What was the disco backlash like?

The tipping point was Alicia Bridges. Her butch dyke affect was bad enough, but then when she kept insisting on pronouncing "action" as "AKK-SHONE," Middle America just decided they had had enough, and killed disco.

Racism and homophobia had a lot to do with it: this is rarely if ever looked at.

Lots of disco and 70s professors on dl, you should get some lectures, thihi.

r2 Don't mention that on the Steve Hoffman music forum. The *cough* white privileged straight men *cough* will attack you.

Disco did not fall fast. It lasted as long as a lot other fad/genres. From around 1974 into the 80s. Aids killed a lifestyle that Disco glorified.

You just could not have a song like "Love to Love You Baby" at the height of the AIDs crisis.

Disco was dead before anyone even heard of AIDS.

It got too popular too fast, and everyone started using it everywhere, until it over-saturated, and we ended up with ridiculous hits like "Disco Duck"... and people over-dosed and got sick of it. When even school kids were dancing "The Hustle", we knew it had gone too far.

It also got associated with "gay" and "effeminate" and "queer" things... so masculinity reasserted itself in the homophobic populace.

Even in gay bars, dance-floors died for a while. It was sad.

It didn't last long though. And even as everyone else in my high school was adopting the "Disco Sucks" and "Disco is Dead" mantras like the sheeple they were, I never stopped loving it. Thankfully, the "New Wave Invasion" happened immediately after, and I got my cool music and danceable stuff all over again, just minus the funky baseline.

Racism and homophobia had nothing to do with it. Actually Disco evolved into House. Times change. And House set the stage for Rap.

How sad and powerless are minds that look for racism everywhere.

Lol, R1.

It was about homophobia.

The kind of mouth breathers who today rally around a Kim Davis were the same types who jumped on the "Death to Disco" "movement ".

Incidentally, they were also the type of person who could never get past the Doorman at ANY disco, and knew it!

Punk had alot to do with its fall. Young white kids, especially in the UK, felt it was not political enough. Or did not speak to white working class culture. Maybe a bit of homophobia there but not racism.

R8. Major League Baseball hosted Burn a Disco Record for discounted admission nights. Along with dozens of other bizarre promotional events sponsored by radio stations and promoters & PR types. It was HOMOPHOBIA not racism.

There was a riot at one of these. I thought the op was asking about the "Death To Disco" phenomenon in the early eighties!?!?!

Not the natural progression in popularity from one musical style to another?!?!

Which thing are we talking about?

R11. Punk & Disco were happening simultaneously. 75-80, or so.

This fad was created to keep baby boomers busy at night. As boomers aged their attention turned to condominiums and wine bars.

I thought punk and disco happened at around the same time and then gave birth to their love child, New Wave. Didn't Talking Heads and Blondie use elements of both.

The Disco Sucks movement sounds like it was more racism that homophobia: I'm sure most people had no idea that gays existed back then or liked disco since before AIDS it was easier to pretend we didn't exist.

Like so many youth-based fads, it left everyone who wasn't young, cool, sexay, well-dressed, and fond of recreational drugs feeling left out - that was a LOT of people. I lived out in the suburbs where there was no awareness of the gay and multi-racial aspects of big-city discos, where I lived you didn't go to the local discos unless you were good-looking, could afford the latest fashions, young, straight or straight-ish, slutty, and fond of recreational drugs.

Honestly, I think the association with drugs hurt disco more than racism or homophobia.

It was certainly NOT homophobia.

It was racism and transphobia.

ALL the major disco stars were transwomen of color (like Sylvester and Donna Summer and Barry Gibb)

Disco died because of the transphobic hatred of cis white gay men of privilege.

Dance my systerwomyn. Dance

I felt it was too establishment. Early on a lot of it felt like "old people's music"

Wasn't there still a big divide between "white people music" (e.g. rock and roll) and "black people music" (e.g. soul) and disco got lumped in with soul? It wasn't like today when lots of white kids listen to rap, it was far more segregated, no?

