Why does disco get such a bad rap?

Overexposure.

While there were unheard from small groups listening to the likes of Pink Floyd, and AC/DC, It was ALL disco as far as the media , and pop culture was concerned. This pop culture in the 70s went like this:


Kiss > Kiss > Disco > Fleetwood Mac > Disco > Disco

You had your disco music, disco clubs, disco dancing, disco ducks, silk disco shirts, disco, disco, disco! On TV shows everyone from "CHiPS" to Buck Rodgers were disco dancing. Even the rock guys started doing disco.

For those that didn't care for it it was just too much. The whole end of decade was being defined by it. Just no comparison to dance music of today.

I'm not reading your personal blog post. I just want to say boney m and eruption is patrician. I mean almost all of disco is. But Italo disco is dogshit.

As much as I love disco, there were a number of bad and cheesy disco records.

I think that overexposure of the genre was what doomed it. Disco so fully saturated the culture of the late 70s (radio, TV, movies) that you were forced to either love it or hate it. And many of those who initially loved it eventually grew tired of it. By the time of its decline, it seemed like everyone was ready for something else...anything else.

Also, I think disco grew to represent the excesses of the 70s...symbolizing a decadent lifestyle that increasingly felt more alien to people suffering through the recession of the late 70s. I think people got to the point where they wanted a more organic-sounding music that they could better connect with. I don't know if the 80s necessarily provided that...but at least some artists (like Bruce Springsteen) seemed ready to capture an audience turned off by disco.

The interesting thing is that several of today's artists are adopting some of the sounds of disco again. It seems to have caught on somewhat with the generations who either didn't live through the original disco era or were too young to remember it.

>>74195720
>It's been suggested that rawk fans couldn't deal with some other genre taking over the airwaves from them
^This. Rockists are sensitive and touchy as fuck.

>>74196014
This is all true. Overexposure, commercialization, some bad songs, and yes, of course rockfags upset that they weren't front-and-center.

you don't need to add "bad" in front of rap. it can be assumed that it is bad already.

disco sucked ass

Lots of rockers bandwagoned disco at the time, but those songs sure didn't stay in the live setlists very long. Has Elton John _ever_ played anything from Victim of Love in concert?

Nile Rodgers, and his former Chic band mates Bernard Edwards & Tony Thompson, were all very well respected for their musicianship and production work. None of them had difficulty finding work, post-Chic.

As someone who was 14 in 1978, I can tell you that me and my friends were into Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Molly Hatchet, etc. None of us wanted to listen to fucking Donna Summer.

>>74196295
But that's the catch. Plenty of people sought Nile Rodgers and the Bee Gees as producers during the 80s, but very few people wanted to buy a Chic or Bee Gees album.

Racism and homophobia. Disco was seen as too gay and black.

>>74196449
I don't agree there because me and my friends grew up in the sticks pretty much, we didn't know a thing about gay culture that we could mentally link disco with it.

you're not supposed to rap on disco beats duh

desu a lot of black artists really didn't like disco much either for a number of reasons--one being the push by record labels to do disco songs and the white-ifying of the genre. Jazz artists wrote it off as too simplistic while funksters like George Clinton disliked it for the above-mentioned reasons.

maybe cause the lyrics were always meta about dancing and such

>>74196550
Bullcrap, tons of rawk songs were about being a rock star and doing groupies.

>>74195720

It got repetitive after a while with the same four on the floor beat in every song. It was like having sex in the same position for three straight years.

Eventually it evolved in what would become dance/club music in the 80s. Madonna's everybody and shannon's let the music play were early disco derivatives

You'd have to be a major revisionist to deny that disco was the soundtrack to gays and people of color coming of age and celebrating it. For many it still is. And you'd have to be musically illiterate to gloss over the genius of men like Moroder, Midney and Costandinos - to name just a few.

Of course there was a lot of disliking of disco because of its fanbase--it directly confronted the notion that the straight white male was the sole arbiter of truth in popular music. Disco didn't suck in Europe or on the US coasts: it just sucked with flyover country rednecks. No surprises there.

"The industry" only barely tolerated it because it snowballed outside the claws of the majors: thank God they were severely burned when they tried to cash in by acquisition and quickly found their mass-market disco LPs returned by the millions. Guess disco really sucked for them.

>>74196696
Overexposure didn't do disco any favors. Marketing can run anything into the ground and FWIW I think funk was better dance music than disco, that four-on-the-floor beat you mention lacks a good groove.

>>74196449
>Disco was seen as too gay and black.
Are you retarded?

I'm, sure disco had it's share of racist haters, but it is my opinion that the Disco Duck song had more to do with it's downfall. It seemed that's when the line had been crossed, and it became a parody. A big unfunny joke. People became embarrassed to be a fan. Overexposure then turned it into to a cartoon.

