Why did rockfags have such a chimpout over disco?

Why did rockfags have such a chimpout over disco?

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Because it was fun and 90% of Disco is garbage.

The only good Disco was European.

Wahhhh Wahhh a music genre I don't like is popular

This is false.
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Eons ago, in the strange time when punks and stoners disagreed about everything except whether disco sucked, rockist sages would complain bitterly about all the ways dance music wasn't alive. It was prefabricated, they charged--mechanical beats and studio thrills stripped of human error, with producers exerting such complete control that the so-called artists were little more than names on a label. More ecumenical souls wanted to deny these insults outright, but unfortunately, there was truth to them. The proof came whenever the latest flash made her or his pitiable attempt to cash in with a personal appearance. These were almost always solo--without label subsidies and concerted image buildup, backing bands were literally insupportable. The norm was a brief set in a club designed for dancing during which the name on the bill attached itself to a body and emoted the words over tracks blasted from a cruddy PA. Soul has-beens and never-wases did what they could to invest this format with whatever audience skills they'd accrued on the usual hodgepodge of small stages. With the younger hitmakers, fans were grateful to be spared actual lip-synching.

Once the smarter punks sussed that disco wasn't about to take over the world, they made their peace with dance music. In some cases, in fact, they tried it themselves, and just exactly who was coopting who remains debatable. As the most insatiable rock and rollers of the time, the children of 1977 wanted it all and got plenty, so that if it was fair to say that Boy George was "like punk never happened," it was just as fair to retort that punk made glam dance-pop possible. This connection was predominantly Brit, epitomized by Scritti Politti's migration from noise-punk to treacle-funk and Joy Division's rebirth as New Order. The American variant, briefly dubbed dance-oriented rock or DOR, never surpassed the B-52's, who started it.

After Saturday Night Fever, disco got very overexposed very fast and started flooding the radio and people quickly got tired of it.

it was black and gay, very dangerous to the white rock establishment

Disco didn't really die, you know, it was just pushed back onto urban radio and underground clubs where the mainstream wouldn't hear it as easily. And, it happened so relatively quickly. The fact that the music was alive in 1981 means that there was still a big demand for it.

>>>/tumblr/

House was Disco's revenge.

go away

It became Hi-NRG, then house music.

I have nothing against disco but like most other music genres, it did pass its sell date. There were still hits coming out in 1979 but for the most part it was getting tiresome.

What killed disco wasn't overexposure, it was the large amount of bandwagoners jumping onto the format. When you had Ethel Merman and Sesame Street doing disco, it became essentially a joke. Parodies of the form were appearing by the dozens and groups were doing unimaginative takes on the genre without really knowing anything about it. That's what ended disco.

Gloria Gaynor said about Disco Demolition Night, "Absolutely. For one simple reason. I'm analytical enough to have looked at that situation and thought, if they hated disco music, why did that have all those records to burn?"

So did hip-hop. Reagan and John Wayne parodies, Mel Brooks, Mr. T, Rodney Dangerfield, etc.

I always felt the problem with disco was the same that EDM has always suffered from--you can't really appreciate the stuff unless you're in da club. Bumping disco tunes at a party in your living room doesn't cut it. Teenagers especially found disco to be remote and inaccessible--it was really for adult swingers.

And there could only be so many clubs. When it got as widespread as it could go, there wasn't any more room for it and disappointment ensued. It just couldn't get any bigger than it did. When people realized that, they stuck with it in cliques or moved on. And disco became a sort of an historical anecdote.

It was pushing them off the airwaves.

Disco had a specific sound and in music, what's trendy can change fast. Also it was a producer-driven genre and the singer often could be interchangeable. At some point as well a lot of cheap, derivative disco records also appeared. But I think the better artists from that era survived.

In Germany there was a similar phenomenon. After years of German rock and pop singers singing in English and just blindly copying American and British styles, there emerged a new wave of artists in the late 70s-early 80s who sang in German. The term found for that movement was "Neue Deutsche Welle" = New German Wave. It was brilliant and offered a huge variety of bands and styles. Only the use of the German language that was suddenly cool among young people, was the common link. But the record companies somehow lost any sense for quality control and signed any artist singing in German, flooded the market and it all went downhill, very soon "Neue Deutsche Welle" became a term for terrible music. But also in this case the real good artists from that era survived.

Record label execs were pushing all sorts of acts to do a disco record and lots of big names did disco themed stuff... Kiss... The Stones.. McCartney. All the big R&B/soul acts were expected to do their part.. so you get Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye almost against their will doing things that were considered going disco.

