.” Around this time, radio stations started advertising “Bee Gees-free weekends.” Discontent was in the air(waves).
A changing of the guard seemed to happen in late August when new wavers the Knack took
“My Sharona” to number one for six weeks. It also became the top song of the year.
Heralding this change was Dahl, who Natkin says used to hold promotional
events in bars where he’d dress in a mock Army uniform and break disco
records over his head.
The reason for the Disco Demolition Night promotion, Natkin says, is
that the two worst teams in the American League were playing a
doubleheader and stadium owner Bill Veeck wanted to attract more than
the usual 6,000-person crowd. He got his wish. “We pulled up and there
were lines around the block,” says Natkin.
After the first game, Natkin says, Dahl went onto the field, “gave
his little speech” and offered a box of disco records to be blown to
bits. After the explosion, “the whole place went nuts,” Natkin
remembers. Fans charged out from the stands, wrecking the field and
causing the cancellation of the second game (the first time a game was
canceled due to a factor other than weather). Eventually, police were
called in.
Dahl, says Natkin, thought the event might make the front page of the
local papers the next day, but Disco Demolition Night ended up national
news — and controversial news at that. Dahl’s intent might have been to
mock the “disco lifestyle,” but his stunt was perceived as having
racist overtones. Chic’s Nile Rodgers (who would go on to produce
Madonna) later
likened the event to “Nazi book-burning.”“I was appalled,” remembers Marsh. “It was your most paranoid fantasy
about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately
lead. It was everything you had feared come to life. Dahl didn’t come
from Top 40 radio, he came from album rock radio, which was fighting to
heighten its profile.”
Gaynor, whose
“I Will Survive” had become a disco anthem earlier in the year, agrees: “I’ve always
believed it was an economic decision — an idea created by someone whose
economic bottom line was being adversely affected by the popularity of
disco music. So they got a mob mentality going.”
Disco’s decline was steep. Aletti remembers working at a record label
around that time, and his entire department getting renamed: “We became
the dance music department. Disco became a dirty word.”
Renaming disco didn’t kill it, of course. Donna Summer still had hits, as did Michael Jackson,
Lipps, Inc. and others. But an era had ended. By July 1981, the new wave magazine
Trouser Press noticed disco had caught on amongst the English bands that
would soon dominate the newly-created MTV. “I hate to break the news,
but disco isn’t dead yet,” wrote Robert Payes in a
Spandau Ballet review. “It’s just changed owners.”
These days, disco’s echoes can be heard in the work of artists like Lady Gaga,
Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head and countless songs. It’s also referenced in seminal works of art such
as the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” and the films “Boogie Nights” and
“The Last Days of Disco.” As for the music itself, Gaynor says one
reason people still take to disco is that it delivered on the
egalitarian ideals that early rock ’n’ roll only promised.
“Disco never got credit for being the first and only music ever to
transcend all nationalities, race, creed, color, and age groups,” Gaynor
observes. “It was common ground for everyone.”
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/31832616/ns/today-entertainment/
Hitskin.com
that the backlash was racist or homophobic. Although ABBA's Dancing Queen is one of my guilty pleasures, I never liked the Disco Scene. I'm blue jeans and T-shirts not sequinse and platform shoes. It never occured to me that any particular group epitomized disco.
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