Blame it on the media, and Rick Dees.

>>74195847
>Italo disco is perfect
ftfy

>>74196752
Exactly. It became a spoof after a while with disco duck, and disco dog, and cheap bands where the producer was the star - like silver convention. It had a good run and they milked it for all it as worth, but eventually people got sick of it.

>>74196712
I don't get your insistance that it's about racism and homophobia. One of the most popular films ever was Saturday Night Fever that made millions of white heterosexual kids want to be John Travolta.

Racism, sexism and homophobia exist and no one is denying that. But it's not why disco got a bad rap.

>>74196791
No, that anon has a point. People in the Midwest generally disliked it for these connotations. If you were alive back then you would know this

I think the problem was that it ruined the extremely solid black R&B tradition that went back to 60s Motown (Berry Gordy, the O'Jays, the Temptations, etc) and replaced it with a lot of formulaic dreck.

>>74196874
>I don't get your insistence that it's about racism and homophobia
Here, I'll help

>>74196712
>people of color
>fuck Straight White Males™ amirite

Xir's a tumblrina, everything is about racism and homophobia.

>>74196510
Tell that to the Sugarhill Gang

>>74196904
>People in the Midwest generally disliked it for these connotations
So a minority of hardcore "rayciss"" Christianske disco therefore it wasn't beloved? That's such a generalizing statement, disco was hated because of the sole fact that it was seen as dancey mainstream appeal shit by dadrockers. The people who though it as a racial thing we're a vast minority.

>>74196571
>being a rock star and doing groupies
neither of which is dancing

I'm sure there was a little bit of homophobia in the sometimes over the top negative response to disco...but OTOH didn't the Village People have several top ten hits, and got so popular they even got their own movie? It's hard to think of a more (perhaps stereotypically) gay act than them.

Also Elton John and Judas Priest were huge with rawk fans despite being queerer than a three dollar bill.

>>74196910
I don't. R&b music was great during that time with the spinners, Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson's off the wall, etc etc. It remained strong through the early 80s with prince and teddy pendergrass

>>74196904
When I was a kid back then, we didn't even know what a gay person was. We just disliked disco because it wasn't Zeppelin, Aerosmith, or ZZ Top.

>>74196951
I'm not saying that race was the sole reason, but I also think your looking back on the period with rose tinted glasses. I lived through it, and many thought disco was for "fags and niggers" to quote my father at the time

Nah I think what ruined disco was really the Yuropean stuff like ABBA that managed to systematically strip out all of the blues and funk sounds from the stuff. I mean, even Christgau, who was generally quite supportive of disco couldn't stomach ABBA.

>>74196014
>overexposure
This. Every kind of popular music fades from popularity at some point, but disco was so aggressively popular and pushed by advertising execs that it died a fiery, public death instead of fading away nature.

>>74195788
You forgot when Kiss did disco.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7isxoTIeYM

>>74196857
Nah, it bites the dust dead last.
>Hi-NRG >Italo disco

>>74197080
It's a funny thing because most of the music acts that really generated the big anti-disco backlash like the Bee Gees were white as a snowflake.

>>74197065
>to quote my father at the time
Not every dadrocker in 1977 was your faggot dad

>>74196014
>Also, I think disco grew to represent the excesses of the 70s...symbolizing a decadent lifestyle that increasingly felt more alien to people suffering through the recession of the late 70s. I think people got to the point where they wanted a more organic-sounding music that they could better connect with. I don't know if the 80s necessarily provided that...but at least some artists (like Bruce Springsteen) seemed ready to capture an audience turned off by disco.
Right. This is also what happened in the early 90s when grunge broke. There was a recession going on and nobody wanted to see some faggot in Beverly Hills posing in a hot tub with strippers. Grunge managed to connect with audiences better than glam metal.

>>74197143
That was because the bee gees were played incessantly on the radio. You literally couldn't escape them - it was to the point where a.m. stations were having 'bee gees free weekends'

>>74197143
Uh huh. And tons of people who didn't know jack about gay culture loathed disco because of the Bee Gees being horribly overplayed and overexposed.

I also don't deny that a lot of rock fans didn't like it because they said it was manufactured electronic crap that took no heart/soul/talent/instrument playing to make.

And let's not forget Nile Rodgers didn't like it either. He may have softened over time, but at the time he hated that Chic got lumped in with the disco acts, when he'd intended them to be sort of an "urban Roxy Music".

Disco does sound pretty gay if you listen to it, and I don't mean in a homophobic way. What started out as a mutation of 60s-70s black music styles ended up as a mass-produced, corporate, white bread brand of music. But was still connected with "black music" by racists.

