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Article: Did 70s Disco Really Suck?
In every era, great thinkers add to The Pantheon of Slogans that provide hope and inspiration to aid humanity's never-ending quest to combine intelligent thought with the ability to walk on two legs. But, as the Internet has proven, this melancholy crusade is a work in progress.
In Ancient times, a Carpenter from Gallalee said, "Love your brother and don't interfere with Caesar's business."
In the Renaissance, a poor son of a peasant became the first artist to feature nude scenes in art, saying, "The leaf covers the brain of man."
In the Victorian Age, a great Monarch instructed all women who distressed their male masters by secretly imagining adulterous love with Jaime in the Outlander Series to "Just close your eyes and think of England."
In World War II, General MacArthur established the day-after-Christmas ritual with his pungent exhortation, "I Shall Return!"
In the tumultuous 60s, forward-thinking minds who tried to increase brain activity by growing long hair and pondering the meaning of album liner notes cried, "Revolution Now!"
The March Of Civilization reached its apex in the 70s when humankind yearned for a return to the salubrious days of Satan-worshipping song lyrics and sticking one's head into P.A. columns during concerts with the battle cry, "Disco Sucks!"
The Disco Sucks Movement was a reaction against the woosy decadence of silk shirts with Chinese Dragon designs, platform shoes, and guys with gell in their hair getting all the beautiful women instead of rockers with boots, spandex, and cheap hairspray in their hair getting all the beautiful women.
As you can see, the battle line was a stark contrast in style, fashion, and male prerogative.
However, the issues of this bitterly fought war became blurred as even the standard bearers of rock and roll took short vacations from the demands of artistic integrity to push out a quickie four beats to the bar anthems for the platform shoe crowd for a quick buck.
The question that all of you are probably asking, besides the subject's relevance to anyone under the age of 30, is, "What was Disco?"
The long answer one can look up on Google and hash out the mean in the various contradictory theories, which could provide a pleasant break from killing people in RPG video games and still being butthurt over the Game Of Thrones ending (I feel your pain my brothers and sisters).
I'll provide a short answer for the purposes of this essay.
Assume it's the definitive explanation until you reach the end of this penetrating meditation and have formed the opinion that I'm too old to write about music.
Disco didn't appear out of the blue; it'd been around since D.J.s and dance clubs came into being and has never gone away. It's still alive and well in various permutations, which escapes the notice of old farts because the audience is in the 20-30 age range, and nobody ever really knows what their kids are doing or listening to.
The 70s version of Disco came out of the New York Gay Dance Club Scene and featured the traditional pounding 4/4 beat with whatever was in style on top. The Disco movement became supercharged by the surprise success of the movie Saturday Night Fever which, like with Elvis in the 50s, the Industry managed to get everyone to adore a straight white male hero, and that got the cash registers ringing like church bells on Sunday.
That led to the rise of bands and artists such as the Bee Gees, K.C. and The Sunshine Band, Donna Summer, Tramps, Ohio Players, and Rick Dees with his infamous "Disco Duck" song.
That's an oversimplification, but accurate enough for my sacred mission to illuminate hard-hitting truths without wasting time on actual research.
There are two reasons why rock and roll audiences reacted with such hostility to Disco. Of course, there are more than two, but let's not test your patience. The most important was that these immaculately coifed and dressed artists began to suck up all the P.R. oxygen and profit from sensitive singer-song writers and heavy metal studs; thus driving up the price of cocaine to unsustainable levels and forcing them to play music with a simple dance beat with even less than three chords to compete.
Needless to say, the spandex rockers resented being out dumb downed by the silk shirt upstarts who often didn't even feature guitars, much less an actual band, in the music. Plus, the sophisticated clothes and Gay origins of 70s Disco may not have played well to the mullet-haired males that made up a large percentage of the audience in a typical metal concert.
That's admittedly an unscientific observation, but strict stickling to details doesn't belong in an article about rock music anyway.
The Disco Sucks Movement reached its zenith when protestors began burning huge piles of disco records or destroying said discs in public displays of righteous indignation, which was OK with major Labels as long as the stuff was paid for. They didn't care what anyone did with the product once they got their money.
The Disco Sucks movement suffered a setback when major Rock and Punk groups started coming out with Disco crossover singles. However, rage soon turned to reassurance and approval once fans realized that their heroes made lots of money on the hits. Americans are generous and quick to forgive selling out as long as it's successful, which is the bedrock of Democracy and The American Way. Rock artists who recorded these thumping anthems for the glitter ball set helped the healing process by instructing their publicists to issue sincere statements of regret about the regrettable lapse of artistic integrity and commitment to that old-time rock and roll.
Indeed, the protectors of the sweaty standard of stadium rock returned to basics and staunchly held the line of uncompromising purity until the 80s, when it became necessary to wear even more eye makeup and add cheap synthesizers to the music.
- Al Handa
Dec. 2022
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