Fifteenth Issue: Disco Rocks
I recently read a young adult book called Burn Baby Burn by Meg Medina. It had interesting characters and a good plot, but more than anything else the setting was what stuck with me. The book is set in New York City in the late 1970s, amidst the Son of Sam killings and the popularity of disco music. I watched the first season of The Get Down last year, which takes place a few years after this book does, and mostly deals with the rise of hip-hop and rap that many trace back to the New York City blackout of 1977. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this time period in this particular city over the past year or so. Here’s a quick breakdown if like me you weren’t alive then (photos taken from here but most are originally from the National Archives):
Anyway, now to disco. All I knew about disco music for a long while was that people hated it. It was cheesy and silly and involved dumb dance moves, shiny disco balls, and bright flamboyant outfits. As I actually listened to the music later though, I kind of like it or at least don’t dislike it with the amount of fervor people in the 80s and 90s seemed to. It seems pretty normal, at least inoffensive? So why all the hatred?
Disco was popular in the 1970s because it was fun. Life sucked, and people wanted an escape. Then, in the late 1970s, the tide began to turn against disco in favor of rock music. Specifically, punk rock began to grow in popularity, and they hated disco. This makes sense to me because punk rockers tend to hate everything. I remember when they hated emo and scene kids in the 2000s. This seems like it’s more widespread than that though.
July 12th 1979 is known as “the day disco died” because of Disco Demolition Night in Chicago. I know it’s not New York City, but it’s a weird enough thing that it affected the whole country as far as musical interests and popularity. At the time of that night there were six disco songs on the top ten chart and just a couple months later there were none.
Disco Demolition Night was started with a guy called Steve Dahl, an asshole young DJ in Chicago who was fired from his radio station when they switched from rock to disco. He was mad about it and kept talking about how disco sucks and amping up other young white dudes who needed something to be angry about (personally I find angry white men annoying. To quote America’s Next Top Model, “some people have war in their countries.”). Basically these insecure guys were threatened by the emerging civil rights movements in the 1970s – women’s rights, black rights, gay rights – and rock music validated them. Disco Demolition Night was a promotion during a baseball game where Steve and his radio station said if fans donated a disco record, they would be allowed in the park for just a dollar, and during the halftime, they would put the records in a big dumpster and blow them up in the middle of the field. Here's Steve:
A lot more people showed up than the organizers thought. One usher who was working at the stadium said that “a lot of the records were not disco records but BLACK records – Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder”. There were more than 47000 people in a stadium with a capacity of just under 45000. When Steve finally took the field in the middle of the game, fans started throwing beer bottles at him. He was confused because these were people who liked him. He led the crowd in a countdown and blew up the records, but there was too much dynamite and it made a crater in the field. The players were still on the field, warming up, but not near the explosion. Pieces of records flew everywhere. People started going nuts.
“People started jumping out of the stands…total chaos,” one witness said. Steve and the other radio station employees ran away, and some fans started bonfires on the field. People started throwing pieces of the broken records. One baseball player said, “I walked out to look at center field, and I heard something go by me. It was an album from the upper deck and landed next to my right foot. It was stuck in the ground. I said: ‘Holy shit, I could have been killed by the Village People.” Another player got into a fist fight in the parking lot. The rest of the players went into their locker room and locked the doors. The police showed up, and the next part of the game was cancelled due to the riot. Forty people were arrested and the field was a mess. People who participated were exhilarated and excited by their experience, but that’s not how it’s remembered.
“I could see the South Side kids I grew up with on the television running over their field. Those were the douchebags I ran away from in high school. And they were burning records. I thought: ‘Didn’t you all read Bradbury? Burning books? Burning records? This has the feeling of a really bad cloud.”
Steve and his buddies said that their movement against disco had nothing to do with racism or homophobia. Others think that it was definitely linked. “…it was a boiling-over of testosterone from white straight men who saw disco – and the whole club scene – as threatening to their masculinity.” Disco was embraced by the gay community, and it was started by the black community. It came out of groups that had been oppressed, and with the release of the movie Saturday Night Fever, disco became mainstream, “put[ting] a white face on what was basically black and Latin music”.
Many rock critics agree that homophobia and racism were behind the backlash against disco, “giving respectable voices to the ugliest kinds of unacknowledged racism, sexism and homophobia”. One prominent voice in the punk scene that was just beginning to emerge at the time said that disco was the “result of an unholy union between the homosexuals and blacks”.
Despite disco dying out by the 1980s, it came back. Much of the music in the 1990s and even now in the 2000s and 2010s is informed by disco music, like Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and even a lot of house and EDM music. And also, those anti-disco rock lovers might not want to acknowledge it, but their music was started by black people too – look at Chuck Berry! Anyway, I’ll leave you with my favorite picture from New York in the 1970s, it’s not safe for work so be aware of that.
- The city was super poor and had lost a lot of money and was in bad condition. The only reason it didn’t go bankrupt is because the city kept firing police, firefighters, and teachers, which obviously didn’t really help the situation in the city at all.
- A lot of landlords who couldn’t afford to keep their buildings up and running would burn them and collect the insurance money. There weren’t enough firefighters to put out all the fires so they’d just burn and then the rubble and burned out buildings were just left there.