From a musical standpoint, I see disco as being a bastardization of funk music. Much in the same way that hip-hop and rap are bastardizations of funk music (but that's not the topic of this thread). It's much more clean and way less offensive sounding...very radio friendly. Also it tends to be way poppier, which adds to the radio friendliness. The technicality, musicianship, and feel are all almost non-existent. It doesn't have the nasty groove that funk does. The music is very predictable, cheesy and formulaic...string orchestras predictably inserted. There's not really any blues. Like rap and hip hop, it's pretty much inferior to funk music in every way.

Of course there are a few exceptions to every rule, like The Bee Gees. But even then, songs like Stayin' Alive I'd have trouble considering to be disco.

Forget the gay/black thing. Disco was inherently a social form of music. You go to parties, bump ass, have a few drinks, bring along some girls. That obviously doesn't appeal to /r9k/ neckbeards who listened to Rush in a dark basement.

The problem is most casual listeners judge disco by the pop hits, which is a bit liking judging all rock music based on hearing Nickelback.

There were loads of great producers and artists that just never got heard by mainstream audiences. Look to labels like Salsoul, West End for the real deal. A lot of those records where made by musicians with real chops. The stuff that was played at clubs like The Loft and Paradise Garage by pioneers like David Mancuso and Larry Levan is in another class compared to what most people think of as disco.

I think it was more a case of this really. I'm not really buying into your homophobia argument as the glam movement was dripping with it...and that didn't really seem to bother anyone too much. And soul was huge in the early 70's...right before disco broke out. No problems with any racial boundaries there.

I just think people felt slightly betrayed and shocked when rock and rollers and pop stars started jumping on the bandwagon, and giving up their rock and roll sound in order to get airplay or crossover into previously uncharted territory. (i.e Bowie, Elton, etc.) I think people felt they were selling out.

>>74196295
Along these lines, one of my favorite things about disco is that it was the pinnacle of instrumental virtuosity in pop music. As a tromboner from a family of brass players, those horn parts are insane. After that, electronics began to take over, and pop musicians stopped playing instruments primarily.

>>74197132
Hi-NRG is wonderful, but it lacks the gloriously broken English of Italo disco.

>>74197489
Glam was mostly a British thing. Alice Cooper found out early on that Americans were far more receptive to shock antics than crossdressing dudes. I mean, KISS had a hell of a lot more commercial success than the New York Dolls (nuts to you, Christgau).

>>74197489
I think homophobia was an element of why disco fell, but not the main one. There were a lot of contributing factors, and that one certainly didn't help.

Also, glam was nowhere near as popular as disco.

>>74196712
>Disco didn't suck in Europe or on the US coasts: it just sucked with flyover country rednecks. No surprises there

Partially true. Disco was an urban West Coast/Northeast thing that didn't connect well with people in Texas or Iowa. Studio 54 became so exclusive and elite that Steve Rubell pushed people away unless they were a big-time celeb. Disco became too elitist.

>>74196359
Hey, fuck you kid, Donna Summer is great.

As others have said, its probably due to disco's exposure to the mainstream through the film "Saturday Night Fever". Disco was its own deal, its own scene kind of rolling along, then SNF came out, and it all got really overexposed.

The industry did the same thing ironically again, to less effect, with John Travolta in Urban Cowboy, with country line dancing/mechanical bulling riding in bars, to the masses.

I think folks will buy and go along with a lot, but if it begins to feel like they're being force fed stuff, there will be pushback for sure. Even happened with the old rock dinosaurs, and newer rock acts.

I would disagree that that disco was a fad - two of the biggest artists of the early 80s, Michael Jackson and Madonna, kept that disco groove going right on into the 80s and beyond. So did indie/alternative artists of the 80s such as New Order and Depeche Mode. Disco never went away.

Disco came out US R&B in '71-'73.

Something like Edwin Starr's 'Running Back and Forth (Motown, 1970) is a staging post; or 'You're the One' by Little Sister (Stone Flower, 1970).

By '73 it's recognisable as a style in Love Unltd's Love's Theme' or Harold Melvin's 'The Love I Lost'.

There were European records being played (Crystal Grass, Chachakas, etc) but as curiosities, not major hits.

The European guys didn't really show up 'til 75-76: Moroder, Cerrone, Alec Costandinos; by '78 Eurodisco was everywhere and ABBA had a big part in that.

>>74197670
It got rebranded. It became dance music. Donna summer survived into the 80s. She worked hard for her money. Same with the pointer sisters

>>74195720
>it blended the best elements of Motown, soul, and funk from the 60s-70s along with other elements like Latin, classical, reggae, and blues
personally I don't care about most of those elements on their own, so why would I want them blended?

>>74197080
ABBA's great too.

