Line #29 Analysis/DiscoSucks


1	!!Rise and Backlash
2
3	For a time in the late '70s, the music genre of {{disco}} was the biggest thing ever. It had its roots in the Black, Latino, and [[WhereEverybodyKnowsYourFlame gay]] club scenes of UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity and UsefulNotes/{{Philadelphia}} in the late '60s and early '70s, and started cracking the mainstream around 1974-75 with songs like Van [=McCoy=]'s "The Hustle", The Hues Corporation's "Rock the Boat", and Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting" as some of its first big hits. [[Creator/{{Motown}} Motown Records]] fell in love with the new sound and reinvented itself around it as its '60s "Motown sound" fell out of favor. It quickly spread to the UK (through that country's Northern soul scene) and Western UsefulNotes/{{Europe}}, where it inspired a contemporaneous scene that continued to flourish into The80s. It wasn't until 1977, however, when disco truly ''exploded'', bursting into the popular consciousness with the blockbuster success of ''Film/SaturdayNightFever'' and its soundtrack. Clubs like New York's Studio 54 became ''the'' places to be and be seen. Every medium-sized American city had at least one disco radio station and club. It was during this time when, in the memory of pop culture, disco became the sound that defined The70s.
4
5	Then, even before The80s officially started, a vociferous backlash emerged in the US from both White and Black music listeners. White music fans gravitated towards various forms of rock, specifically PunkRock, NewWaveMusic, HardRock, and HeavyMetal (including HairMetal, which itself became the Disco of the '80s), and rejected the genre's hip, urban image. Meanwhile, the Black leaders of {{funk}} actively led a campaign to "rescue dance music from the blahs" as Music/GeorgeClinton put it, rejecting disco's fusion of "their" music style with mainstream pop. The UsefulNotes/{{punk}}s castigated disco for its political apathy, seeing it as music for mindless hedonists and comparing it to [[UsefulNotes/WeimarRepublic Weimar-era]] cabaret music that was [[BreadAndCircuses lulling people into a false sense of security]] in the face of right-wing authoritarianism. (Several of them would, however, later admit in Creator/VH1's ''[[ILoveTheExties I Love the '70s]]'' that they thought the soundtrack to ''Film/SaturdayNightFever'' was brilliant.) Additionally, working-class music listeners in an era of economic malaise rapidly grew resentful of what they perceived to be a culture of elitism and ConspicuousConsumption in the disco scene, given the large amount of money needed to afford the flashy outfits and dance lessons that were necessary to survive on the dance floor.[[note]]A similar story played out with ProgressiveRock around the same time, never a critical darling to begin with, which fell into decline by the late '70s as listeners came to see it as the domain of [[NewAgeRetroHippie hippie]] [[SillyRabbitIdealismIsForKids idealists]] and [[InsufferableGenius pretentious, nerdy intellectuals]]. Between its [[GenreBusting creative boundary-pushing]], the need for expensive instruments and lessons to play the songs proficiently, and its tendency toward audiophilia leading to a perception that listeners needed expensive stereo equipment for the music to be heard properly, the genre grew to be seen as having pulled rock away from its roots as working-class party music amid the economic downturn of the latter half of the decade. As a result, much of the ThreeChordsAndTheTruth ethos of early PunkRock was meant as a [[SpiritualAntithesis direct repudiation]] of prog and everything it was believed to stand for.[[/note]]
6
7	Even many disco fans grew fed up with its commercialization, especially those who had been part of the scene since its early years. [[https://thedaydiscodied.home.blog/saturday-night-fever/ In hindsight,]] many of them regard ''Saturday Night Fever'' as, ironically, the genre's ''real'' death blow, a film based on an article that [[BasedOnAGreatBigLie turned out to have been heavily fabricated]], and which presented a image of disco culture that had little to do with reality but ''was'' readily embraced by the many people who started pouring into nightclubs after seeing the film. As a result, the genre's early innovators (many of whom, as noted, came from marginalized communities) were crowded out, replaced by a glitzy, marketing-driven vibe that went against the decidedly non-commercial ethos of the early '70s movement, particularly with the many White rock musicians who, in the late '70s, started embracing disco sounds in the name of marketability. Many clubs and radio stations switched to NewWaveMusic, and while blue-collar rock fans rejected new wave for similar reasons that they shunned disco, this cross-pollination with new wave as it started to transition to AlternativeRock and dance music would culminate in the AlternativeDance movement mentioned below.