It didn't disappear. It transmuted into house music, and that electronica shit the kids dance to today. Nevah Went Away.

Disco and gays were always linked together, even back then. The disco rebellion was largely hetero, blue collar rocker types. When people like Rod Stewart, Cher and Babs jumped on the disco bandwagon it started going downhill and it became clear that it was nothing but a fad. Studio 54 closing seemed like the beginning of the end.

It was homophobia more than racism--music that was associated with African-Americans (like soul and funk) remained in style, but disco was associated with gay people too.

The snobbery of early discos that people are referring to above also didn't help it, either. The velvet rope works very well in the short term for nightclubs but it can really piss people off in the longterm if they feel they are being judged as unworthy.

There's a great BBC documentary that they just broadcast again in the UK two days ago, called The Joy of Disco, that gives a brief overview of the history of disco. It touches on its origins in black and gay clubs, how popular (and weird) it became, and the extent of the backlash that rose up against it (and the obvious racist and homophobic sentiments behind it). Also reiterated what others have said, that it didn't really die but evolved into House in the '80s.

With the exception of a few artists Disco was weirdly faceless. It emphasized producers over artists. Listeners like to watch, judge and identify with stars they can recognize.

It was me! I started the backlash with "Don't try to take me to a disco..."

SOME of you are out of your fucking minds.

And by "out of your fucking minds" I mean mentally ill.

You don't sound unbalanced yourself at all, r26/r27.

[quote]Incidentally, they were also the type of person who could never get past the Doorman at ANY disco, and knew it!

Music you have to dress up in a white polyester pantsuit to dance to under a shiny mirrored ball is queer. Beer music is straight. Cocaine music is queer. Everyone could tell the difference. I can say queer because I own six different recordings of Hello, Dolly! They don't come much queerer than me and I grasp at once that straight people don't want to dance to gloriously gay music. I don't fault them for it even if they look askance at the fact that I own six different versions of Gypsy too. Straight people had feathered hair and unisex clothing thrust at them in the disco era. It's no wonder they rejected the music (and the polyester) after a brief immersion in it.

I'm gay, not racist and I think disco sucks fuckin' BALLS. Terrible, generic, boring music. The homophobic thing is pure and utter nonsense.

You can't be gay, and not like disco!

The late 70s was also the time of all of those awful flyover rock bands like Skynrd, Foghat etc. That was what all the douchey straight people were listening to, and disco was just the antithesis of that.

So, nobody else wants to comment on drugs and disco, and how anti-drug feeling was part of the backlash?

Anyway, I suspect that everyone who'd been a hippie, leftist, activist, or socially aware person during the sixties must have hated it. Here they'd spent their youth trying to stop the war, expanding their consciousnesses, trying to support all oppressed people, and taking themselves VERY seriously, and thinking the popular music of the day was so fucking deep. And here the Disco movement came along, and the music was synthetic and forgettable, and the young disco-goers were beautiful and thoughtless.

I was young at the time, but I was quite aware that Disco Hate encompassed all sorts of people, from ex-hippies to rednecks to parents to the nerds who eventually took over the world.

I was a kid in the 70's and liked disco for awhile but eventually became tired of the over saturation and expanded my musical horizons. It had nothing to do with racism or homophobia for me or my friends/ classmates. Def Leppard, Joan Jett & Pat Bentar were coming in strong and we liked their music. I was never a new waver but some of my friends were. We also went through our grunge, rap & heavy metal phases and just generally had a great time.

I can't believe people would deny that disco was gay, what with the existence of the many, many gay bands, from Kc and the Sunshine Band to the Village People... who coincidentally starred with Bruce Jenner in "Can't Stop the Music,"

KC still has never come out, hasn't he?

People really hated it.

They hated it worse than Victoria Grayson hated Lydia with that heat of a thousand burning suns line she had in season one of Revenge.