>>74197418
Again though, growing up in Tennessee I didn't know what a gay person was. The reason we didn't like disco had very little if anything to do with racism or homophobia, in fact all the disco fans I knew were straight white people. We disliked it because it was flamboyant, cheesy, and didn't involve playing a real instrument.

>>74197628
>Liberalism was an urban West Coast/Northeast thing that didn't connect well with people in Texas or Iowa. Washington became so exclusive and elite that Hillary Clinton pushed people away unless they were a big-time celeb. Democrats became too elitist.

Not to derail the thread, just noticed the similarity, carry on.

>>74197751
And also, from what I remember, most blacks were into funk, not disco.

>>74197690
Earl young young and David mancuso were the really big contributors, imho. Morose was also important

>>74197795
*moroder

>>74197751
That's why I said that homophobia played a part in the anti-disco backlash, instead of saying that it was the sole cause of the anti-disco backlash.

>>74197719
This. Disco became a dirty word, so they started to be like "oh, yeah, disco sucks, how about this dance/pop/Hi-NRG instead?"

For further evidence, look at how the word "disco" survived and thrived in Europe throughout the 80s with music that wasn't that much different from what was happening in America.

>>74197775
ebin post

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>ywn never ruin normies fun by blowing up their shitty gay dance music while blasting anti-numale macho rock

At least it happened

>>74197751
>flamboyant

So in other words, faggy. Nice contradiction.

Like someone else said, radio stations were playing disco all day every day and rock fans couldn't deal with it because they're oversensitive ninnies.

>>74197751
>didn't involve playing a real instrument
Ironic that this was a widespread enough view when >>74197492 was true.

>>74197836
except it was just a different brand of normie that did that

>>74197836
Pretty hilarious that some were blasting Another One Bites the Dust in these scenarios when that's practically a disco song with a gay singer.

>>74197840
Don't agree. The FM stations in my neck of the woods didn't play any disco at all other than maybe the Rolling Stones' "Miss You". But come on, it's ridiculous to say that rawk wasn't alive and well during the height of disco. It's more like rawk fans couldn't handle anything other than rawk being #1. No different than my grandparents listening to Cab Calloway and Lawrence Welk on repeat back then and acting as if Elvis and Little Richard had never happened, let alone Jimi Hendrix. Same basic stubborn refusal to move out of one's comfort zone.

I can't come to any other conclusion than it's just lousy cookie-cutter music which was, at least visibly, enjoyed primarily by despicable slimy posers with coke spoons around their necks looking to get laid. I can't think of any positive connotation disco brings to mind whatsoever - everything I associate with it is negative. It hasn't aged well, unlike other musical genres (I can still listen to classical, swing, folk, proto-rock, hippie rock, AOR stuff, early hip-hop, etc., but not KC & The Sunshine Band). I have never heard of the so-called "good" disco music artists mentioned in this thread, but this thread has made me think about seeking some of it out just to see if I'm not giving the genre a fair shake.

>>74197917
I agree. Rock didn't go away, but it was sure harder to hear on the radio for a while. Lots of fantastic rock records came out in the late 70s, including Neil Young's "Rust Never Sleeps", one of my personal favorites, but disco owned the airwaves for a couple years.

>>74196752
Of all of the clichés that get trotted out as to why "disco sucks," I find the "it had a repetitive beat"/"anybody could pound out a four-on-the-floor beat" cliché to be perhaps the most hilarious.

Vicki Sue Robinson's "Turn the Beat Around" brought Latin rhythms into the disco mix, The Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'" got some seriously funky counter-rhythms going on the rhythm guitar and the keyboards on top of the basic disco drumbeat, and the high-hat pulse of disco hits such as "The Love I Lost" owed a great deal to the swing-era jazz style of keeping the rhythm on the ride cymbal.

Not to mention that many of the "disco sucks" crowd seem to have absolutely zero problem with pounding, repetitive four-on-the-floor beat of so many classic Motown 60s hits. Or with the pounding, repetitive four-on-the-floor beat of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction." "Satisfaction" is generally regarded as one of the greatest rock and roll songs of all time, if not the greatest, but if you watch any vintage live performance of the Stones playing "Satisfaction," Charlie Watts is just pounding away on the snare drum on every beat in an even more simplistic manner than 99% of "repetitive" disco drum beats. Yet that's the greatest rock and roll song of all time. Precisely because of its brutally repetitive beat, and because of Keith Richard's brutally repetitive and musically moronic three-note guitar riff.

The whole "this music is too simplistic and it takes no talent to play it" was the same canard heard all the way back in the 50s when the adults said that rock-and-roll was noise that didn't require any talent to play.

