Rise and Backlash
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 gay club scenes of New York City and 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. 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 Europe, where it inspired a contemporaneous scene that continued to flourish into The '80s. It wasn't until 1977, however, when disco truly exploded, bursting into the popular consciousness with the blockbuster success of Saturday Night Fever 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 The '70s.
Then, even before The '80s 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 Punk Rock, New Wave Music, Hard Rock, and Heavy Metal (including Hair Metal, 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 George Clinton put it, rejecting disco's fusion of "their" music style with mainstream pop. The punks castigated disco for its political apathy, seeing it as music for mindless hedonists and comparing it to Weimar-era cabaret music that was lulling people into a false sense of security in the face of right-wing authoritarianism. (Several of them would, however, later admit in VH1's I Love the '70s that they thought the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever 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 Conspicuous Consumption 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
Even many disco fans grew fed up with its commercialization, especially those who had been part of the scene since its early years. In hindsight,
many of them regard Saturday Night Fever as, ironically, the genre's real death blow, a film based on an article that 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 New Wave Music, 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 Alternative Rock and dance music would culminate in the Alternative Dance movement mentioned below.
A number of factors also added conservative culture war politics and rank bigotry into the mix. Disco's popularity (and continued Cult Classic 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 New York and Philadelphia in a time when America's major metropolises were increasingly seen as Vice Cities and hotbeds of a kind of labor/welfare-focused liberal politics that had fallen into disrepute by that point, with even the liberal President Jimmy Carter backing away from the postwar "New Deal consensus" in favor of a "neoliberal" deregulatory program that his successors Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton would more fully embrace. Social conservatives, including the ascendant Christian Right of the era, also decried 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.
In short, by 1979 disco had a public image in the US comparable to Hair Metal in 1992, Boy Bands in 2003,note or Post-Grunge 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 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 "Bee Gee-free weekends", and a novelty country song called "Disco Sucks" became a crossover hit on the pop charts. It's no accident that Country Music and line dancing would emerge as The Moral Substitute in Middle America, with its Down on the Farm values and performers adopting a glamourous image the way disco stars and dancers did, which would find full flower in The '90s.
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.
The Fall
On July 12, 1979, the Chicago White Sox (whose South Side base meant that their fans were Black and White in about equal measure) hosted a "Disco Demolition Night" promotion (see picture on main page, see The Other Wiki for 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 Shock Jock 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 parody of Rod Stewart'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 doubleheadernote , 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.
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 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 (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 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 Rod Stewart and David Bowie, and African-American Motown musicians like Marvin Gaye.note
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 The '80s, 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 While dance artists like Madonna and Janet Jackson continued to take influence from it (not to mention the influence it had on early Hip-Hop), 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.
Disco would start to reemerge (or at least, come to the surface for fresh air) during The '90s' wave of nostalgia for the '70s and its backlash against all things '80s, mainly in the form of sampling for rap and dance songs. It didn't hurt that most popular dance music, particularly house and its offshoots, can trace its lineage straight back to disco. Still, during this same time, The Simpsons had a character named 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 The '70s is so legendary that the Condemned by History trope was once called "Deader Than Disco".
The Reevaluation
Today, however, it seems as though the former Trope Namer for Condemned by History is itself becoming 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 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 Bruno Mars, Robin Thicke, and Daft Punk have been Top 40 hits, while the early New Twenties saw artists like Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Beyoncé releasing heavily disco-inspired albums to critical acclaim. So the anti-disco backlash is, itself, deader than disco.
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 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 Boney M.) originated in Europe. Robert Christgau 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, the racism was more than open in some parts of the country, as Twisted Sister found out.note
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 Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, 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.
...and Beyond
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 The Pond, post-disco stayed popular well into the '80s, heavily influencing New Wave (which eventually leaked back over to the US), Synth-Pop, Italo Disco, and other styles of popular music. In France, you cannot have a wedding party without some Claude François 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 Ascended Meme when used in a presidential election). For much of The '80s, the global pop charts were dominated by derivatives of disco, post-disco, and punk. Artists like Amanda Wilson and Laura White now carry its torch proudly into the present day.
And this isn't even taking into account disco's influence on underground music, especially Post-Punk bands like Public Image Ltd. and ex-No Wavers like Material, Contortions, and Liquid Liquid. All operated under the basic premise of "take a disco beat and pile weird stuff on top of it", often to great and innovative effect. PiL even had a hit with a song called "Death Disco"... although who was singing probably had some effect. In the U.S., Talking Heads were heavily influenced by disco while racking up hits and critical acclaim. There was also the Industrial fascination with Eurodisco, but that's another matter entirely. This marriage of punk and disco later evolved into the Alternative Dance and Madchester genres of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which saw the success of groups like New Order, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and Depeche Mode. Then, the overtly disco-influenced dance-punk genre of the early 2000s led to the rise of acclaimed indie band LCD Soundsystem. The disco revival scene hit a peak in 2013, when Daft Punk's single "Get Lucky" (sung by Pharrell Williams, 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.
Of course, the most prominent influence disco had on underground music was the entire genre of Hip-Hop, 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 Electronic Dance Music, a descendent of House Music, 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 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!