- Tourists were instructed not to take the subway, which became the most dangerous subway in the world with 250 felonies per week.
- Prostitution increased and Times Square was full of adult stores and pornography in the windows.
- White Flight was a thing as white people left the city for the suburbs. Thirty percent of the people who lived in the Bronx left. The Bronx was then basically abandoned and there were not many public services there which made the Black, Latino, and other minority populations still living there forgotten.
- In July of 1977, the aforementioned Blackout happened. There was a power outage in almost all of New York City, and unlike other blackouts before and after, the particular circumstances of the city at the time caused there to be a lot of looting, arson, and other crimes. The Son of Sam serial killer was on the loose at the time, and everyone was not doing great financially. There was a heat wave, it was night, and it was just the right environment for bad things to happen. Thirty one neighborhoods in the city were looted and vandalized and set on fire. A lot of the police didn’t show up because they were afraid or because of the problems the police union was having with the city. Three thousand people were arrested, one of the largest mass arrests in history.
- During the blackout, a lot of looters stole DJ and recording equipment, and that is widely acknowledged to have brought about the rise and spread of hip hop and rap as people who couldn’t have normally afforded the equipment to make music now had access to it, albeit illegally.
Disco was popular in the 1970s because it was fun. Life sucked, and people wanted an escape. Then, in the late 1970s, the tide began to turn against disco in favor of rock music. Specifically, punk rock began to grow in popularity, and they hated disco. This makes sense to me because punk rockers tend to hate everything. I remember when they hated emo and scene kids in the 2000s. This seems like it’s more widespread than that though.
July 12th 1979 is known as “the day disco died” because of Disco Demolition Night in Chicago. I know it’s not New York City, but it’s a weird enough thing that it affected the whole country as far as musical interests and popularity. At the time of that night there were six disco songs on the top ten chart and just a couple months later there were none.
Disco Demolition Night was started with a guy called Steve Dahl, an asshole young DJ in Chicago who was fired from his radio station when they switched from rock to disco. He was mad about it and kept talking about how disco sucks and amping up other young white dudes who needed something to be angry about (personally I find angry white men annoying. To quote America’s Next Top Model, “some people have war in their countries.”). Basically these insecure guys were threatened by the emerging civil rights movements in the 1970s – women’s rights, black rights, gay rights – and rock music validated them. Disco Demolition Night was a promotion during a baseball game where Steve and his radio station said if fans donated a disco record, they would be allowed in the park for just a dollar, and during the halftime, they would put the records in a big dumpster and blow them up in the middle of the field. Here's Steve:
A lot more people showed up than the organizers thought. One usher who was working at the stadium said that “a lot of the records were not disco records but BLACK records – Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder”. There were more than 47000 people in a stadium with a capacity of just under 45000. When Steve finally took the field in the middle of the game, fans started throwing beer bottles at him. He was confused because these were people who liked him. He led the crowd in a countdown and blew up the records, but there was too much dynamite and it made a crater in the field. The players were still on the field, warming up, but not near the explosion. Pieces of records flew everywhere. People started going nuts.
“People started jumping out of the stands…total chaos,” one witness said. Steve and the other radio station employees ran away, and some fans started bonfires on the field. People started throwing pieces of the broken records. One baseball player said, “I walked out to look at center field, and I heard something go by me. It was an album from the upper deck and landed next to my right foot. It was stuck in the ground. I said: ‘Holy shit, I could have been killed by the Village People.” Another player got into a fist fight in the parking lot. The rest of the players went into their locker room and locked the doors. The police showed up, and the next part of the game was cancelled due to the riot. Forty people were arrested and the field was a mess. People who participated were exhilarated and excited by their experience, but that’s not how it’s remembered.
“I could see the South Side kids I grew up with on the television running over their field. Those were the douchebags I ran away from in high school. And they were burning records. I thought: ‘Didn’t you all read Bradbury? Burning books? Burning records? This has the feeling of a really bad cloud.”
Steve and his buddies said that their movement against disco had nothing to do with racism or homophobia. Others think that it was definitely linked. “…it was a boiling-over of testosterone from white straight men who saw disco – and the whole club scene – as threatening to their masculinity.” Disco was embraced by the gay community, and it was started by the black community. It came out of groups that had been oppressed, and with the release of the movie Saturday Night Fever, disco became mainstream, “put[ting] a white face on what was basically black and Latin music”.
Many rock critics agree that homophobia and racism were behind the backlash against disco, “giving respectable voices to the ugliest kinds of unacknowledged racism, sexism and homophobia”. One prominent voice in the punk scene that was just beginning to emerge at the time said that disco was the “result of an unholy union between the homosexuals and blacks”.
Despite disco dying out by the 1980s, it came back. Much of the music in the 1990s and even now in the 2000s and 2010s is informed by disco music, like Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and even a lot of house and EDM music. And also, those anti-disco rock lovers might not want to acknowledge it, but their music was started by black people too – look at Chuck Berry! Anyway, I’ll leave you with my favorite picture from New York in the 1970s, it’s not safe for work so be aware of that.
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