It's funny how there wasn't any homophobia towards disco or glam, but people were "betrayed" and "shocked" when gay artists such as Bowie and Elton flirted with R&B/soul/disco sounds in the mid-70s? OK. I certainly think it was the case that glam was not as big in the US as it was in the UK - prior to his "plastic soul" makeover with Young Americans, Bowie was big in certain American cities such as LA and Cleveland, but was nowhere near a big a star in the US as a whole as he was in the UK.

I think that very few people are so prejudiced that they will come right out and say "I hate disco because I hate gays and blacks," but it's pretty clear to me, as someone who actually lived through the disco era, albeit as a young child, that homophobia played a part in the anti-disco backlash. The "disco sucks" rallying cry itself carries homophobic overtones.

>>74198085
Elton John had gone from "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" to "Philadelphia Freedom" and "Don't Go Breaking My Heart". I assume his fans felt very sold out especially since they didn't know he was gay. After that, his disco attempts were just pitifully bad IMO. (Bite Your Lip..Get Up And Dance...Argh.) Seriously, what credibility did Elton have to "get down" all of a sudden? That's the problem I think people had with a lot of these artists jumping on the bandwagon. That was my point.

But yes, you guys are obviously correct in that the Glam movement was much bigger in the UK than here in the US.

>>74198109
>I assume his fans felt very sold out especially since they didn't know he was gay

Are you Squidding me? Ok maybe Elton had some macho rock numbers like SNAFF, but other stuff like All The Girls Love Alice should have clued you in. That and of course his outfits.

I mean, think about all the Queen fans who just couldn't believe it that Freddie Mercury was gay.

>>74198133
Freddie Mercury was flaming from the get-go, he never tried to hide it. My mother was friends with a woman who grew up across the street from him.

I mean, you'd think a band named Queen would be about as obvious as Rob Halford wearing bondage gear on stage.

>>74198153
Wasn't he married to a female for a brief bit in the 70s? I always thought of freddie as more of a real life jack harness than a flamer.

>>74198166
There were plenty of reasons why it should have been obvious, especially if you read any interview that FM gave back in the day. I think that part of the backlash against disco was because some disco artists were so overtly gay or appealed to a gay fanbase that it wasn't possible to overlook it, while you could kind of pretend that Freddie Mercury, Lou Reed, Rob Halford, Elton John, David Bowie, etc weren't gay.

>>74198194
What disco acts were gay aside from the Village People who were a manufactured gimmick band anyway?

>>74198231
Sylvester (basically the that DePaul ripped off)
https://youtu.be/VyAHULpMXKQ

>>74198271
*rupaul

I can't really name a lot of gay disco artists (although I'm sure some were), but the fanbase was definitively very gay, or at least people assumed it was. As we see with artists like Justin Bieber, in a lot of case people don't really hate the artist so much as his/her fanbase (in Bieber's case, tween girls). Often we see that kind of snobbery towards the perceived audience of a particular genre of music encoded right into to the ostensible put-down of the artist in question, as when we see, for example, Garth Brooks referred to as "Wal-Mart country" or REO Speedwagon referred to as "Camaro rock." It's one thing to come right out and say we hate the lower classes who shop at Wal-Mart or drive Camaros, but it's slightly more acceptable to fold that kind of class-based put-down into an aesthetic attack on a genre of music whose (perceived) listeners are the kind of lower-class peons whom we secretly scorn.

Anyway, as we've pointed out, quite a few rock legends like Bowie, Mercury, Halford, etc were gay but somehow redneck rock fans could overlook this fact while mocking disco for being gay, and at the same time disco clubs in the late 70s were the best place for a swinger to pick up chicks. In that sense, it was more of a straight culture than prog or metal which only appealed to angry neckbeard virgins. Not to say some women weren't into the shit, but you were going to find a lot more chicks in your neighborhood disco club than at a Rush concert.

>>74198360
Some of the disco fans were gay. So are some rock fans, and some country fans, and some jazz fans, and some classical fans, and some reggae fans.

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>>74196449
>too black
lmao disco is white people's funk

The earlier days of disco when it was semi-underground were a lot better than the commercialized sewage being pumped out in 1978-79 which is really what turned people off. In short, I never really had anything against disco, but I did have problems with the force-feeding of a diet of almost nothing but disco by the media and AM/Top 40 radio.

>>74198429
R&B veterans making bad disco records, rockers making disco records, disco dancing lessons for old people, disco lessons from Jeannie Ernst, rollerskating, Mad Magazine's "Making Out" record, it all became massive overkill.

BTW, Alice Cooper did a very good disco record in 1977. "No More Love At your Convenience" was played on the radio, and I think it was slated for single release, but it never was.