Every single one of these songs suck.

you just don't have the funk

there were no guitar solos and you didn't see any live performers (in the rock sense) at discos, just someone playing records

Overexposure and passing fads doesn't explain the absolute vitriol some people had for it though. Hip hop has done more to anger conservative white people than disco ever could but it's never had a small scale riot over it.

xe's right you know

The single, greatest piece of evidence for oversaturation, IMO anyway, was the Beach Boys trying to make a disco record. Talk about bandwagon.

There is good disco. The kino shit is mostly Italian though.


Peter Jacques Band
Giorgio Moroder
Deodato (not Italo but still good)

back in the day you had to go an event to chimp out if you wanted everyone to hear it, now everyone can comfortably flip their shit over nothing at home

ABBA scrambled the brains.

How could a God tier group sound so cheesy, yet come of so flawless.

>God tier group sound so cheesy, yet come of so flawless
two very talented musicians, two really good singers

things most disco music lacked

Disco was a niche music that blew up way beyond any reasonable expectations until it took over the world. Then it settled back into its niche. That's all. We don't have conspiracy theories about why the swing music fad of the late 90s fizzled out, so why disco?

There are a lot of myths about the rise and fall of disco. Most people maintain that it lasted about 4-5 years, from 1975 to 1979. It actually started a bit before that with James Brown, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Superfly, Shaft, and all that. Even during all the disco record burning in 79, that year also gave us Off The Wall and Chic's Risque, two of the best disco records ever made.

idk but i bet Joe "Humans are a tribal people" Rogan would know

Yo, it's like, have you ever seen gorillas fight? They totally know MMA. Have you ever done ketamine?

The early 80s recession had to do something with it; bands had to adopt a more stripped, low-cost sound with synthesizers. Barry White and KC & The Sunshine Band couldn't keep doing their thing with a full nine or ten piece band behind them.

>Earth, Wind, and Fire - September
>Every single one of these suck.
you hate life

The social climate was changing as the 70s ended; people were getting tired of the excesses of the Sexual Revolution and a more conservative mood was coming. Also AIDS.

Disco became homogenised, these videos sum up how things were getting.

youtube.com/watch?v=Z8zyAEss08A
youtube.com/watch?v=3GVugJj7BUs
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The backlash was inevitable after disco during 1978 swelled into a red giant about to go supernova. Disco became so huge that every suburban couple was taking disco-dancing lessons, there were disco lesson for the elderly, everyone on the fucking planet had a disco album from Ethel Merman to Mickey Mouse, stores were selling disco fashion like three-piece suits, platform shoes, and gold chains. New York City had a restaurant called Disco Donuts.

Disco wasn't just a fad, it was a mass market phenomenon that took over America like a tentacled monster. Soon every town had a disco club running with coke-fueled orgies and a mirror ball overhead. Dozens of new disco records were coming out every week and most were bland, paint-by-numbers 120 bpm looped shit. So inevitably people got tired of it all.

If the record industry killed disco, they did so with pure greed. People were just burned out on it by 1979. It also got so big and mass-market that it lost all of its hipster cred.

The real story is not that "white, heterosexual" Americans rejected it because of racist homophobia. The big news is that white heterosexual mainstream America embraced the music enthusiastically and after the fad was dead it had made a permanent shift in musical tastes.

Disco has always been shit. Everybody hated it. It's only liked now because it's become trendy to like it again.

Studio 54 imploded, disco had run it's course like so many genres before and after it, and New Wave killed the disco star.

There was no conspiracy. Give me a break. As if any one group had the power to kill off an entire genre of music, totally ridiculous theory. A lot of good disco hits came out back then, but by 1979 or '80 it had gotten stale and boring and it all had become a parody of itself just as New Wave was really starting to take hold.

Call it a shift in popular musical tastes, but definitely not a conspiracy.

I'm not denying there was bad disco, but not all disco was bad

During the mid to late 70s, disco did provide a breath of fresh air for a generation that was tired out of the protest era, California hippie triple albums, and 18 minute guitar solos. Disco provided simple, fun music you could dance to that didn't try to have a serious message. Unfortunately, the record industry caught onto this and decided to milk the cow for everything it was worth.

Same reason as any other group pissed off about another group.
INABILITY TO GET LAID

It never went away. It just got renamed house, techno, dance music etc. You can´t keep a good beat down.