8
9	A number of factors also added conservative culture war politics and rank bigotry into the mix. Disco's popularity (and continued CultClassic status) in gay clubs, the popularity of Black and female musicians and large presence of non-White and female disco fans, and the European origins of some successful musicians and record labels all became fodder for homophobia, sexism, xenophobia, racism, and nationalism, leading disco to be perceived among a generation of young, blue-collar men as pretentious, effeminate, and un-American. Furthermore, it was associated with cities like [[TheBigRottenApple New York]] and Philadelphia in a time when America's major metropolises were increasingly seen as {{Vice Cit\|y}}ies and hotbeds of a kind of labor/welfare-focused liberal politics that had fallen into disrepute by that point, with even the liberal President UsefulNotes/JimmyCarter backing away from the postwar "New Deal consensus" in favor of a "neoliberal" deregulatory program that his successors UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan and UsefulNotes/BillClinton would more fully embrace. Social conservatives, including the ascendant [[MoralGuardians Christian Right]] of the era, also decried [[SexDrugsAndRockAndRoll the sexually charged atmosphere of the music and the nightclub scene, as well as the popularity of recreational drugs among fans]], traits that they long criticized rock music for as well.
10
11	In short, by 1979 disco had a public image in the US comparable to HairMetal in 1992, {{Boy Band}}s in 2003,[[note]]In the US, at least. Boy bands and {{girl group}}s remained popular in Europe well into the '00s -- incidentally, much as disco did in the '80s.[[/note]] or PostGrunge in 2012. Among the critics, nobody who wanted to be taken seriously treated it as much more than vapid, disposable pop, a type of music whose few good early hits were drowned out by [[SturgeonsLaw the volume of garbage that followed]], while among mainstream listeners, it was associated with a snobbish, decadent big-city lifestyle that they wanted no part of. Many radio stations promised "[[Music/TheBeeGees Bee Gee]]-free weekends", and a novelty country song called [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqSBQFJRKq8 "Disco Sucks"]] became a crossover hit on the pop charts. It's no accident that CountryMusic and line dancing would emerge as TheMoralSubstitute in Middle America, with its DownOnTheFarm values and performers adopting a glamourous image the way disco stars and dancers did, which would find full flower in The90s.
12
13	And yet, unlike hair metal in 1992, boy bands in 2003, or post-grunge in 2012, in 1979 disco still enjoyed a towering presence in mainstream American pop music. This left many people itching for a chance to tell the world exactly what they thought of it.
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15	!!The Fall
16
17	On July 12, 1979, the UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}} [[UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueBaseball White Sox]] (whose South Side base meant that their fans were Black and White in about equal measure) hosted a [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin "Disco Demolition Night"]] promotion (see picture on main page, see Website/TheOtherWiki for [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night more information]]), the brainchild of a White Sox executive and Steve Dahl, a DJ who had been fired from the rock station WDAI on Christmas Eve, 1978 as part of its switch to a disco format. After being snapped up by the rival rock station WLUP, Dahl reinvented himself a ShockJock who turned WLUP into a bully pulpit "dedicated to the eradication of the dreaded musical disease known as disco", where he regularly mocked his old station as "Disco D.I.E.", recorded a disco-bashing [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLFMELubizU parody]] of Music/RodStewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?", and rallied his fans into a mock "anti-disco army" called the Insane Coho Lips. Fans could bring in their disco records in exchange for less than a dollar admission; since the game was a doubleheader[[note]]Incidentally, against the UsefulNotes/{{Detroit}} Tigers, probably the closest thing the White Sox have to a rival within the American League. The Sox, of course, have a FandomRivalry with the Cubs, but until interleague play was instituted in 1997, they had only played each other in six official games--all part of the 1906 World Series.[[/note]], the plan was that the records would get blown up in the middle of the field between the games, and the stands at Comiskey would be extra-full because everyone and their uncle would pay to see those stupid disco records get what they deserved.