>>74197978
This is true. The media narrative was framed as if disco was the only thing that "the important" people were listening to and buying and that rock music and its' largely blue-collar fans were beneath contempt and not even worthy of acknowledging, unless somebody died at a concert. I saw it as a class division. The media were upper-class and held disdain for the working class who supported rock music.

In short, I never really had anything against disco, but I did have problems with the force-feeding of a diet of almost nothing but disco by the media and AM/Top 40 radio.

>>74198415
That's why the first hip-hop song to go mainstream was also a disco one.

>>74198503
Totally disagree. Bruce Springsteen, the patron saint of blue-collar rock, was on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week in 1975. But "The media were upper-class and held disdain for the working class who supported rock music." Right.

In 1979, when disco was dominating the airwaves, Time Magazine put the post-Keith Moon Who on its cover, and declared that they were pushing rock's "outer limits," even though a large part of the band's fanbase at the time probably would have disagreed with that assertion (and still does disagree with it, judging by the number of "The Who should have hung it up after Keith Moon died' comments I've read on this forum over the years). But "there was a concerted effort on the part of the media to ignore rock groups even though they were still clearly a major force in music." Uh huh.

The center of rock journalism in NYC was if anything pushing punk rock as hard they could...Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, etc even though none of these guys got played on the radio. Devo and Patti Smith got on Saturday Night Live, I never recall any disco acts getting that honor.

>>74198505
Everyone sampled chic

>>74198563
Those Springsteen Time/Newsweek covers were in 1975, well before the disco explosion. As for the rest, punk rock was being pushed by the media alright BUT most rock coverage in the late 70s was still focused on 60s-era guys like the Stones and Dylan. As for AOR like Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and Van Halen, you never saw or heard them outside of FM radio, which was fully corporate by the end of the decade.

>>74198628
You can try to spin those Time magazine covers however you want, but the Springsteen cover was in late 1975, by which time the Hues Corporation's "Rock Your Boat," George McRae's "Rock Your Baby," the Blackbyrds' "Walking in Rhythm," Gloria Gaynor's "Never Can Say Goodbye," K.C. & the Sunshine Band's "Get Down Tonight" and "That's The Way I Like It," the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'," and Van McCoy's "The Hustle" had all been hit disco singles. Didn't see any of those artists featuring on Time's cover that year.

Furthermore, that The Who were a "British Invasion holdover" when Time featured them on its cover in 1979 as "pushing rock's outer limits" actually proves my point: the mainstream media in 1979 was more concerned with reinforcing the notion that 60s artists like Dylan or The Who were important and relevant to its readers than, say, Chic or Donna Summer or the Bee Gees were.

Not to mention that Rolling Stone Mag was about as mainstream a magazine as there was in the 70s, and of course it featured Aerosmith and Van Halen and all of the other AOR bands of the era who didn't make it to the cover of Time.

>>74196752
>and FWIW I think funk was better dance music than disco, that four-on-the-floor beat you mention lacks a good groove
I think it was Gloria Gaynor (?) who said at the time that white people could only dance to a one-dimensional beat. George Clinton said that disco was like having sex with only one kind of stroke.

>>74198567
That doesn't mean it wasn't disco.

>>74198715
And Rick James said he wrote Superfreak so that whites could have something to dance to.

Yeah, I know. All of it perpetuates the stereotype that ehite people have no natural rhythm. Tell that to Average White Band or Rufus.

>>74198715
But I said earlier that rawk fans complained how disco was too simplistic and required no talent to play but at the same time a rock classic like Satisfaction had a beat so simple a blind monkey could play it.

>>74198166
When Halford came out of the closet in the 90s, holy god it was hilarious to see mealfags spill their spaghetti. I actually remember people burning Judas Priest records and T-shirts in a bonfire. I mean, come on. The guy couldn't have been more obvious about his sexuality if he'd tried. Fuck, you even had other metal bands jumping on the bandwagon like Accept and their song London Leather Boys from their Balls to the Wall album. Nothing gay there I guess. Now, I wonder how many fans of Judas Priest and Accept would have considered disco gay, while listening to these macho songs about men in leather. Freud would have a field day.

>>74198827
Why did he come out, anyway? Was there a reason or a significance for it, I can't remember.

>>74198563
>>74198678
All this talk about mainstream media not liking disco is silly. The whole Saturday Night Fever film was based on a cover story about disco from New York Magazine. There were a million disco stories on the news and in magazines. There was the blockbuster movie about disco there were disco novelty songs and Christmas albums on 14th Street there was a Disco Donuts Diner. Every singer had to make a disco record. Disco was everywhere and inescapable.

Despite all the cries of homophobia YMCA by the Village People was a huge hit. I don't think the anti-disco backlash had anything to do with bigotry or media bias.

>>74195788
sounds like hip-hop today

Providing tangible evidence for racism (especially) and homophobia can be a slippery slope as most people are not going to burn crosses and carry signs that say "God hates fags."

