going back to “disco sucks”: this is a concept that’s so ubiquitous, so common, and so normatively embraced, that most people simply tend to just go ahead and assume that, yeah, disco sucks, haha, we all know that. people tend not to think about it any further than that, or ever question how this particular concept came to be (much less why we’re still making jokes about it, and declaring it as a universal truth, even though it’s been 35 years and “deader than disco” has itself entered our lexicon as a cliche). the way that we unquestioningly take it at face value, as established fact, seems very bizarre to me in that it’s normally incredibly obvious that music is tied to cultural and sub-cultural niches and forms of expression, and their attendant tensions… and how the subjective, contextual, fluid nature of music’s quality is normally itself accepted as a completely self-evident fact.
still, “disco sucks”. it says right there on the bumper sticker. don’t think about it. everyone knows it sucks and it’s funny how much it sucks. haha. fuckin’ bee-gees. fuckin’ ABBA.
(i also find it weird how people seem to assume that somehow an entire genre was sustained entirely by the bee-gees, ABBA (who aren’t really disco anyway), and one gloria gaynor song)
but to pause even briefly and consider the cultural context in which disco emerged, and the cultural context from which the reactionary push against it emerged (“disco sucks” was a refrain embraced by the rock fans of the late 70s… specifically fans of the heavily white-dominated contemporaneous form of rock), and it’s very easy to see an underlying cultural tension, related to race, sexuality, and gender.
disco was a scene and musical form primarily created and embraced by black americans, latin americans, italian americans and, yes, by the lgbt community. most of the performers (the ones who don’t get remembered like the bee-gees do) and producers were black, and the music itself was largely based on the conventions of other primarily black genres like r&b, funk, gospel and soul.“disco sucks” was a statement that, in two words, summed up an entire universe of cultural tension: the cultural expressions of white male americans, and embraced by white male americans, was superior to the “shallow” cultural expressions of american minorities.
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