The Death Of Disco Was An Inside Job

 

 “The Death Of Disco Was An Inside Job”

Chicago shock-jock Steve Dahl at the 1979 Disco Demolition event.

"Revisionist history" can be useful if it's done to correct errors or biases in past historical accounts. Or it can be a thing of evil when it is merely the lazy process of ignoring reams of data, refusing to perform in-depth research, and skipping over logical conclusions in favor of pseudoscience for sensationalistic commercial purposes, trolling for attention, and/or to prop up pre-determined political/religious beliefs, e.g.: The Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery! The Sex Pistols weren't punk, they were just a boy band! Martians built the pyramids!

Which brings us to disco.

There’s been a fair amount of revisionist history in recent years regarding the mid-to-late 1970s disco explosion. Disco’s short life and spectacular flame-out in 1979 has been attributed to “rockism,” racist, and anti-gay attitudes, and although these elements may have had some impact on the sudden backlash, there needs to be a more fully nuanced explanation for the death of disco. In short, disco had no one but itself to blame for its’ sudden demise. Let us, as they say in funk, break it down, to five main points:

1. The Race Argument:

Disco was built using many of the same musical elements as funk music:

-Afro-Latin percussion (cowbells!)

-Guitars played high on the neck (thank you, James Brown), and/or with wah-wah pedals

-Steady, high-energy mid-tempo dance beats

-Occasional lush orchestrations

However, disco smoothed out the sometimes complex African-derived rhythms of funk (e.g.: Brown’s "Cold Sweat") to a thump–thump–thump beat so simple even the nerdiest white people could follow it. This caused resentment in the black community, as did how the inherently political Black Power message of funk had become diluted. Dance music went from “Woman of the Ghetto”, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and “Say it Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” to “Shake Your Booty,“ “Get Up And Boogie” and, er, “Boogie Oogie Oogie.“ (see Professor Rickey Vincent’s book “Funk!“).

The idea that disco was made largely by people of color is a bit disingenuous. Actually, FUNK was largely made by people of color. As Vincent points out, few non-Blacks made - or could make - funk. But disco opened the floodgates to anyone who could keep a kick-drum ticking away at 120 beats-per-minute. It is certainly a positive thing to create a musical genre that is available to any and all musicians. But the effect of disco was, as Nelson George details in his book 'The Death of Rhythm and Blues," essentially a whitewashing of dance music in the music industry's attempt to get "crossover" hits.

Of course there is (newsflash!) racism in America. Ask anyone who was a FM rock jock in the '70s about complaints they would receive whenever Black artists like Jimi Hendrix would get spins. But the idea that racism was a major element in the “Disco Sucks” movement doesn't really hold water when a simple scan of 1970s/80s record sales charts reveals that some the biggest albums and songs of the ‘70s (and of all time) were by Black artists. Even as a mob was descending on the 1979 “DiscoDemolition” event in Chicago (with racists chucking actual soul and funk records onto the bonfire along with the disco), the Michael Jackson phenomenon was just starting to explode to an unprecedented degree. Hip-hop, which developed in the late '70s alongside disco, became for a time the world's biggest selling genre and it's the blackest music ever.

2. The homophobia argument doesn’t really wash as the average public had no idea that gay people were making/liking disco. Feel free to peruse radio airchecks or news articles of the day, and you will find very few references to queer culture in disco music. In fact, most people really didn’t know what gay culture was like at all. Very few listeners at the time were even aware that disco stars the Village People were singing about gay life. How could they know? Realistic depictions of queer lifestyles were almost nonexistent in mainstream media. Think there’s an episode of “The Brady Bunch” where Mike decides to cruise Santa Monica Blvd? Or even in the “sophisticated“ urbane films of Woody Allen, ever seen scenes set in a Greenwich Village bathhouse? You just keep lookin’, and you’ll soon see how invisible gay life was in 1970s America. To most, disco was just sounds on the radio, not signifying anything else.

In any case, ‘70s glam rock was the queerest music ever, and people loved it. The “Rocky Horror Picture Show” soundtrack (“I’m just a sweet tranvestite from transsexual Transylvania”) Elton John ( “I’m a bitch, I’m a bitch!”), David Bowie (“You’ve got your mother in a whirl/she can’t tell if you’re a boy or a girl”), Queen, the Kinks (“Lola” who  “…walked like a woman and talked like a man”) Lou Reed (“Walk On The Wild Side,”) etc. all had much more explicitly queer themes, and yet still were hugely popular with the mainstream on both sides of the Atlantic. By contrast, what would trigger anti-gay sentiment in, say, “Night Fever” or “Boogie Wonderland”? Really, again only the Village People (or Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out”) brought gay themes to the Top 40, but with messages so oblique that they went over the heads of most listeners. As opposed to Lou Reed’s “Vicious” (“You must think I'm some kinda gay blade”) from his best-selling 1972 glam rock album pointedly titled “Transformer,” with a leather boy posing on the back cover.

Likewise, The B-52s, who were far more overtly campy than most disco acts, were shooting to stardom in the late '70s, just as disco was collapsing. And then as the ‘80s dawned, numerous New Wave artists like The Culture Club, Soft Cell, The Smiths (and later Erasure, The Bronski Beat and The Communards) had much more explicitly gay personas and songs than anything from the disco era. This didn’t prevent them from shooting to the top of airplay and sales charts.

So if racism and homophobia were not such big issues in the death of disco, what was?

3. Formulaic cliches, rolling off an assembly line...

 The publics' taste in art and entertainment can be very fickle indeed. And that’s bad news if you are a giant corporation looking to increase profits on a quarterly basis. Record company execs would pull their hair, asking, “Why did they like The Dave Clark Five last year, but not now??” as they sat on warehouses full of unsold product. 