Disco didn't die - it evolved. If you were out in the clubs, I doubt that the Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park would have made much difference to the soundtrack to your nights out. It marked the beginning of the end of disco's chart dominance, but the beat went on and on.

I was born in 1967. Raised on 70's radio, I enjoyed all kinds of music, not really understanding the concept of genres (or caring). I was a roller-skating fiend, and all I knew was that "disco" was super fun to roller-skate to, at the skating rinks, and I loved it! I remember seeing the "Disco-sucks" record-burning stuff at MLB games, on the news......and I especially remember this, when I saw AIRPLANE! for the first time, with my parents. It got a HUGE laugh & CHEER, in the movie theater. Even my parents, who were very much of the WWII-Glenn Miller/Tommy Dorsey-era, and did not care for rock music, cracked up at this.

Keep in mind it came about in the post-counter culture 1970's. It was a counter balance to the dreary, back to the land earthiness of that time. Plus, it also offered escape from what was going on in the '70's:oil shortages, high prices, war, dumpy hippy culture. When those things changed, disco culture was going to change, or vanish. The 1980's was about a return to tradition, OR a punk rock culture to counter that, but that is another discussion. Disco was the exact opposite of hippy inspired culture. Just look at the physical ideal presented! Men esp. had to be lean, gorgeous, well-dressed and great dancers with perfect hair. Fashion was now polyester suits over cotton and denim. Designer label fashions were preferred over earthy individualism and rough looking or ethnic inspired fashion. If you didn't measure up you couldn't be a part of the crowd. Some have argued that disco never really died, that it changed. Looking back over the music since then, I can see that, too.

Disco culture was also pre-AIDS, although we did have herpes to worry about. The blatant sexuality of the era changed fast with the advent of AIDS.

R40 here again. I agree with the previous poster who said disco didn't speak to working-class whites. I may be gay but also from a blue collar background. Disco just didn't speak to me or move me. It seemed so plastic and fake. Although the discos in the area I grew up in may not have had velvet ropes, we heard about this going on in the urban areas. Disco did not include me, gay or not.

FWIW, the local public broadcasting radio has had a disco music show, if you can believe it. I couldn't believe what I was hearing! I had to chuckle.

There was some racism and homophobia involved, no doubt about it.

But it was also partly a downfall of its own making. The original disco trends were really fresh and unique, and came from the clubs, etc. But it became something that was commercialized and went EVERYWHERE. I mean, for fucks sake, there was an Ethel Merman disco album.

The first wave of new wave -- Blondie, Pretenders, the Police among them -- swept some of the funkiness of disco into what had been a moribund rock scene. Remnants of disco melded with remnants of punk, and ergo, we got new wave.

[quote]You can't be gay and not like disco!

Then I wasn't gay!

AKKSHONE! I wanna live.

How can you say that disco didn't appeal to working class straight people when Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was the best selling album and everybody wanted to be like John Travol---oh wait...

It was the K(ids) I(n) S(atan's) S(chool) devotees that started the backlash!

I believe dr. Johnny Fever made us all aware that disco sucked.

All that hate for happier times. I remember how quickly fashion changed from complexity to simple.

Even music embraced simpler purer synth.

It's such a bizarre sight to see the absolute, unbridled craziness of a stadium full of (mostly white) straight men taking part in and cheering on the burning and destruction of thousands of disco records. Telling choice of words, too (Disco SUCKS!).

R43 is right. As much as I love both of them, once Johnny Mathis and Ethel Merman recorded disco songs, it was time to move on

This was all over the news when it happened.

Disco was already peaking when Saturday Night Fever came out. Suddenly everybody wanted a piece of that money making pie.

Everybody put out a disco record...

"I Feel Love " and Cerrone's "Supernature" were so far ahead of their time. It added such a new dimension to the landscape and pallette... New dance genres were instantly created....

The guitar crowd didn't like the change and cultural shift...and didn't want to dance to disco rock songs. I thought It was fun dancing to Boston's "Dont Look back" lol

Music wise.... The Knack's "My Sharona" killed Disco...