My dad told me how when he was a teenager, his parents used to be all like "WTF. Ted Nugent and UFO are garbage how can you listen to this racket!?" but for a short while, the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack replaced Andy Williams and Tony Bennett when they'd invite friends over and all get drunk. You had US Navy officers bumping In The Navy and Macho Man.

Frank Sinatra even made a disco record.

Easy. Disco was an urban, gay, black, and Latino thing and it didn't appeal to the masses of white redneck trash in flyover country.

Chief among those threats were homosexuals. The late 1970s, before the onslaught of AIDS, marked the apex of gay culture, bursting with an exhilarating, even arrogant confidence in its own strength and future. Disco music, along with an anti-rock cabaret style, was a gay sonic emblem. The Village People were cartoon emissaries to the straight world, but they were really more a marketing ploy, the disco Monkees. A better example was Sylvester, who eventually succumbed to AIDS, a brilliant falsetto singer and the best musical product of the San Francisco gay scene.

Not all of disco was gay. Much of it was crafted by male producers who shaped insinuating instrumental backdrops behind the chirpings, cooings and moanings of nearly anonymous female singers. Sometimes those singers could be fitted into the exaggerated feminine stereotypes doted on by gay culture - dominating (Grace Jones), fashionably airy (Silver Convention) or brassily extroverted (Gloria Gaynor).

Beyond homosexuals, another ground for prejudice against disco was simply misogyny: rock-and-roll in its tougher, more aggressive forms has always been a male preserve. Disco allowed entry to the pop charts for women who might otherwise have been frozen out. The best singer to emerge from disco, Donna Summer, could have succeeded in any style, from R&B to ballads, but disco was the easiest way to make the charts in the late 70s.

>Implying the 80s wasn't literally the decade of greed and excess

hmmm similar to how trap is nowadays

just like the 2010s.

Ok, of course it's true that disco got too blown-up and formulaic. A lot of the big disco hits were so wretched that they practically sounded like parodies of themselves (cf. Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy"). Not all disco was bad, for example Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" was ok although some might classify that one more as funk than disco.

Disco was more than just music, is my guess. It was heavily tied into cultural experiences - stupid clothes, embarrassing dances, retarded movies. When the public's patience with this wore out, the music itself was blamed, discredited as being all garbage, and discarded.

>trap and mumble rap
Anyway yeah, any genre that starts to become about itself turns into derivative shit. Unfailingly.

did you know that rappers shoot other rappers?

Easy. When basic boring middle aged suburbanite parents like that one user mentioned started bumping disco when they normally never listened to anything more challenging than Andy Williams, the jig was up.

did you know that in other countries musicians get assassinated?

did you know where the first synth e sizer was made and the politics of that country?

My uncle used to gig in local bands in the 70s and he said back when disco blew up, a lot of rock clubs started putting up mirror balls and lighted floors. A lot of rock musicians were given the boot. Some of them gritted their teeth and decided to play on disco records because they had to make a living somehow, but nobody liked it and a lot of rock fans never got over the disco explosion.

If we're being pedantic, it's 1700s (now) Slovakia.

other countries?

Yeah I grew up in the 80s (I'm old, I know) and the Reagan years were a lot more socially conservative, the coke-fueled excesses of the 70s were passe. Me and none of my friends ever learned how to dance. I guess club/dance music still existed in urban areas like NYC, but out here in flyover country it was never seen or heard from.

>Disco was more than just music, is my guess. It was heavily tied into cultural experiences - stupid clothes, embarrassing dances, retarded movies. When the public's patience with this wore out, the music itself was blamed, discredited as being all garbage, and discarded.
This is my guess more than anything. When you had major retailers stocking disco fashion, faggots in gold chains and leisure suits, cocaine up the wazoo, little kids listening to disco, old people listening to disco, the SNF singles being played on the radio all day every day, it got to the point of massive overkill.

Disco was Chad music for alpha males who went out clubbing and impressed women with their dance floor moves. Rock was for /r9k/fags who were too scared of girls and instead they wanted to get stoned while listening to David Gilmour play a 20 minute guitar solo. Not a female in sight.

Yeah I'm real sure there weren't scores of groupies at rock concerts and girls weren't throwing themselves at Ted Nugent and David Lee Roth.

