Disco and its Discontents: the evolution of disco and its social, economic and political impacts in New York during the 1970s.
The beginnings of the Disco era can be seen to be somewhat attributed to the tentative opening of David Mancuso’s Loft, and the reopening of the Sanctuary at the beginning of 1970. The opening of these clubs marked a decisive next step in the history of ‘nightworld’[1] in New York and the culture that surrounded dance throughout this decade provides it with a unique identity unmatched by any other. Although Olivier Coquelin opened the first ‘discotheque’ on New Year’s Eve in 1962, importing the idea from France into the hub of New York with the opening of Le Club, the concept didn’t catch on for a few years and Disco didn’t truly gather momentum until the early seventies. Discotheques became a focal point where the supressed members of society could find empowerment: black and white gay men, straight women, and working class youths finally found their voice in Disco. The rise and fall of the genre followed a familiar pattern of discovery, exploitation and eventually destruction by the commercialized mainstream; this transgressed radically between individualism and communalism. Today, the sound of Disco is an aural reminder of an age of innocence; of experimentation with drugs, of sexual liberalism and of the early struggle with capitalism.
 As a genre, radio ignored Disco and so it developed mainly underground, gaining exposure from clubs that welcomed black, gay and Latinos alike. David Mancuso developed his idea of the Loft from rent parties and the venue slowly settled into a ‘social groove’ and became a fine example of New York’s ‘much-talked-about-but-rarely-witnessed melting pot’[2] of people and cultural values. Mancuso decorated the space with streamers and balloons, laid out fresh fruit and punch for his guests, and developed the most technically advanced sound system in the whole city that ‘crystalized’ the sound of the New York nightworld. With this sense of a communal place being ‘home-like’, the Loft had the feeling of the safety of a ‘womb’, ‘where the constant and memorable sound is that of the mother’s beating heart, which pulses along at, roughly speaking, the rate of a dance record’[3]. Mancuso found he was able to communicate with all his guests at once with music and, as a host as well as a DJ, he sought ‘the potential power of the party, through which congregants can reach a spiritual and joyful unity where egos disappear, where there is no stress, and where life energy is high’[4]. Here was a place where dancers could discover new possibilities of pleasure with their bodies that didn’t revolve simply around sex and the ‘nascent dance ritual enabled gay men, ethnic groups, and women to experiment with a new way of being which revolved around communal hedonism, ecstatic release, stylist yet functional clothing, and bodily rather than verbal communication’[5].
 The Stonewall Riots on 28th June 1969 gave birth to the gay liberation movement in the Western world and the first gay-only discotheque that opened in 1970, known as the Continental Baths, was seen to be the first discotheque that truly liberated the city. In the words of Douglas Crimp, ‘the innovations of Disco mirrored the ethos of gay liberation regarding the expansion of affectional possibility’[6] and these kinds of social spaces began to shape gay identity. The music had strong characteristics of eroticism, romanticism, and materialism that were a strong contrast to their equivalent meaning in mainstream rock music, and in the context of gay culture, highlighted key ambiguities. Disco music was endlessly repetitive with open structures and insistent rhythms, encouraging a physical response that was boundless and free. The more tribal rhythms heard in Disco, influenced from African American music, felt primitive and physically erotic, and were a quality not heard in popular rock. Disco’s eroticism was experienced by the whole body, whereas rock’s was simply more phallic. This sense of ‘openness’ was key to the underground dance movement as sexuality was not just ‘defined in terms of ‘cock’’[7] and dancers were encouraged to re-discover their bodies as part of the listening experience.
 Whilst sex was undeniably implied, discos were often strangely asexual and rather than pursuing potential partners, dancers settled into a kind of hypnotic ‘groove’ which the DJs established through contouring the atmosphere in the club. Not only could the DJs read the mood of the crowd in the club, but they could also actually physically read the grooves on the records; ‘the dark black grooves are instrumental sections and the lighter black are the vocal’[8]. It was through the combination of these two ‘readings’ that clubs DJs, Mancuso in particular, would begin to program their music around the natural peaks and troughs of the ‘rhythm of life’, giving dance floors a feeling of a quasi-religious aura. Drummer Earl Young is said to be the creator of the ‘disco beat’; ‘I would use cymbals more than the average drummer and I realised that if I played the four-four on the bass I could work different patterns on the cymbals’[9], and this thumping bass and polyrhythmic flash of cymbals ‘compelled dancers to move their bodies’[10] and the textured layers of the disco aesthetic allowed the music to shift between various moods. It was via this platform that the Disco DJs became ‘if not the biological parents, then at least the midwives of the music industry’[11] as they delivered records to the club audiences first, before radio.
