“Rockers certainly thought so, but they forgot themselves. Rock and roll was originally dance music, and never lost that essence, no in its least danceable offshoots. You didn’t see very many people dancing to, say, Black Sabbath or The Ramones....
“That’s what rock is made for, is what I’m saying, even when it isn’t readily apparent.”
Absolutely. Real rock & roll was killed by the Beatles (hippie version, at least) and the like (any coincidence they’re British and not American?). It became less and less about dancing and having fun and more about “being cool” i.e., being current. The original ‘50s makes were largely conservative types, including DRESSING WELL, but the San Francisco hippie-drippy scene took over and it became rampantly liberal. Including looking like $#@%# and inhibitions about being fun - no dancing, just sitting around and “listening”. “Cool” started to mean absolutely no action that could make you seem like a fool. No fun.
“Disco had limited appeal and for whatever reason, call it popular delusion and the madness of crowds, outgrew its natural fanbase.”
I find that hard to believe. People must all be real fools, then, because Disco was “popular” or it wouldn’t have been on the charts so much.
Meanwhile, “rock” i.e. heavy metal and all that noisy twangy stuff, is/was really mostly underground fringe stuff. Lots of people talk about it and how they love it, but truth - didn’t make the Top 40 that much. That includes the ‘80s. (BTW, who the hell are the Ramones? It keeps coming up on the Internet but I have no clue what the hell they ever did that ever got played. Fringe. Overstated. That and “the Smiths”. Internet legends.)
Incidentally, I grew up under a metalhead (boy) and a disco queen (yes, a girl), only a year apart. Very different characters and behaviors to go with their favorite music. Of course, under the surface some of it was all the same!
"We are the Mods...We are the Mods...We are We are We are the Mods..."
In their 20s, the Beatles were ridiculing the idea of playing rock songs their whole life and went off into “Moms and Dads” music which certainly afforded them a paycheck as already established acts including Sinatra could finally record versions of their material.
“I find that hard to believe. People must all be real fools, then, because Disco was ‘popular’ or it wouldn’t have been on the charts so much.”
It’s not that people were fools, nor that it wasn’t actually as popular as it was. Disco was no mirage. You can’t fake something that big. But I must insist that it was a sort of madness. You can’t very well explain away something that big having that big a backlash against it and disappearing that quickly. It’s like every other fad, in that it was sudden, intense, and fleeting. Fads, to me, are a sort of mass madness.
Not that it really disappeared, as I said. Disco went on under different names, from new wave to pop to r&b to hip-hop.
“Meanwhile, ‘rock’ i.e. heavy metal and all that noisy twangy stuff, is/was really mostly underground fringe stuff. Lots of people talk about it and how they love it, but truth - didn’t make the Top 40 that much.”
In my post I likened the hard stuff, which was what I assume the people blowing up disco records in stadiums were acting in defense of, also by nature have a limited appeal. The anti-hair metal revolt of the early nineties was as virulent in many ways as the revolt against disco.
Also, you are right to suggest it isn’t as often in the Top 40. There’s a reason we reserve the term “pop” for lighter fair. However, don’t undersell the power of hard rock. Hair metal ruled the charts for a time, along with Madonna, George Michael, Whitney Houston, etc. The best selling album of the Nielsen soundscan era, which began in 1991, is Metallica’s untitled so-called “black album.”
I might be willing to stipulate that disco is relatively more comfortable in the mainstream than metal. It seems to have a bit wider appeal, though it can fly off to the unlistenable extremes of 10 minute funky base solos and such. Still, that’s not really the point. The point is that it was not fit to be as dominant as people thought it to be in ‘77. That was a fad, and people got sick of it as they should.
“BTW, who the hell are the Ramones? It keeps coming up on the Internet but I have no clue what the hell they ever did that ever got played. Fringe. Overstated. That and ‘the Smiths’. Internet legends.”
They aren’t internet legends, exactly. What happened there, I think, is that the sort of people who listened to punk and emo back in the day were the same sort of people likely to turn up in positions to influence popular taste later in life. They pick songs to be in movies and on tv, write in Rolling Stone and other rags, program classic rock radio stations, blog, etc. So the youth of today get a skewed view of yesterday.
I personally picked the Ramones as an example only because, along with heavy metal as exemplified by Black Sabbath, punk was a notable—though not very popular—hard alternative subgenre to disco. You’ll find them played on the radio today, and they aren’t so obscure that most people wouldn’t know who I was talking about, even if they were nobodies relative to Donna Summer.