Disco faded because of overkill and having passed its sell date. For every true craftsman like Nile Rodgers who knew what he was doing, there were ten hack producers who thought a Frank Sinatra disco record was a good idea. I'm no disco fan and even I can hear the difference. However, to others, a Nile Rodgers production may as well be sitting at the same table as the gimmick, semi-novelty acts like the Village People. Disco didn't die completely - it just ran itself through the mill while reinventing and renaming itself.

The term was always stupid because the credit mostly belonged to R&B and R&B was what made it work. All the bandwagoners sucked the R&B right out of it. Ethel Merman didn't sell but a lot of these hacks did and it created the backlash against disco.

Sinatra actually recorded those two disco versions of "All or Nothing At All" and "Night and Day" in 1977, before Saturday Night Fever came out, and the former wasn't even released at the time, it only saw the light of day on the Reprise "suitcase" box set years later.

Now Andy Williams recorded an extended disco remix of "Theme From Love Story" in '78, so if anyone was a bandwagoner here, it wasn't Old Blues Eyes. ;)

When shit like this came out, you knew it was over.

Yes we've talked about this multiple times in this thread. Absolutely wretched.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZmZdqsCW8vM

Disco was pretty fucking bad. For ever good disco act (KC, Donna Summer, Bee Gees, Chic), you had 20 horrible fly-by-night ones and non-disco artists trying to jump on the fad.

nigger I listed to EDM by myself with nobody else
but then I am autistic and riddled with anxiety

Funny how Ethel Merman managed to be completely unattractive and look like a 45 year old when she was in her 20s.

boomers scared of black people and gay
prove me wrong

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its literally true you cant prove me wrong you have no argument

Disco wasn't black and latinx tho
It was rock music with a dance edge
Rock People started to hate it when it went from being Bee Gee's and ABBA to EW&F and Chic because niggers smell.

Objectively wrong and not an argument.

boi if you only knew how influential Chic were

Damn, to think Elvis probably would have put a disco record out if he'd lived just a little bit longer.

I think the sociological reasons offered for the so-called demise of disco are a load of barnacles. At its most simple, you seem to think that that an unholy alliance of Wayne Campbell, Garth Algar, Bob & Doug McKenzie, David Duke and Fred Phelps combined to destroy disco. At this point, you may as well allege that the Stonecutters ("Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the disco genre down? We do! We do!") from the Simpsons are responsible.

It wouldn't even have been that much worse than most of the music he put out in his last years.

theres good disco, but at the time disco had gotten so huge and oversaturated with all these shitty gimmick disco records such as

youtube.com/watch?v=97RjuC9YeXg

youtube.com/watch?v=1rE5LxCY5WI

that being said there was still some amazing disco / funk records released youtube.com/watch?v=i0m19eFeQag

but the discodemolition was mostly an excuse for white people to destroy black records in a segregated-chicago neighborhood

youtube.com/watch?v=YGBDAxCDLs4
This is my favorite political disco song.

Disco faded at the right time, the sounds and production values were getting ridiculous as were the album ideas and the artists doing disco.

Sadly a lot of producers didn't really get the genre and made the sound gauche and those are often that songs that sold the most.

Disco Demolition Night was a stunt dreamed up by Mike Veech, the son of White Sox owner Bill Veech. The people had all those disco records to blow up because admission was 98¢ and a disco record for WLUP 97.9 FM (FM 98 back at that time). They would be blown up in between games of the double header.

Steve Dahl had previously hosted mornings on WDAI 94.7 (now WLS-FM) but lost his job when the station changed formats and turned into Disco DAI at the end of 1978. Hence his anger towards disco, even if some of it was exaggerated for PR purposes.

I was 15 back then and disco didn't do squat for me. Yeah, a lot of people my parents' age got into it after Saturday Night Fever came out but a high school kid doesn't have much use for music like that. You're not old enough to go clubbing or anything when you're 15-16. I guess if I'd been in my 20s I might have appreciated it more. My uncles used to bring home some hot ladies from the disco clubs, even one uncle who was involved with the Nashville music scene and did the whole "Urban Cowboy" thing got into disco.

Hadn't you known that rock originated with blacks down in the South playing the blues?

Yeah he's pretty uninformed. Rock and roll did originate with black music from the Mississippi-Tennessee area that also spawned Elvis and during its height in 56-58 there were rock and roll records being recorded all over America from California to New England and every place in between. The amount of rockabilly records being recorded in the mid to late 50s was huge and most of them came from indie labels and not the giants like RCA and Columbia. In fact a lot of the best rockabilly came from indie labels in flyover country--loads of teenagers back then were chomping at the bit to record their own roc -and roll 45 to impress girls with.

