If you go off of how disco is referenced in pop culture today, itâs easy to think that disco was an insignificant fad that had no depth and played obnoxious, repetitive music. I want to tell you all the ways that that is wrong, and show how totally radical and significant disco actually was, especially for women, people of color, and gays. I also want to address the reason that disco isnât better appreciated today. Get ready to get excited, empowered, mad, and addicted to the boogie.
In the early 70s, music was changing a lot. The 60s were dominated by Rock nâ Roll, Folk, and Soul. The songs that came out of those genres were designed to be heard live in a concert, either by the artist themselves or a cover band. That means that to listen to the music as it was intended, you have to go out on a specific night that your band is playing, and if you want to dance, itâll be for maybe an hour or less, depending how long the performersâ set is.Â
Disco came out of the urban black populations of cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Detroit. Instead of being played live by bands, it was played on vinyl discs, which could be played indefinitely. As such, the music became focused on keeping people dancing all night. The upbeat rhythm that some people criticize disco for as sounding all the same is actually very intentional: itâs a good, danceable rhythm that is consistent between songs, so instead of having dead noise as you wait for the next song to start, you can just fade out of one song and into the other without stopping the dancing.Â
Whatâs more, since it wasnât live, you could go to a discotheque any night of the week and know that there would be good music to dance to. This totally changed the culture of nightlife. Instead of going out on a pre-scheduled date with your sweetheart, now you could just get together with your friends at the last minute and head to the disco! Many women at the time found this liberating, because they were no longer tied to a man on a date, but hanging out with their girlfriends. Some even said that disco was better than sex.Â
That being said, disco and sexuality were closely linked. Sure, singing about sexual desire was nothing new, but the approach as well as the message were pretty different:Â
Rock nâ Rollâs focus on fulfilling oneâs own sexual satisfaction, without much concern for the (presumed female) partner was being slowly replaced by the more sensual, affectionate attitude presented in soul. Take for example a contrast of the Rolling Stonesâ âSatisfactionâ and Marvin Gayeâs âLetâs Get it Onâ:
âSatisfactionâ (1965)
âAnd Iâm tryinâ to make some girl, who tells me
Baby, better come back maybe next week
Canât you see Iâm on a losing streakâ
:Letâs Get it Onâ (1973)Â
âDonât you know how sweet and wonderful life can be?
Iâm askinâ you baby to get it on with me, oh oh
I ainât gonna worry, I ainât gonna push
I wonât push you babyâ
Not only was there a shift in message, but there was a huge shift in who was singing about sexual desire. White women, black men, and especially black women dominated the charts with catchy songs about love, dance, and sexual attraction.Â
Donna Summer was a black woman from Boston who became known as the âQueen of Disco,â as she sold over 140 million records and earned 32 hit singles throughout her career. Her songs made it clear that she wouldnât let anyone define her sexuality for her. On one occasion, her assistant was accosted by a cop because she was wearing sexy clothes and he thought she was a âstreetwalker.â She convinced him that she wasnât, but when Summer heard the story she asked, âWell, what wouldâve been so bad if she was?â This prompted her song, âBad Girls,â in which she is unapologetically sexy and emphasizes that sex workers are âLike everybody else, they come from near and far,â ordinary people who are trying to make money.Â
My favorite example of black women owning their sexuality is in the music video of âItâs Raining Men,â by the Weather Girls. The group consisted of two overweight black women, Izora Armstead and Martha Wash, who in a hilariously low-budget video sing about how thereâs no need to be lonely when youâre single, youâve got many men to choose from for your sexual satisfaction:
âIâm gonna go out to run and let myself get
Absolutely soaking wet
Itâs raining men, hallelujahâÂ
Disco wasnât just a place of open sexuality for straight people, it also was huge for the growing gay community. Underground gay discos began as early as 1969, but they became so popular that soon they became regular stops for straight people as well. This led to what the Village Voice refers to as the âmainstreaming of gayâ:
ââŚthe straight party world seemed to acknowledge gays as the indispensable ingredient of disco⌠Not only did gay men confer instant cachet on straights, but the very ethos of the disco eraâthe quest for perpetual pleasureâseemed to have pansexual applications. Albert Goldman, a chronicler of disco during the â70s, observed that âwhat differentiates discomania from most of its predecessors is its overt tendency to spill over into orgy, as it has done already in the gay world. All disco is implicitly orgy.â In the course of this overlap, disco became the vector by which gay liberationâs sexual mores penetrated the straight world.Â
