love live disco
Caption: [ (Stitch with @/oldbruhh): What’s a music opinion that genuinely pisses you off? I shall commence the-
The idea that disco was some frivolous, soulless music genre… when instead it was like this time of unprecedented power that people of color and queer people had over the music industry. And that it simply “fell out of fashion” instead of being pushed out of the industry by people who hated the fact that people of color and gay people were kind of like having sway in the industry.
Honestly I really blame the Disco Demolition Night of 1979. This was an event hosted by the Chicago White Socks and uh 97.9 WLUP in Chicago. It was organized specifically by this dude Steve Dahl. He was an anti disco shock jock dj for the radio station. And Mr. Dahl’s plan was basically that you would get 50% off your ticket to the baseball game if you brought a disco record to destroy at half time.
Here he is next to a dumpster with a bunch of the records. Over fifty thousand people showed to this event and it quickly got out of hand. And the Chicago police had to show up in riot gear to break up the event. This is a great article that speaks to the racism and homophobia of the event if you want to check it out.]
Disco Demolition: the night they tried to crush black music When a DJ called on listeners to destroy disco records in a Chicago stadium, things turned nasty – and 40 years on, the ugly attitudes behin the GuardianWhen I first heard about this subject online I was a bit skeptical at first that music fans who disliked disco were motivated primarily by prejudice, since music taste can be shaped by a lot of things. But one day my uncle brought it up to me completely unprompted. This was a few years ago, shortly before he died. In older age, my uncle was a huge audiophile who collected all these classics on vinyl and he was a young adult during the 70s, the height of disco. I remember him talking about how he was ashamed of his behavior when he was younger. He basically said that white straight dudes like him hated disco because they were being homophobic and that they saw it as music that "f*gs listened to" and he now regretted holding that prejudice in his past. It was interesting hearing from someone who actually lived through the time period and in hindsight could see the bigotry that clouded his judgment back then. Most boomers who hated disco and deny their prejudice are probably being a lot less honest than my uncle was.