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I have been toiling with this thought for sometime and thought I would share it with you. Short version: The racist/homophobic american culling of Disco created the space for almost all hip hop and electronic music and almost 40 years later is such a force that it has even become part of country and western music. Sequence of events: Disco becomes increasingly popular in latin and african american inner cities as an extension of soul/motown. Leads to heavy rotation in badest assest night clubs and is polyester hipster nose candy of choice Saturday night fever comes out (1977) and hordes of greasy white jerseyites start driving over the turnpike in terrible clothes to wait outside clubs and not get it. Aware they are not travolta, they stay out and do drugs anyways. Moms/Wives hate disco because they took their greasy husbands/sons/daughters All white people get the clap, Jimmy Carter does nothing. Steve Dahl gets after briefly sucking as a radio host in detroit moved to a rock format radio station in Chicago in 1978(WDAI). Dahl gets fired shortly there after due to a format change from rock to disco (which was moving a lot of units and market shares nationwide) Most of Billboard top 20 is disco. Dahl gets picked up by another station across town (WLUP) that was AOR. Album Oriented Rock. Floyd, Zepplin, et al. Dahl makes his whole schtick about how "disco sucks". In fact the GIS results for disco sucks is white kids wearing t-shirts with that slogan...that were originally created by Dahl (or super butt hurt steve). Butthurt Steve makes parody songs about Disco. Uses some wildly racist terms to describe donna summers. The owner of the WLUP station had a dad who owned like...either the white sox, or Comiskey park. Ratings were up, so they decided to go with the whole disco hating thing. They created a promotion asking listeners to buy, steal, or bring down any/all disco records down to the ballpark. In Between that day's double header, they would have "disco demolition night" where they would detonate the pile of pilfered disco records. It happened. A bunch of demin'd drunk on dime draft white folks stormed the field and created quite the scene. Cops had to come out in force to tame the disco raged folks. At this point, it is unclear how the rest of south chicago was affected as Dahl fans left the scene but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that there were some groups who then went into nearby disco/gay/ethnic clubs and started a lot of trouble, strong arming the aforementioned bar patrons. This hit news, and was picked up nationwide with the folks who in a year would elect Reagan. The moral majority were just plain fed up with all these negroes and latinos being gay and doing drugs and disco-ing and poisoning the youth of america and ripping our great country's moral fabric. The net result was that Disco was suddenly a pariah. I did not experience this, but I did experience being handed a list of about 300 songs that should not be played anymore two days after 9-11 happened which included such great classics as drowning pool's "let the bodies hit the floor". That turned out ok actually. Suddenly radio stations within weeks dropped disco almost entirely. It mostly disappeared from Billboard and airplay charts. Most likely advertiser driven. Guys selling washing machines and used cars did not want to be lumped in with the nationwide "disco is poisoning our children" debate, and pulled adds from disco radio stations, forcing them to change formats or pull disco rotation. Leading to less airplay nationwide, leading to low retail sales etc etc etc. Record stores that specialized in the stuff also had bricks thrown through windows, constant angry calls, forcing them by large to pull the "disco" placards from their stacks. But there was still a demand for the original seed of the music. Not so much the John Travolta/BeeGees stuff, but the real thing that was there before it became a white problem. The thing that was in the small clubs and parties before studio 54 and the like, but since labels were tanking due to the revenue loss due to the above stuff there was no money to support the 15 member live acts so you have an increase in popularity of the DJ. Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles predominantly. Now Larry already had his thing going on, and just enjoyed his stuff at the Paradise Garage (where we get the term UK Garage at this point). But NYC is NYC and everything is always accessible. However in Chicago, where this all started, Knuckles starts picking up a following at his residence club called "the Warehouse". He is on a lot of label lists and is still getting vinyl pressings and demos from artists/studios/small labels and starts spinning newly released disco records when there is no airplay to speak of and is not being shelved by retail. As his popularity increases, new and old fans start reappearing into record stores and ask the shops "Do you have any of the music like what Frankie plays up at "The House". So slowly, beneath the gaze of the 700 hundred club and 60 minutes, record stores begin reshelving disco records under the new white backed sharpied genre separating tab as "house". This really wasn't disco music, because as the record labels dried up due to lack of sales, this forced a lot of existing and budding musicians and studios and producers to really pare down their ability to have 6 member string sections and 10 member horn sections, and 5 member backing vocal sections. Luckily electronic instrumentation was becoming more available in terms of synths and drum machines. (Interestingly, a lot of these underground post disco records had no problem finding a home in Europe) This led to a whole swath of budget productions that still would not see retail sales in mainstream america, but were limited mostly to east coast boutique retailers from late 1979 through approximately 1982. The rise of the club DJ coincided with this. DJs became increasingly popular, the block party phenomenon grew up, and DJs started to bring along hype men to talk them up. Here, you probably know the rest of the story. Hype men became so popular that they took over the show over time and became the main act. Samplers became affordable and you had wide adoption from them of hip hop groups, who...sampled predominantly all the mainstream unknown gems from the post disco 79-82 period initially. Go back and find these things and you will be surprised at how many early hip hop classics were taken from this period of mostly unknown music. Detroit then happened and gave us techno, europe went ape poo poo over the whole thing and next leveled it for the next 30 years. Again, butthurt racist antigay whites tried to destroy disco, and inadvertently created the space and germination for all of electronic music and hip hop, which is now an option in every nashville studio. Great job, hth.