By the mid-'70s, disco records were starting to sell well. 1977 saw the release of the disco-themed film "Saturday Night Fever,” and its’ blockbuster soundtrack. Therefore, in the music industry’s quest for a sure-fire hit-making formula, they directed nearly all of their artists to release a disco song. Sinatra? The Beach Boys? Classical orchestras? Think of the most utterly unlikely artist expected to make a dance-floor banger, and odds are, if they were active in the 1970s, they made a disco record.

And they were terrible. Oh dear lord, there was so, so much terrible, terrible disco. One dumb, gimmicky novelty record after another came oozing off the assembly line: Lawrence Welk's accordion-wielding polka-meister Myron Floren released an album called "Disco Polka." And it wasn't even the only disco polka record!  "Tuxedo Junction" was a disco recreation of 1940s Big Band hits. There were even rip-offs of other disco hits, like the martial arts/Chinese titles released in the wake of Carl Douglas' hit "Kung Fu Fighting." Soundtrack themes to such films and tv series as "Star Wars," "Star Trek" and even "Close Encounters of the Third Kind' all got the disco treatment. Check out the Wilton Place Street Band’s disco version of the “I Love Lucy theme,” an actual Top 40 hit, for sheer laugh-out-loud stupidity.  There was not only Rick Dees' hit “Disco Duck”, but someone else did a Christmas version of “Disco Duck,” which might be the worst record ever made. I have a 12 inch Single called “Disco Rabbit.“  

Some of the biggest names in music attempted to pound their well-established square peg styles into the round hole of disco. Faded stars like Frankie Avalon, Petula Clark and Teresa Brewer remade their old hits inna disco stylee. EZ listening acts like Percy Faith, Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis figured this would be a way to squeeze into modern music charts. Leftover hippies like Country Joe McDonald (who recorded the truly wretched "Bring Back The Sixties, Man") and The Byrds cut new songs designed to get them back into the good graces of their old Baby Boomer audience, now living a coke-filled life of affluence. 

Resentment started to run high among both artists and the public as the relentless pounding of that disco beat was freakin' EVERYWHERE. Apart from the afore-mentioned funk fans, there were also many rock, country, and mainstream pop fans who felt like they were being pushed aside. This fear that genres such as rock were being killed off might have been the number one reason for the anti-disco backlash. There were several punk-ish records released based on the theme of "disco sucks," as well as "Disco Sucks" bumper stickers, t-shirts, etc. I don't recall such similar "Funk Sucks," "Glam Sucks" or even "Punk Sucks" activism. 

Of course, disco, like any form of music, was capable of producing gems. Artists like Chic and Donna Summer continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. But with funk/r'n'b acts, rock ‘n’ rollers, lounge crooners, ethnic artists, et al, all being told to make a disco record, and with not nearly a high enough public demand to sustain all this bad music, it naturally burned itself out - the cultural equivalent of an economic bubble.

4. Disco production was expensive.

Like the swing jazz of the 1930s/‘40s Big Band era, disco productions usually relied not on garage bands or rec-room DJs but on lush orchestrations performed by large groups of top session pros. Partially out of economic necessity, the Big Bands of the ‘40s had to pare down to small combos, thus ushering in the Bebop era of jazz, which has been the mainstream approach to jazz group organization ever since. Disco, years after its decline, would similarly mutate to such low-budget forms as house and techno. (Tho, unlike what happened to jazz, where former Big Band musicians mostly just immediately moved on to smaller groups, the growth of House in the 1980s occurred with no input from the original disco performers or record companies.)  Disco’s big budgets were not the sole reason for the genre’s demise, but they sure didn’t help. 

5. Disco had an extremely limited artistic and emotional range. 

You pretty much had to stick with that off beat high-hat rhythm or it wasn’t disco. If it was too slow, or too fast, it wasn’t disco. If it was too experimental, low-fi, or jazzy, then, even if it did have that disco beat, it was probably going to be considered jazz (like Pigbag's "Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag,") or New Wave, a la Ian Drury’s “Sex and Drugs and Rock n Roll,” or Public Image Ltd’s “Swan Lake” aka “Death Disco,” and hence had little chance of getting spins at Studio 54. Basically, if it broke from the strict rhythm formula and shallow dance/boogie themes, then it was no longer disco, which had painted itself into a corner, leaving little chance to grow, as all art movements must do, lest they stagnate and die.

Other musical genres born in the same mid-‘70s time period such as punk (and the subsequent alternative rock movement) and hip-hop are still thriving today, as they had much more open-minded attitudes. A hip-hop or punk/New Wave/alt-rock artist could be personal, political, funny/satirical, and/or totally weird. Themes of darkness and anger, unimaginable in disco, were welcome. One could also record these styles relatively cheaply, while utilizing wildly varying tempos and textures, unlike the predictable machine-like anonymity of studio pros cranking out high-gloss disco records. At least in their original purest forms, punk and rap were street-level peoples’ movements, not directed by - indeed, opposed to - record company machinations. Their constant boundary-pushing ensured their longevity.

And so...

The results of the audio autopsy are in: disco never stood a chance. "Disco Demolition” simply pulled the plug on a terminally ill patient. I do not support violence or vandalism, but there's a part of me that is ok with the “Disco Demolition” night. Yes, it was a messy event, and there were certainly some bad actors involved. But it was organic. It had the feel of people standing up and saying: "We have had enough." Of course, there are better ways to fight back against the corporate take-over and white-washing of culture, but "Disco Demolition" did so in such a forceful manner that it sent shock waves thru the music industry. At least for a little while, the suits realized: these people love their music. We better not mess with it.