Friday, July 10, 2009
News / Chicagoland 'Cause I never dug disco*
Posted by Whet Moser on 07.10.09 at 10:54 AM
TOC has a beef with our "whitewashing" of Disco Demolition Night: "Disco Demolition looked like a chance for some powerful members of the local media and business community to gather followers to blow up records and vent their hate for a music and culture that just happened to be a commercially potent outgrowth of black and gay culture"
If it was me, I woulda just blown up a stack of Readers.
There's an active debate in the comments of our story, but if you're really interested in the intersection between disco, homophobia, race, and the entirely legitimate point that a lot of disco really did suck, USC prof Alice Echols has a thoughtful chapter in her book Shaky Ground (chapter 11, you can read it here).
See also a recent Sound Opinions, which discusses the genre and gives a nice short history, and "White Noise Supremacists," a 1979 essay by Lester Bangs on the racism in the New Wave movement:
"There is certainly something almost emetically self-serving about the unreeling of such confessions in the pages of papers like the Voice—it’s the sort of thing that contributed to the punk reaction in the first place. But it illustrates one primal fact: how easily and suddenly you may find yourself imprisoned and suffocated by the very liberation from cant, dogma, and hypocrisy you thought you’d achieved. That sometimes—usually?—you’ll find that you don’t know where to draw the line until you’re miles across it in a field of land mines. Like wanting the celebration of violent disorder that was the Sex Pistols, ending up with Sid and Nancy instead, yet realizing the next day that you still want to hear Sid sing 'Somethin’ Else' and see The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, and not just because you want to understand this whole episode better but to get your kicks. These are contradictions that refuse to be resolved, which maybe is what most of life eventually amounts to."
* 4-Ever Fresh, "Urban Sound Surgeon"; see also Dr. Octagon, "Bear Witness"
Comments (3)
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"A lot of disco really did suck," writes Whet Moser. Gee, the same couldn't possibly be true of rock and roll, could it? Or "martini music"? Or classical string quartets? A lot of ANY genre will suck, Whet. That's why the good stuff stands out. Disco Demolition Night was the equivalent of a Nuremberg book-burning rally: by trashing disco records, people were acting out their own paranoia about urban music--read black, Latino, and gay--becoming accepted by mainstream culture.
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Disco Demolition Night is one of a handful of events in Chicago history that I could do without ever hearing about again (see also '85 Bears)--but you get a pass this time, Whet, because of the Dr. Octagon reference. Best album of the '90s, I say.
Regarding Albert Williams' comment above: the backlash against disco and urban music was futile. Consider that a month after Disco Demo Night (aka "the day disco died"), on August 10, 1979, Epic Records released Michael Jackson's album "Off the Wall," believed by many to be the greatest disco album of all time.
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That woeful year -- 1979
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The kids at Comiskey's Disco Demolition Night were alright, says photographer Diane Alexander White
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