And quite frankly, all those guys in Chicago on the field at the Disco Demolition were men I would never want to associate with anyway...

During disco's heyday, many straights considered it retrograde and decadent. I had straight p.c. friends who turned up their noses at it.

You have to get to Europe to get how dance and electronic music is not as much a part of mainstream culture here as it is there. It just doesn't fit with out Teddy roosevelt masculine ideal, and it didn't help that gay folks loved it. American guys can't deal.

Disco was not being played as much because It was the end of a decade. With each decade comes changes in music, fashion, etc. Disco as it was then ran its course.

[quote]Anyway, I suspect that everyone who'd been a hippie, leftist, activist, or socially aware person during the sixties must have hated it.

I'm pretty sure they did. I seem to recall mentions of how selfish youth culture was at the time -- I was pretty young but have memories of 30-somethings on both "WKRP" and "Private Benjamin" making rather pointed jokes about how people USED to care about stuff, not like those vapid 20-something disco queens nowadays. That was early 1980s though, well after the Disco Demolition.

R57, what those 30-somethings of the early 80s forgot was that young people "used to care" because there was a draft going on and an unpopular war being fought. Once the draft ended and the war with it, there was no need for young people to band together in protest. The protesters of the late 60s early 70s were fighting for the right to be left alone. In other words, they were fighting for the right to be as selfish and vapid as generations of youngsters who weren't being chosen to die in Imperial wars of choice. Witness the way many of the hippies of the 60s became the yuppies of the 80s.

It wasn't the fault of young people in the late 70s and early 80s that they had no wars to protest. And at least by the 80s young people had the honesty to admit that recreational drug use was fun but not a path to phony enlightenment.

R30 is just wrong. On so many levels.

When Ethel Merman released a disco album, that pretty much sealed the deal.

I don't get why people who loved rock hated disco; if you love rock listen to rock; if you don't like disco then don't listen to disco

[quote] disco didn't speak to working-class whites.

Where I came from, Disco was nothing but working class whites of the most obnoxious sort. Mostly machinists and their ladies who looked down on college students.

The sorts who, two decades later, would be line dancing at neo-CW bars, and doing karaoke

Over exposure, homophobia and racism. You knew disco was dead when your fat white quasi Nazi gym teacher made you take disco lessons. I grew up in Ohio, a white lower middle/working class area. The trashy whites hated disco, it was considered music for fags and blacks. These were people who thought Led Zeppelin and Lynard Skynard were the epitome of music. Fights used to break out on the school bus over whose music gets played, the blacks or the whites.

R63, did they play music on the school bus? I remember vicious encounters in school (this was in New England) over different rock groups and over disco versus Rock.

Back then, I was a teen gay. I disliked both Rock and Disco. My passion was classic JAZZ!!! That, and the great singers. I was listening to Billie Holiday years before anyone in my area!

R50 That sounds like a randy good time to me.

[quote]Actually Disco evolved into House.

No it did not. It morphed into New Wave and Synth Pop first. You skipped a whole era of music!

Straight guys coldnt stand the dance music, thought it was gay. They went for this instead.

Gather 'round and let me tell you about the end of disco ... People had to make a choice between rock & disco. Scary times.

Fast forward to the early '90s. Backlash against rock (hair band phase). People had to get on board with grunge (a different kind of rock) or be set adrift at sea. The only survivors were Guns N Roses.

Now, I can listen to whatever the hell I like. That includes the Bee Gees.

Homophobia. There was also less emphasis on melody so it was hard to listen to it outside the disco.

The NYPL at Lincoln Center had an excellent multi-media exhibition on the entire history of disco

[quote]I don't get why people who loved rock hated disco; if you love rock listen to rock; if you don't like disco then don't listen to disco

I like both, but Rock to me back then had a melody like Pat Benatar, Styx or Foreigner. What breeders liked was total trash without a beat or melody from hair bands like KISS or Def Leppard. 99% of which no one wants to hear again or ever hand any staying power.