 Whilst beginning as a predominantly underground gay movement, Disco was steadily taken up by popular culture and the media in New York. By the end of 1974, The New York Times had run its first article on the emerging culture, discussing how the ‘new urban clubs attract a clientele led by a polyglot coalition of young white, black and Latino gays and straights’[12] and Billboard published a front-page article on the ‘disco-mix’ in November. It was around this time that people began to realise that the Disco DJs, the ‘New York Night Priests’[13], could gain records more recognition in the clubs than radio could on the air. Relationships between record companies and DJs became turbulent until Bob Casey took the lead and established the National Association of Disc Jockeys (NADD) to provide an open forum, from which the idea of the ‘New York Record Pool’ was formed on the 2nd June 1975. Sixty-five of the biggest DJs signed a declaration, agreeing to ‘pool’ their records and knowledge for mutual benefit so as to prevent the record companies from dominating and capitalising the culture - this idea of the equal status of all the DJs was symptomatic of the underlying social forces behind Disco. This idea was hugely successful and pushed Disco record sales higher and higher and, simultaneously, further and further into popular culture.
 The success of Disco in the mid-seventies attracted the attention of international pop and rock stars and a ‘disco market’ started to be targeted. Sales assistant at Colony Records, Ronnie Coles said at the time ‘It’s gotten out of control – everybody’s going disco, rock and rollers, old soul people, jazz people on obscure little record labels. They know that anybody can hit. Anybody’[14]. By 1975, Disco was no longer exclusively underground, it was ‘the thing to do’, and the dance culture was thrust to the forefront of New York’s late night entertainment scene. America’s economy had begun to struggle and signified a change in social and economic standing as unemployment numbers rose. The masses descended on the genre; ‘people came to be in fantasy-land. The more hostile the vibes in your life, the better you learn to party, ‘cause that’s your salvation. Now things aren’t going so well for the stockbroker in Westchester and his wife, they come down here, where it doesn’t matter how much money you earn or what the label on your coat says’[15]. Dancing ‘your troubles away’ to Disco for ten hours straight was the equivalent of working the night shift and ‘the discotheques… were attracting previously sheltered middle-class WASPS who, less sure of their philosophical footing now that the economy was turning sour, had begun to discover the value of the dance floor as a space of cathartic escape and communal expression’[16].
 The Disco experience of the seventies was extremely powerful in both a social and political sense as the romanticism of it gave dancers a sense of an alternative to everyday life and a glimpse of ‘what it is to live at the height of our emotional and experiential capacities’[17]. Disco was indicative of a ‘wider experience of pleasure in our society, a mode of experience which is both terrifying and overwhelmingly powerful’[18]. However, there also was hostility towards Disco that stemmed from people’s association of it with capitalism, in terms of how the music was produced and what it expressed. People were concerned with the fact that Disco culture was consumerist and obsessed with the idea of the celebrity. There was a backlash against the newer elitist clubs such as Studio 54, who frequently turned people away at the door simply based on appearance. Disco seemed characteristic of an advanced capitalist society due to the amount of money spent on it, in terms of the cost of the technology of the sound systems and the contexts in which people consumed it (drugs and alcohol were never far away); it was suggested that the music was simply an ideological expression of this. When the Wall Street Journal ran a headline story about the rise of the discotheque industry in May 1976, it seemed that the shift in power from the underground clubs such as Flamingo and The Loft, to the newer clubs such as Studio 54, was a pre-meditated ‘media subplot’.
 On 8 November 1976, Newsweek ran a story which discussed the mass-takeover of new discotheques; ‘There are kiddie discos, senior citizen discos, roller-skating discos, and discos on wheels, which carry their canned music and lights to suburbia. Disco franchises talk about becoming the ‘MacDonald’s of the entertainment industry’’[19]. The values behind Disco were changing as popular culture appropriated the genre, and after DJ, Nicky Siano attended the Disco Forum II, he noted that ‘No one was talking about how to create a fun atmosphere [anymore]. They were talking about how to run a moneymaking business. They looked at everything with dollar signs in their eyes’[20]. After the release of John Badham’s 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, Disco was viewed from a more commercial standpoint as it deleted the downtown scene of drugs, ethnic gays and liberal same-sex dancing, and replaced it with white straights, alcohol and organised dances such as ‘The Hustle’. The gap between the underground clubs’ and new clubs’ idea of ‘Disco’ grew greater, with the experience in places such as The Loft being about ‘the pureness of the sound and the excitement of music’, contrasted against the experience at Studio 54 which was about ‘the flashing lights, …the drugs you were taking, …the celebrity dancing next to you, [and] the paparazzi[21].