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May 3, 2015 19:50
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 21:33 |
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I wonder if a modern strain of disco would exist if it had not been tampered with back then or if people would've naturally gotten tired of it after a little while anyway. I guess it still exists but it's like a raptor to seagull evolution where the start and end points are too different to really associate even if they are connected. It's weird that a genre as big as house had the original term come from such rinky-dink roots, just some guy playing in a warehouse, hey you got any of that warehouse music man? I guess it's like who were the original nameless teenagers who first started saying cool or 420 or whatever, it's weird to actually have the exact origin on something like that. Is a potential modern version of disco worth giving up the route that things took, all the electronic and rap stuff? Would those have formed on their own eventually? Are we missing out on possible successor genres to disco that never got to exist because things went this way instead? This was a pretty interesting write up thanks for taking the time to make it.
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May 4, 2015 02:14
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Mr. Unlucky posted:I wonder if a modern strain of disco would exist if it had not been tampered with back then or if people would've naturally gotten tired of it after a little while anyway. I guess it still exists but it's like a raptor to seagull evolution where the start and end points are too different to really associate even if they are connected. That's a really good question that I had not thought of. I think the disco that was going on during the very late seventies with some exception had gotten a bit offsides. It was being totally overdone. I think the bee gees were a spinal tap of the pop world, trying a million different things to get famous before getting saturday night fever. Disco Duck was another atrocious example (except it later became a daft punk sample, which is nice. People were racing to jump the shark, so it is probably a good thing that it died when it did. However, its impact is so tremendously ingrained in a serious majority of modern music...just a curious story as to how and why.
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May 4, 2015 03:33
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This thread is amazing, thanks for the knowledge!
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May 4, 2015 05:04
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Come now, surely George "Rescue Dance Music From the Blahs" Clinton merits at least a small mention. 
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May 4, 2015 11:30
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Wheat Loaf posted:Come now, surely George "Rescue Dance Music From the Blahs" Clinton merits at least a small mention. I am not familiar with this story. Care to expand?
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May 4, 2015 17:02
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I'm not familiar with all the details myself! As far as I'm aware, George Clinton (and possibly James Brown, but I'm not sure about him) thought disco was sell-out music, and supported the idea of driving it off the charts in principle, at least. "Rescue dance music from the blahs" was the subtitle of Funkadelic's Uncle Jam Needs You album in 1979.
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May 4, 2015 17:23
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I'll have to look that up, I had not known. Thank you for the info. I do think disco got pretty ridiculous towards the end. Its hard to think of a corollary in modern music, but I think maybe rap rock would fit, or the early 2000 creed days when every label was putting out hee-yaa-ee-yaa-ee-yaaan-yeah bands as fast as they could. There were the first few disco labels like Sun and Solar and etc, but once Clive Davis got involved, everyone seemed to just try to over the top it, and thats when it just became an absurd parody of itself. I am glad it died when it did (could have been sooner imo).
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May 4, 2015 17:29
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Steve Dahl is awesome.
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May 4, 2015 18:17
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you are awesome, ferrule.
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May 4, 2015 20:38
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 21:33 |
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Probably because I've been listening to Steve Dahl for decades.
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May 4, 2015 20:57
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