The rise of disco had brought with it the mainstreaming of gay, possibly the opening salvo in the queering of America. Yet it wasnât homosexuality per se that disco ushered in but a sustained exploration of the sexual self, including the femme side of the male persona. With its fluid structure of crests and flows, disco music allowed men to imagine the wavelike and recurrent quality of the female orgasm, and to enter a world of psychic plenitude where the spartan injunctions of machismo had been overthrown. Needless to say, this world turned upside down made another, discophobic America very nervous.â
Within 10 years of Stonewall, gays reached unprecedented visibility both on the dancefloor and the records themselves. One of the best known openly gay music groups of disco was Village People, who always wore these costumes:
Their message was that gays are everywhere: we are ordinary people, who do ordinary jobs, like construction or military service. (And, before you get upset by the war bonnet, thatâs Felipe Rose, who is actually Native American)
As the Village Voice article suggests, the presence of gays in disco challenged mainstream masculinity. In their song âMacho Man,â Village People lift weights and show off their large muscles, while also being flamboyantly gay, which at the time was stereotyped as being very feminine.Â
Youâre probably familiar with their song âYMCA,â but you may not know just how gay it is. Answer: very gay. The song addresses the experience of young gay men who wanted to escape the homophobia and isolation of their small towns and move to the big city. With locations in every city, the YMCA was a cheap resource for temporary housing and meals, and it soon saw an abundance of young gay men. This was huge for three reasons: 1) the individual realized that he wasnât the only one with these kinds of feelings and began feeling much more validated/justified in his sexuality, 2) he was able to make friends and form a proud, gay community, and 3) he was surrounded by horny, sexually available potential partners!
Letâs take a look at some of the lyrics of YMCA:
Young man, thereâs no need to feel down.
I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground.
I said, young man, âcause youâre in a new town
Thereâs no need to be unhappy.
Young man, thereâs a place you can go.
I said, young man, when youâre short on your dough.
You can stay there, and Iâm sure you will find
Many ways to have a good time. [âŚ]
They have everything for you men to enjoy,
You can hang out with all the boys⌠[âŚ]
Young man, I was once in your shoes.
I said, I was down and out with the blues.
I felt no man cared if I were alive.
I felt the whole world was so jiveâŚ
Thatâs when someone came up to me,
And said, young man, take a walk up the street.
Thereâs a place there called the Y.M.C.A.
They can start you back on your way.
Unfortunately, as Iâm sure you can guess, all of this increased visibility and sexual autonomy by women, people of color, and gays was not universally well-received by mainstream culture, and a new movement began that spread quickly like an anti-disco inferno.Â
This movement was called, and Iâm not joking, âDisco Sucks.â It was founded by this guy:
This is Steve Dahl. He was a Rock n Roll DJ for a radio station before he was fired when his station transitioned to disco, and as a result he made it his lifeâs mission to to launch a âwar on disco.â When he got a new job at a different radio, he spent all of his time lambasting disco, criticizing it for all sounding the same and having no depth.Â
Dahl became widely popular, to the point that the Chicago White Sox invited him to come entertain the crowd during one of their games. On July 12, 1979, White Sox fans paid $.99 if they brought a disco record that could be destroyed as a part of Dahlâs âDisco Demolition Night.â A video of the event can be found here. The event quickly went out of control, as the explosions destroyed part of left field, the crowd ran onto the field, and many people stole bases (no pun intended) and even home plate.Â
Why did people become so enraged at disco? The messages in the songs were pretty innocuous (at least on the surface level), mostly dealing with love, attraction, and hopes for world peace. Perhaps a key to understanding it is to look at the demographics of the anti-disco movement, namely: young, straight, white men. Maybe some of them really were just tired of disco music, but for a large number of people disco threatened the cultural landscape that they were familiar with and which favored them. Instead of the Rolling Stones, they were now hearing the Weather Girls, Village People, and Earth, Wind & Fire.Â
Disco saw a sharp, painful decline after Disco Demolition Night. it was pretty much gone by 1981.Â
To highlight the difference: in 1979, the top 10 Billboard Hits had 6 songs by black women, two songs by black men and women, and one song by an openly gay band, leaving only three songs that were sung by straight white men. Only three years later in 1982, the top 10 only had 2 songs by white women, and one collaboration between Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. The other 7 songs were all straight white men. Whereas in 1978 the charts were âmajority minority,â by 1982 it had flipped and being straight, white, and male was once again the default. Some even argue that mainstream music hasnât been as diverse as disco was since.
tl;dr Disco was a musical movement that gave unprecedented visibility to minority groups, especially women, black people, and gays, giving them a voice and a space to own, explore, and be proud of their sexuality.Â
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