I come from a family rife with prejudice. A casual outside observer would never guess in a million years. But it's there, believe me.

And FWIW, I have been in the health care/mental health profession for many years, and it never ceases to amaze me the prejudices people will reveal when they feel comfortable.

I strongly agree that there was/is a component of this in the backlash just as I strongly agree that there were other factors as well that were independent of this.

My own distaste for much of disco (even though there were several songs that I loved), back then (I was around 9 or 10), had far more to do with worshiping ROCK. Nothing at all to do with racism. Probably a little to do with indirect homophobia - in retrospect, I think I did view a lot of the "scene" as effeminate and, therefore, uncool. Then again, David Bowie or other glam guys did not get under my skin. I think that is more because I perceived them to be ok because of rock cred.

>>74196359
What's it like LARPing as an old guy? You're 25 at the oldest, you fucking mong

>>74198742
>>74198715
Joke's on them because since the late 80s, black music is just dominated by hip-hop which has a very very simplistic beat compared to the funk days.

>>74198882
Hate to break it to you, but a lot of oldfags are on /mu/. I come on here to get a dose current trends and see what new stuff is worth checking out. I also like nostalgia threads like this.

Racism and homophobia?
Gee, I thought disco got a bad rap because it was the preferred music of promiscous cokeheads.

>>74198942
Way to be redundant

>>74198942
>Gee, I thought disco got a bad rap because it was the preferred music of promiscous cokeheads

So just like every rock band ever. I mean, you gonna tell me that the Stones, Zeppelin, and Aerosmith didn't use drugs and only had sex in the missionary position with their wives?

Was public image ltd actually influenced by disco though?
To me it was more dub and reggae that it was influenced by, not disco although I can see how those could be confused with disco.
And honestly the reason why it didn't survive for long is because it was shallow music, same reason why pop music will be forgotten despite being the most popular kind of music.

>>74198942
My cousin said back then he did know a lot of guys who got into disco strictly to pick up chicks, the music itself meant nothing to them. He said he preferred going to Grateful Dead shows, house parties, the beach, etc to get laid. The system did seem to work though.

>>74199002
No different than pretending to like modern country music now

Is this even a question?

In a nutshell, my two cents is that disco was a bastardization of the great funk and Philly soul records from the early 70s, dumbed down for mass consumption, favoring vacuous repetitive beats with slick production over musical talent (which continued into the 80s), and was therefore not to be taken seriously. That said, I tend to agree with other posts that the "good" disco records, namely the earlier Latin-tinged non-hits, have held up better than the mainstream drivel, the latter of which being primarily what I remember and probably what most people associate with disco as a fad. I actually regard a lot of those big records today as guilty pleasures, mainly because as silly as they were, at least some of them had memorable tunes, unlike what passes for dance music today, which I generally cannot recall even right after I've heard it.

As for the comments on racism and homophobia, I do not deny these as factors in disco's demise, but I was really too young at the time (8 years old in 1978) to be cognizant of disco's origins, let alone old enough to experience the music in its proper club environment, although I do remember hearing it in roller skating rinks complete with glitter balls. In retrospect, the "rockers" who felt threatened by disco's commercial success and who were going to supposedly save us from that disco menace were in some ways more offensive than disco itself; in other words, there did seem to be a mean-spiritedness beneath the disco backlash directed against more than just the music.

>>74199040
Go to bed, christgau.

I kind of agree that rawk fans were unable to accept the changing times. My dad said back then a lot of his peers didn't like New Wave for the same reason. Jimi Hendrix-style blues rock was worn out and tired by the late 70s, there was no further place to take it, and all the Aerosmith T-shirts in the world weren't going to change this fact.

>>74199103
The testosterone poisoned of the 70s thought of new wavers in much the same way many think of hipster nu-males today

>>74199040
Continued. I was a little kid during the height of disco so I couldn't remember a huge deal about that era, but by the time Reagan was president, just about anything associated with the 70s was completely passe and uncool. Nobody wanted to listen to disco, wear bell bottoms, nobody wanted to watch 70s TV shows like Love Boat and All In The Family. That shit was done and belonged to the past.

If you'd played KC & The Sunshine Band at a junior high party in 1982, you'd get quite a few scowls at best, your face punched in at worst.

>>74199196
You do know that the biggest selling pop album of all time came out in 82 and it was based primarily around a disco beat.

>>74199103
Uh huh. I think by the mid-70s, everyone was burned out on hippie/post-hippie stuff and wanted to dance, and there hadn't been a lot of music like that since the British Invasion/Motown girl group days a decade earlier. A lot of the people pushing disco were older guys in their 30s like Christgau who imagined it as a return to the simpler, more innocent days of the 50s-60s when music was based on catchy pop singles with hooks as opposed to the long, slow, overproduced malarkey of the protest era.