18
19	What happened instead went down in pop music history. The White Sox were forced to forfeit the second game (the last time a game was forfeited in the [[UsefulNotes/{{Baseball}} American League]]) after the explosion led to a riot--fueled by another ill-considered moneymaking venture that afternoon: Comiskey Park had a discount on beer that day ([[AlcoholInducedIdiocy whoops]]). Thirty-nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct, and while nobody died, estimates of the number of people injured were as high as thirty. While Disco Demolition Night did not by any means start the backlash, it added fuel to the fire and marked [[GenreKiller the turning point where disco went into freefall]]. The backlash extended beyond disco to rock artists who were merely influenced by/adjacent to it, like Music/RodStewart and Music/DavidBowie, and African-American Creator/{{Motown}} musicians like Music/MarvinGaye.[[note]]Aside:One notable participant in the mob was a young man who had a silver belt buckle stolen from him during a tussle around third base but managed to steal a bat from the dugout. His name? Creator/MichaelClarkeDuncan.[[/note]]
20
21	Attacked on all sides and with a powerful image against it, disco was fading fast and completely dead by early 1981, and with it went the fashions and styles related to or heavily associated with it (such as flared trousers). For the rest of The80s, admitting that you liked disco may as well have been, at worst, admitting to cannibalism, or at best, admitting that you were ''incredibly'' out of touch.[[note]]A joke from ''Film/{{Ghostbusters\|1984}}'', which would have been funny to audiences in 1984 but is lost on modern audiences, is Louis playing "Disco Inferno" at his party, put in by the filmmakers to help show how much of a dork he is. ''ComicStrip/{{Garfield}}'' also used to make the same joke about Jon Arbuckle.[[/note]] While dance artists like Music/{{Madonna}} and Music/JanetJackson continued to take influence from it (not to mention the influence it had on early HipHop), whatever remaining fandom the genre itself still had was restricted to gay clubs, which marginalized it even further amidst the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the resulting anti-LGBTQ+ backlash of the '80s.
22
23	Disco would start to reemerge (or at least, come to the surface for fresh air) during The90s' [[PopularityPolynomial wave of nostalgia for the '70s and its backlash against all things '80s]], mainly in the form of {{sampling}} for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiKOif0UKRM rap and]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSV0D_Id8Ho&feature dance songs.]] It didn't hurt that most popular dance music, particularly {{house\|Music}} and its offshoots, can trace its lineage straight back to disco. Still, during this same time, ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' had a character named [[DiscoDan Disco Stu]] who was used almost purely for comic relief, showing that the genre was still far away from returning to public acceptance. Hatred of disco as a symbol of everything wrong with The70s is so legendary that the CondemnedByHistory trope was [[Administrivia/RenamedTropes once called]] "Deader Than Disco".
24
25	!!The Reevaluation
26
27	Today, however, it seems as though the former TropeNamer for CondemnedByHistory is itself becoming [[PopularityPolynomial a subversion of its own trope]]. Younger generations have grown up with no memory of disco or their parents' hatred of it; to them, it's simply a style of music that they will like or dislike on its own merits. The Sirius XM disco station [[ColbertBump probably introduced more than a few new fans]], as seen by the surprisingly large reaction to its removal, which forced it to be {{Uncanceled}}. Similarly, the advent of the internet allowed some people to discover disco for the first time after terrestrial radio stations stopped playing it. Many of the negative connotations associated with it have died out, and many of its enemies have toned down the vitriol and forgotten about it. This can be seen on the pop charts; in 2013 alone, a number of "disco revival" songs by artists as diverse as Music/BrunoMars, Music/RobinThicke, and Music/DaftPunk have been Top 40 hits, while the early [[TheNew20s New Twenties]] saw artists like Music/DuaLipa, Jessie Ware, and Music/{{Beyonce}} releasing heavily disco-inspired albums to critical acclaim. [[{{Irony}} So the anti-disco backlash is, itself, deader than disco]].
