Did People Hate the Disco Music or the Disco Culture?
I read “When Rock Met Disco” by Steve Blush and it presented some paradoxes.
Disco is dead. Blush says in his book that it isn’t. Disco met punk and became “new wave.” Johnny Lydon did a song with Afrikka Bambatta. It isn’t in the book, but I hear 70s Disco in current Dua Lipa songs. Disco gets sampled.
Disco was expensive. There is an image of Disco being in exclusive clubs where drinks are super expensive and the clothes are high fashion. True. The paradox is that Disco started by playing records. When concert prices got high or ticket scalpers took all the concert tickets to jack up the prices, Disco was small…on a record. No big band. No light show. Disco started in small clubs and houses.
There is a modern belief that hatred of Disco was racist. Due to album marketing and radio marketing, music did get racially segregated. AOR radio played rock bands from the 1960s to 1970s. The only non-white was Jimi Hendrix. In the 1960s, Dick Clark sponsored shows with multicultural acts and played to multicultural crowds. Rock concerts were primarily white in the 1970s. The paradox is Saturday Night Fever. The movie features disco-going characters that were white and racists. Travolta’s character calls that out at the end of the movie. Studio 54 was filled with white people. The book doesn’t go into all the back and forth of racism, but the “Let it Roll” podcast did.
4. There was this decadent culture associated with Disco. A lot of people couldn’t or wouldn’t relate to that. They hated that. They hated the picture of Disco. When that time passed, the music was embraced, but the decadent image didn’t.
Was the Disco sucks movement a movement more against a perceived music and culture than the actual music and culture?
Buy the book by Steve Blush