 Writer Albert Goldman published an article in the June edition of Esquire that discussed how he felt that ‘the one thing that binds all these other dissimilar establishments together is the music and the common atmosphere for overstimulation’. If disco was emblematic of the current era, ‘then the stunning profusion of lights, sounds, rhythms, motions, drugs, spectacles, and illusions that comprise the disco formula’ are ‘taken as far as they can be taken and combined with every other extreme to produce the final rape of the human sensorium’[22]. In Theodor Adorno’s 1938 essay ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, he expresses his concerns with the idea of the ‘radio’ as a new technology in the 1930s, and how he believes it to be incredibly Fascist and a deceptive tool of mass culture. He felt that the radio only played music that conveyed the need to conform, requiring little effort to listen and turning the whole act of ‘listening’ to music into an almost unconscious action. This is similar to Goldman’s view where he senses that the masses are being ‘stupefied’ into conforming by the distractions presented in Disco.
 By August 1978, Disco began to also take over the airwaves with radio stations such as WKTU-FM switching over to a disco-only format – by the end of the year over two hundred stations had joined them. However, radio DJ for WDAI-FM, Steve Dahl tapped into the anti-disco sentiment and started his campaigning of the ‘Disco sucks’ movement; ‘Disco represented superficiality. The whole lifestyle seemed to be based on style over substance’[23]. His cause was ‘dedicated to the eradication of the dreaded musical disease known as DISCO’[24] and he played disco records on his show, ending them by ‘blowing them up’ with sound effects. On 12th July 1979 he organised an anti-disco rally at the home of the Chicago White Sox baseball team, Comiskey Park, where attendees needed to only pay 98c if they brought a disco vinyl with them. In the half time, Dahl piled up the records and allowed the crowd to chant ‘disco sucks!’ before he blew up the records with dynamite. Dahl’s campaign ‘made a lot of people sit back and question the Disco stuff that was being shoved down their throats’ says Frank Rose, ‘Disco sucks what? Cock?’[25]. This anti disco movement echoed not only homophobic tendencies within America at the time, but also drew on a far wider ideology: ‘Disco as a whole had come to represent excess, extravagance, hedonism, physicality, and expressivity’[26] and this the anger against it was related not only to the music but also to the poor performance of the economy towards the end of the seventies.
 The black-lash against Disco was so immediate that some even feel it was premeditated, and by the end of the seventies people began to see Disco purely as some kind of ‘record industry sabotage’, describing the music being produced as ‘the most artificial shit I ever heard’[27]. However, despite somewhat dividing society between underground and mainstream, Disco served a purpose over its lifespan and left behind a legacy. It introduced the record industry to the 12-inch single and the iconic ‘four-on-the-floor’ beat illustrates how Disco used conventions to particular effect. The music embodied the social, political and economic tension of the seventies and served as a platform for black and white gay liberation, as well as a cathartic escapism for all supressed communities in New York at the time. In the words of Jamie Kastner from his documentary The Secret Revolution of Disco, ‘beneath Disco’s carefully vapid veneer, it’s true aim [was] the mass liberation of gays, blacks and women from the clutches of a conservative rock-dominated world’[28]. Looking back we can understand that the genre was ‘able to perpetuate itself as system, syntax, or script and not only as sentiment, experience, or social formation’[29].