R71 curated by a queen, a DLer probably.

R71 curated by a queen, a DLer probably.

Le Freak. C'est Chic

"Funkytown" (Lipps Inc.) holds up. (So does "Ring My Bell" by Anita Ward.)

"Because you dance to disco and you don't like rock..."

It was completely my fault; no one liked my all sex song solo album. Not even my brother!

Halston and Liza loved it. Halston is even mentioned in the song “He’s the Greatest Dancer.” When the song came on at Olympic Tower, he would make everybody stop what they were doing and wait for the lyric with his name in it.

The "Disco Sucks" movement wasn't just racism, it wasn't just homophobia... it was the uncool resenting the cool. Because while in the big cities the discoes may have been full of black and gay people, out in the white suburbs where I lived, they were full of good-looking young white straight people, with plenty of disposable incomes to spend on flashy clothes, coke-spoon necklaces, and overpriced cocktails. The poor, the uncouth, the unattractive, or the middle-aged were definitely not welcome to join their party.

And since during the late seventies I was a chubby virginal nerd who was obsessed with "Star Trek" and classical music, I'll let you guess which side of the divide I was on.

THIS was responsible for the downfall of disco................. even as a gay man, I'm embarrassed.

Thinly veiled homophobia.

R81, I thought that was a great song with great album art

Disco was just another iteration of club dance music.

Straight guys couldn't dance to it.

Withe the rise of rap, it was supplanted by House and Techno.

Dance music evolves.

1970-1985 was a great time for music because all genres were creating great music at the same time. I was a metal head who also loved disco as well as punk, classic rock, country rock, it was all good to me. The iconic makeup and hair and fashions from these distinct genres are still being copied to this day. Imagine being a fan of Joan Jett, Wendy O Williams, Van Halen, Sylvester, Donna Summer, Luther Vandross, Eddie Rabbit, Joy Division, Blondie, all at the same time. Oh, and don't forget Broadway which was incredible at that time too. Never forget the I LOVE NY TV ad campaign set to a disco soundtrack.

Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes biggest hit was in 1974. Hardly the "end of disco." I'd say it was near the start of disco.

[Quote] Straight guys couldn't dance to it.

Excuse you.

The poor white oeople I grew up with hated disco and didn’t hide that fact, but the rock and roll they listened to certainly didn’t kill off disco. That was rap and hip hop, mostly.

It didn't go out fast, about five years was all music trends lasted during the rock era. After about 90s, when rock music died off and R&B became mainstream pop is when you saw trends last twenty years or more..

The Beatles were about five years, the soft rock of the early 70s was about five years, the second British invasion was about five years.

Fashion and trends as a whole were very short lived.

Around 1979 many rock radio DJs spurred on an anti-disco agenda to their listeners. Part of it was backlash of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack dominating the airwaves and part of it was anti-black anti-gay sentiments. Disco remained popular in the clubs and in record sales until the early 1980s but subsided with the growing popularity of new-wave and corporate rock.

As music it wasn't just as good as the rock that preceded it.

Disco Streisand: help or hindrance?

When Kiss did a disco song I knew it was over.

Didn’t this conversation recently move here?

Straight white males killed disco because they considered it fag music. Ironically it was immediately replaced by the faggiest music genre ever - New Wave.

Yes R94

But the 2015 Thread Bumper Troll

The mind reels at what direction disco could have gone in had it not been killed. Imagine if rock had been killed in 1960. The parents of disco-haters hated rock just as much if not more, and many of the earliest rock records were cash-grabs by grifters, hucksters, and established artists who had no business being a part of it.

Can't Stop the Music (1980) with the Village People and Bruce Jenner celebrated Disco and signaled its end.

No, R19. A lot of people liked soul and blues. I grew up with it along with rock. Disco was something else.

Even after disco died, black artists still had to struggle to get airtime on MTV when it was new.

Disco was as gay as a picnic basket.

Disco was killed by hompphobia, 100% reality.