I'm a record collector and a lot of fantastic rockabilly was coming out on obscure labels and from obscure artists, often much better than the big brand stuff from places like NYC.

I'd have to agree with that. Overexposure did hurt disco--when you get to the point where it's so mainstream and toothless that Disney is putting out disco albums, it really does lose any kind of coolness or hipness--but at the same time, the butthurt that rockfags had for disco seems to have gone beyond a simple dislike of the music.

That Chicago "Disco Demolition Night" footage is unnerving to me - it's almost like the Beatles burnings in 1966, where people have this self-righteous anger toward the music.

I think that goes way beyond "I'm sick of disco" or "I don't like disco music"..

I'm not so sure if that's true. A lot of disco's biggest hits were produced by Giorgio Moroder, an Italian living in Germany.

Black music like soul, funk, and R&B was very groove-driven, it had a complicated rhythm section and was very danceable, but it wasn't disco. James Brown, P-Funk, and all were quite different from disco. Disco was a quite distinct thing, it was also a huge part of gay culture here in NYC.

Disco went kaput for a few years in the early 80s then staged its dramatic comeback on Thriller and Madonna's S/T. Yes, the stuff didn't sound like classic disco anymore but even during the 70s, disco evolved quite a bit in a short amount of time--"Le Freak" for example sounds nothing like "The Hustle".

>Disco went kaput for a few years in the early 80s
The period you're talking about (1980-82) was after the disco bubble collapsed and the US economy was mired in a serious recession. During this time, corporate rock like REO Speedwagon and Journey was a major force and new production techniques and tools were allowing slicker-sounding studio recordings than ever before.

Also during the early 80s, country music went through one of its phases of mainstream pop crossovers, possibly because of Urban Cowboy. Oak Ridge Boys, Juice Newton, Dolly Parton, Rosanne Cash--all of them had major pop hits during this period.

As New Wave took over, pop music started to become slicker and more synth-based. MTV began airing in August 1981 and it gave a lot of exposure to British groups like Duran Duran and Ultravox (besides which, the British had been well ahead of the US when it came to music videos). The Human League broke big in the US in the spring of 1982 with "Don't You Want Me".

Almost as soon as Don't You Want Me hit big, it was clear that New Wave had taken over decisively. Suddenly country artists vanished from the pop charts and most of the corporate rock like REO Speedwagon also quickly fell out of favor. While some of the country/corporate rock giants like Don Henley adapted well to the times, a lot of those guys didn't and they faded from the charts.

I don't get really how disco got linked with gay culture. I'm sure some gay dudes danced to it but I'd wager the amount of straight swingers who went to the clubs to do coke and pick up women vastly outnumbered the amount of gays in the scene. I mean, yeah I know that Donna Summer and ABBA had a large gay following, but still...

Don't forget the weird fad of taking some ancient song from the 60s or earlier and remaking it with a disco beat.

My mom and her friends were teenagers in the late 70s and they didn't think much of disco, to them it was music for weird, creepy adult men who wanted to go to the club and pick up loose women. They got into bands like the Go-Gos when they were still a local act in LA, seeing it as the music that connected with them.

But let's be honest--disco was pretty well mined to exhaustion by 1979. How much more could you do with the basic elements (bass drum 4/4 beat, swirling strings, open high hats, etc)? Even the pioneers like KC & The Sunshine Band--after Part 3 (the album with Shake Your Booty), they started repeating themselves. Same with Donna Summer. There's only so much you can get out of a particular music format.

The average American in the 70s was pretty clueless about gay culture anyway, I mean most people didn't really get the deal with the Village People; shit, how many people thought Rob Halford dressed in leather because he liked motorcycles?

It's just one of several instances of something gay becoming so popular it finally reaches flyover country at which point it smashes into a brick wall of insecurity.

Anyway, it's BS that disco died because Rod Stewart and the Stones were having disco-flavored hits. Those were actually some of the better disco tracks of their respective eras. Paul McCartney's "Goodnight Tonight" was perhaps a less-successful example of a dinosaur rocker performing a disco cash-in, but it wasn't truly painful. However, awful crap like Ethel Merman's disco record certainly didn't do the genre any favors. Neither did yet another album (Tragedy) of toupee-melting falsetto harmonies from The Brothers Gibb. They dipped into that well one annoying time too many.

Anything can get tiresome with enough overexposure. Was there a similar reaction against grunge in the 90s?