Brewster, B., and Broughton, F., Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, (Grove Press; Rev Upd edition, 20th May 2014)
 Butler, M. J., Electronica, Dance and Club Music, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012)
 Lawrence, T., Love Saves The Day, (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2003)
 Ray, M., Disco, Punk, New Wave, Heavy Metal and More, (Britannica Educational Publishing, New York, 2013)
 Reynolds, S., Energy Flash: A journey through rave music and dance culture in the UK, (Picador, 21st August 1998)
 Reynolds, S., Generation Ecstasy: Into the world of techno and rave culture, (New York, Routledge, 1999)
Cohn, Nik, ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’, New York Magazine, June 7 (1976)
 Cooper, C., ‘Disco Knights: Hidden Heroes of the New York Dance Music Underground’, Social Text, No. 45 (Winter, 1995), pp. 159-165
 Crimp, D., and Baltrop, A., ‘Diss-co (A Fragment): From Before Pictures, a memoir of 1970s New York’, Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 1, Winter (2008)
 Dansby, A, ‘Disco Sucks 25 Years On’, Rolling Stone, 12July (2004)
 Dyer, R., ‘In Defense of Disco’, Gay Left, Issue 8, (1979)
Echols, A., The Land of Somewhere Else: Refiguring James Brown in seventies disco’, Criticism, Detroit, Winter (2008)
 Goldman, A.,‘The Disco Style: Love Thyself’, Esquire, 20 June (1978)
 Kronengold, C., ‘Exchange Theories in Disco, New Wave, and Album-Orientated Rock’, Criticism, Detroit, Winter (2008), Vol. 50, Issue 1
 Lawrence, T., ‘Beyond the Hustle: Seventies Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture and the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer’, Tim Lawrence, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, (2009), 199-214, found on http://www.timlawrence.info/articles2/2013/7/16/beyond-the-hustle-seventies-social-dancing-discotheque-culture-and-the-emergence-of-the-contemporary-club-dancer (Accessed 21/11/2014)
 Murray, N., ‘Three Disco Greats on Larry Levan's Life and Legacy’, Rolling Stone, 9 May (2014)
 Nyong’o, T., ‘I Feel Love: Disco and it’s discontents’, Criticism, Detroit, Winter (2008), Vol. 50, Issue 1, pp101-113
 Orth, M., Carter, B., and Whitman, L., ‘Get Up and Boogie!’, Newsweek, 8 November (1976)
 Rose, F., ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Group? The Bee Gees Did It With Disco’, Rolling Stone, Issue 243, 14 July (1977)
 Rose, F., ‘Discophobia: Rock & Roll fights back’, Village Voice, 12 November (1979)
 Walker, J., ‘Paranoia at the Disco’, The New Inquiry, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/paranoia-at-the-disco/ (Accessed 21/11/2014)
 Weller, S., ‘New Wave of Discotheques’, New York Sunday News, 31 August (1975)
Studio 54, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEDO4eXIxQg
 The Secret Disco Revolution, Jamie Kastner, (2012), 84 min., (DVD, Screen Media)
 [1] Tim Lawrence uses the term ‘nightworld’ in his book Love Saves The Day when he refers to the unique nightlife of 1970s New York
[2] Tim Lawrence, Love Saves The Day, p23
[3] Tavia Nyong’o, ‘I Feel Love: Disco and it’s Discontents’, Criticism, Detroit, Winter (2008), Vol. 50, Issue 1, p101
[6] Douglas Crimp and Alvin Baltrop, ‘Diss-co (A Fragment): From Before Pictures, a memoir of 1970s New York’, Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 1, Winter (2008)
[7] Richard Dyer, ‘In Defense of Disco’, Gay Left, Issue 8, (1979)
[10] Nicky Siano, Ibid. p121
[12] Henry Edwards, New York Times, (1974), as quoted in Lawrence, p110
[15] Sheila Weller, ‘New Wave of Discotheques’, New York Sunday News, 31 August (1975)
[19] Mareen Orth, Betsy Carter and Lisa Whitman, ‘Get Up and Boogie!’, Newsweek, 8 November (1976)
[21] Nicky Siano, Lawrence, p279
[22] Albert Goldman, ‘The Disco Style: Love Thyself’, Esquire, 20 June (1978)
[25] Frank Rose, ‘Discophobia: Rock & Roll fights back’, Village Voice, 12 November (1979)
[27] Chuck D of Public Enemy, Alice Echols, ‘The Land of Somewhere Else: Refiguring James Brown in Seventies Disco’, Criticism, Detroit, Winter (2008) Vol. 50, Issue 1, p20 as quoted from Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the world of techno and rave culture, (New York, Routledge, 1999), p24
[28] Jesse Walker, ‘Paranoia at the Disco’, The New Inquiry, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/paranoia-at-the-disco/ (Accessed 21/11/2014) as quoted from The Secret Disco Revolution, Jamie Kastner, 2012, 84 min., (DVD, Screen Media)
[29] Charles Kronengold, ‘Exchange Theories in Disco, New Wave, and Album-Orientated Rock’, Criticism, Detroit, Winter (2008), Vol. 50, Issue 1, p61
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