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29	Finally, the anti-disco backlash is seen by many as having had a very ugly undercurrent. Music historians who have investigated why disco became so fiercely hated agree that overexposure and elitism weren't the sole factors behind the death of disco, but that [[ValuesDissonance homophobia, sexism, racism, and xenophobia]] also played into it. Disco had been one of the few genres to be equally popular across boundaries of race and sexuality (barring, of course, the White rock and Black funk purists), with it being particularly big among LGBT+ communities, and a good number of popular disco acts (such as Music/BoneyM) originated in Europe. Robert Christgau [[http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/pnj/pj78.php called out]] the latent homophobia and racism in the "Disco Sucks" movement as early as 1979, and witnesses to Disco Demolition Night noted a startling amount of destroyed records that belonged to Black artists who never actually touched disco. What's more, [[https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/twisted-sisters-dee-snider-on-destroying-disco-why-lemmy-was-an-angel-181187/ the racism was more than open]] in some parts of the country, as Music/TwistedSister found out.[[note]]They had Music/BarryWhite hung in effigy during their concerts, and at a show in [[UsefulNotes/NewYorkState upstate New York]], the mostly White male patrons started cheering and yelling "Hang the n[=----=]r!" in approval. As a multiracial band that simply thought disco was overexposed and saw Barry White as a symbol of it, they were shocked by this reaction and quickly removed the effigy from future stage shows.[[/note]]
30
31	Meanwhile, disco's old rival, rock music, is looked at in a harsher light in the modern era for these reasons, outside of performers like Music/JimiHendrix, Music/DavidBowie and Music/FreddieMercury, who broke racial and sexual boundaries as artists. Rock music overall is much less popular than it was in the late '70s, with many observers wondering if it will ever regain mainstream relevance. In the 21st century, in an inversion of the disco backlash, it's rock that's being decried as out-of-touch and elitist beyond the boundary-breaking exceptions.
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33	!!...and Beyond
34
35	Of course, the above only describes the United States. If you ask a European about any anti-disco backlash, you will likely get a series of puzzled looks. Across UsefulNotes/ThePond, [[PostSomethingism post-disco]] [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff stayed popular well into the '80s]], heavily influencing [[NewWaveMusic New Wave]] (which eventually leaked back over to the US), SynthPop, ItaloDisco, and other styles of popular music. In France, you ''cannot'' have a wedding party without some Music/ClaudeFrancois playing, usually late in the party. In Eastern Europe and in Russia, it lingered well into the early 1990s, and disco is still very much alive in Poland (as ''disco polo'', which became something of an AscendedMeme when used in a presidential election). For much of The80s, the global pop charts were dominated by derivatives of disco, post-disco, and {{punk\|Rock}}. Artists like Amanda Wilson and Music/LauraWhite now carry its torch proudly into the present day.
36
37	And this isn't even taking into account disco's influence on underground music, especially PostPunk bands like Music/PublicImageLtd and ex-No Wavers like Material, Contortions, and Liquid Liquid. All operated under the basic premise of [[GenreMashup "take a disco beat and pile weird stuff on top of it"]], often to great and innovative effect. [=PiL=] even had a hit with [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a song called "Death Disco"]]... although [[Music/TheSexPistols who was]] [[Music/JohnLydon singing]] probably had some effect. In the U.S., Music/TalkingHeads were heavily influenced by disco while racking up hits and critical acclaim. There was also the {{Industrial}} fascination with Eurodisco, [[YouDontWantToKnow but that's another matter entirely]]. This marriage of punk and disco later evolved into the AlternativeDance and Madchester genres of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which saw the success of groups like Music/NewOrder, Music/TheStoneRoses, Music/HappyMondays, and Music/DepecheMode. Then, the overtly disco-influenced dance-punk genre of the early 2000s led to the rise of acclaimed indie band Music/LCDSoundsystem. The disco revival scene hit a peak in 2013, when Music/DaftPunk's single "Get Lucky" (sung by Music/PharrellWilliams, who himself released the hit dance song "Happy") became one of the biggest hits of 2013, proving that the influence of disco was ''not'' dead. The point certainly seemed to be made worldwide: not only did disco and overtly disco-inspired stuff see a huge upswing in the wake of "Get Lucky", but it even extended across media as well, with shows, movies, and video games openly acknowledging the disco revival.
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39	Of course, the most prominent influence disco had on underground music was ''the entire genre of HipHop'', which originated when [=DJs=] started to loop disco instrumentals and rhythmically toast over the top of them. At the time of writing, hip-hop is the most popular genre in the world, taking the place in culture that rock music enjoyed from the middle to the end of the 20th Century, and it is disco's most direct descendent. The second most popular genre right now is ElectronicDanceMusic, a descendent of HouseMusic, a disco offshoot born in Chicago (ironically enough given that city's legacy with this trope) that emerged when artists began to loop the breakdown of disco instrumentals (figuring that the breakdown was the best part), soon realising they could then play synthesizers over the top of them. Disco is something that people call 'dead', when in reality, it [[TheNthDoctor regenerated]] into both of the two most popular music genres in the ''entire world''! It isn't possible for any genre to be ''less'' dead than that!
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Context Analysis / DiscoSucks