This is something I’ve been lowkey obsessed with recently. I grew up in the 70’s, which I believe to be a blessing. The music was just… better. It was a time when there was a high level of musicianship, great songwriting, and evolving production techniques coalesced into something really special. I really don’t believe we’ll ever again have music as goo as we did in the 70’s. I just don’t.
Early- and pre-teen me listened to everything. It’s not like we had any choice back then. You had a record player and a radio. You listened to what you had on hand or what you could get a good enough signal on from your transistor radio. I had a handful of records of my own, mostly compilations of radio hits, and my parents’ LPs to listen to. My dad’s albums were jazz, classical and crooners like Sinatra and Dino. My mom’s were country and folk music. I don’t know how I came to love Disco but I did.
I’m sure the movie Saturday Night Fever played a big part. Even though I was too young to go see it in the theatres it still had wide-reaching influence on culture. Some of the first LPs I bought for myself were disco records: Donna Summer, The Village People… I was still at a young enough age where sexuality and racial identity hadn’t crept into my thinking. I loved the music. I got a How to Disco LP/book combo and practiced my moves in my bedroom. I loved that music.
And then, it was just gone all of a sudden. Rock and Country filled the void its departure from the music world created. John Travolta traded in his white, polyester three piece suit from Saturday Night Fever for cowboy boots and a Stetson hat for Urban Cowboy. My attention drifted from disco to the Beatles to my Dad’s collection of Russian composers and whatever else caught my ear. I didn’t give disco much thought after 1979 or so, which is when the disco craze petered out.
It wasn’t until I was an adult and subject to nostalgia that I began to think about it again. It was then that I learned about the backlash against disco at the time that culminated with the Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago. It was only when I was an adult that I knew what was fueling the whole Disco Sucks movement: Racism, Misogyny and Homophobia. The majority of disco DJs and club owners were gay men. The voice of disco was that of black women. The music came from African-American and Latinx culture. Fragile white toxic masculinity couldn’t deal with the fact that it wasn’t made expressly for their consumption, that it competed for airtime with music that was tailor-made for them. It’s no coincidence that the demise of disco happened around the same time as the rise of Van Halen which, whether you enjoy them or not, has to be once of the most toxically misogynistic musical acts of all time and blazed a path for 1980’s hair metal.
I miss Disco. The melancholy that I feel over its demise is made all that more poignant that I now realize, as an adult, what drove it to its death. It’s the same shit that’s always kept this country, this society weighed down, unable to live up to the ideals it espouses. Racism, intolerance, misogyny, homophobia, bigotry destroy or corrupt everything they touch. Fear of otherness is a hell of a drug and I hope this country weans itself off of it one of these days.