A lot of the disco haters were young kids who weren't old enough to remember the Motown/British Invasion era, their musical horizons began with Led Zeppelin.

And besides, there was plenty of Styx, Rush, Aerosmith, Van Halen, AC/DC, etc at the time for the rock audience so it's not as if they were deprived in any way.

>>74199363
Rock didn't go out of style at all. The acts you mentioned still had a large fanbase. Rock had to share the spotlight with disco and that's when the lines were drawn. But somewhere around this time is when the music scene started becoming splintered. People weren't satisfied just listening to and enjoying their favorite music, they had to put down what other folks were into as a way to validate their own tastes. Especially if those folks were into something entirely different. You could say the "disco sucks" crowded morphed into the "rap is crap" brigade a few years later. These days anything associated with "hipsters" is the latest target. Some people aren't happy unless there's an "enemy", I guess.

>>74199456
Agreed, although, at age ten, I didn't know I was supposed to take sides. I liked my mom's copy of the Stones' Some Girls and also the Bee Gees' hits I heard on the radio.

However, the taking sides that began sometime in the mid- to late-70s wasn't limited to rock fans declaring disco artists as the enemy. To punk/New Wave fans, "dinosaur" classic rock artists were the enemy. In Nashville, country music purists declared pop-country interlopers such as Olivia Newton-John and John Denver to be the enemy.

Yeah it's funny how rock fans were outraged about how disco was the music of mindless promiscuous cokehead degenerates when...whoops, rock bands did exactly that.

>>74197775
This is actually kind of insightful.

>>74199525
Heyheyhey. Not all disco was mindless dance shit (ok, KC & The Sunshine Band were). I mean, plenty of disco songs like I Will Survive had real lyrics in them with something to say.

>>74199577
The theme of survival was quite a big theme in the 70s, from the disaster movies of the period such as Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno*, etc., to rock songs such as The Rolling Stones' "Soul Survivor" and Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," whose narrator sings that "the only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keepin' on," to, yes, disco songs such as "I Will Survive" or the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive."

There was a general sense in the air of a comedown, crash, or recession after the economic and cultural boom of the 60s, and disco lyrics reflected this just as other cultural artifacts of the period did. While the Sex Pistols sang that "England's dreaming / There's no future / No future for you," the Bee Gees were singing "Life goin' nowhere / Somebody help me. Somebody help me, yeah" in "Stayin' Alive."

Sure, disco music often had a message of dancing away one's troubles rather than attacking or smashing the system that cause the troubles, as we saw in the lyrics of the Sex Pistols or the Clash, but the underlying tensions of the 70s were reflected in the lyrics of both genres of music.

*The much-maligned "Disco Inferno" picks up on this theme of disaster and collapse that was popular in the movies of the period.

You know, it really is unfair to make it sound like anyone who hates disco is anti-gay. Consider that teenage boys are naturally worried about being perceived as effeminate. Since guitars, drum solos, gruffy male vocals, and funky bass, are seen as "manly", and much disco usually does not have those elements in it's music, teenage boys will usually back off from it. It's not that they may hate gays, they just don't want to be thought of as gay.

It's interesting that other countries never experienced a backlash against disco comparable to the one we saw in the US. For example, in 1987, the Bee Gees hit #1 in the UK and all across Europe with their single "You Win Again." However, in America, the song peaked at #75 and the Bee Gees were considered a joke. It's hard not to attribute that discrepancy to the lingering stigma of the Bee Gees as a "disco fad" here in America. Likewise, U2's Pop album, featuring the lead single "Discotheque," was widely regarded as a failure in America, while the album, and the PopMart Tour, was more successful in Europe and the rest of the world.

Whatever America's unique social issues may be, they have, for one reason or another, led to a more violent and long-lasting backlash against disco than any other Western country has experienced.

If people really didn't like disco because of race or the gayness of it, why didn't anyone back then ever just say it? Its only now that people try to dream up these reasons. The bottom line is that people just got annoyed with it. The songs became dumber and dumber. "YMCA".... "Kung-Fu Fighting".... "Disco Duck".... "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty". The Bee Gees and their helium voices. That sort of annoying stuff became constant. People just wanted it to go away.

>>74195720
SNF is one of those really misunderstood movies because it was taken as a symbol of upper class hedonism when in reality the movie was set in a working class New York neighborhood and John Travolta's character was a working stiff who labors in a hardware store by day and goes to the disco club at night.

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>>74195847
>namefags

>>74200205

It was an excellent film. Too often dismissed as a cheap genre flick.

>>74195847
Italo is the greatest music of our times.