I’ve heard time and again that the backlash against disco was racist and anti-gay, since the music it’s based on—funk and salsa—came from blacks and hispanics and gay people liked it. Well, what about all the white people that loved it so much from the mid-70s to the very early 80s? It was white people who put the Bee Gees and Donna Summer on top of Billboard, as much as it was white people who wore “Disco Sucks” t-shirts. Disco wouldn’t have annoyed white people enough for the to hold giant destruction rituals in baseball stadiums if other white people hadn’t overplayed it. Somehow you never hear that side of it.
There were many reasons for the anti-disco backlash...yes, there were the gay and racial issues, but there was more than that. Disco was the total antithesis of the rock movement...you had to dress up (no T-shirt and jeans rock uniform), you had to actually *learn* how to dance, you had to spend money and have all the *right* things, it was exclusive/exclusionary (the doorman and the velvet rope). And yes, it became very, very overplayed by the time of Disco Demolition in July of 1979.
Disco music AIN'T classical music. Classical music is still listened to because it is tried and tested, that is, still being listened to and played all over the planet.
Side-note: the Chinese are big into opera these days, thanks to the Great One, Luciano Pavarotti, who introduced opera to the Chinese. The crowds applauded LOUDLY whenever Pavarotti hit The High Note. Also, there are now Chinese tenors who appear in world-wide opera. Talk about WEIRD to look at...the famous operas are in Italian and German (with some in French and other languages). WEIRD, weird, weird.
It also popularized polyester as a valid clothing material, and also reintroduce the mixed drink instead of previous generation's wine and beer preference.
It restyled dirty-uncombed-hair to something more acceptable. In tern- this led to the zenith of hair styles we saw in the 80s!!
Corporate Rock and Corporate Disco and Corporate Fern Bar music ALL sucked in the 1970s.
There was an underground that had the fun and simplicity of the rock AND roll that came before it.
It's long vanished from the airwaves but it still exists to this day. Meanwhile the media giants continue to dictate to the masses what is "popular" and push the celebrity lifestyle of a musician over any talent.
The same suits that pushed this pap wanted to market poster idols named Bobby over the Beatles in the early 1960s as well.
The same media empire that tells me my politics are not mainstream and insult my intelligence and views in movies and television daily prop up this sort of music as "the best".
The ultimate insult (since people DO recognize that rock and roll and disco are different beasts) was enshrining disco acts in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Whatever. It doesn't matter on the sense of scale of global events, but it is still an insult to the rock acts that are still kept out of induction.