Saturday Night Fever is 163 on Rolling Stone's top 500 albums

If you never heard of disco music, this would be the place to start. The album cover had John Travolta in a white suit ready to dance. The Bee Gees are in the big picture behind him. It made sense in terms of the movie. Travolta was the star and The Bee Gees had songs in prominent places in the movie. The movie is tough to explain.  It has moments of dancing, humor and drama. There are a lot of things that don’t hold up or are just downright creepy.

The album is more than the movie suggests.

The movie and soundtrack open with “Staying Alive.” It is the defining image of the whole thing. In the movie, Travolta struts down the street. On the album, it’s a moving disco drum beat. The next three tracks also belong to The Bee Gees. In 1977, these songs were inescapable.

Track 5 is another definitive Disco track from Yvonne Elliman. What happens next is you get a variety of songs that show Disco wasn’t just gold chains and silk shirts. There is “A Fifth of Beethoven,” a disco version of the 5th Symphony. This is the first of several Disco instrumentals featuring Latin rhythm, ballads, and funk. Then it’s back to The Bee Gees. “Jive Talking” would be an older song by the time of the movie. KC and The Sunshine Band have a song. The soundtrack ends with more Latin rhythm till it ends with a song that is a bit of everything, “Disco Inferno.” That song was mainstream, a bit funky, a bit synth, a bit pulsing.

If you skip the movie and just get the soundtrack, you get a Disco history and picture of how far reaching the genre was. It’s not a perfect picture as there is no early funk, no Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes, no George Clinton, no Sylvester.

The soundtrack may have made the list because it was the all-time best selling album for years or because the movie was iconic or because they had to put a Disco album on the list. Whatever the reason, the album encapsulates more than a movie.