Posted on 05/11/2024 6:55:17 AM PDT by DoodleBob
Forty years ago, on July 12, 1979, what was supposed to be a wacky promotional stunt by shock-rock DJ Steve Dahl to sell tickets to a double-header White Sox baseball game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park turned ugly — when piles of vinyl records, many by artists of color, were destroyed as thousands of anti-disco rioters, 39 of whom were eventually arrested for disorderly conduct, stormed the field. Dahl has always vehemently denied that 98.7FM WLUP’s infamous “Disco Demolition Night” had any racist or homophobic undertones or intentions, arguing that “annexing this event to today’s advocacy is lazy academically and inappropriate geographically” and that what happened should be “viewed in the 1979 lens.”
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The disco movement had been spearheaded by many marginalized people, artists who were LGBTQ or of color, and had initially appeared to those audiences — which is why it’s so easy to assume that Disco Demolition Night had been a bigoted event. But by 1979, disco was as mainstream as a music genre could get. … So, it could be argued that disco fatigue had set in after all this market saturation,
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..there was one report in Rolling Stone that mentioned the inherent, if possibly unintentional, “racist and homophobic s***” that occurred at Comiskey Park. That article’s author, esteemed music critic Dave Marsh, described Disco Demolition Night as “your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead… White males, 18 to 34, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they’re the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.”
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It must be exhausting to blame everything to ____ism.
Everyone I know who hated disco loved Hendrix, Queen, Elton John, jazz, the blues and scores of other similar musicians. Indeed, most disco haters also hated classical music, which is about as white and straight as a genre gets.
We hated disco cause it sucked. End of story.
This is the first that I have ever heard that disco was anything more than obnoxious, repetitive dance music.
Steve Dahl DJ’d on Detroit FM radio before he landed in Chicago. His show was genuinely funny. I was a senior in HS at the time (’76-’77). When Dahl blew up that game, it was better than if the Tigers had won it. He was the hero that night and it didn’t have anything to do with racism or baseball.
I remember this well. It was a riot, literally and figuratively.
I’ll never forget Jimmy Pierson saying, “These aren’t baseball fans.” Hilarious.
No heart no soul just annoying and repetitive beat for the most part.
All I can remember of disco is “Stayin’ Alive” and John Travolta. Was there more to it than that?
In October ‘78, I finally settled down after five years of living on the road doing field engineering. The first thing I did was buy a good sound system — Kenwood LO-7 amps, Dahlquist DQ-10 speakers, Mark Levinson preamp, a Thorens turntable and an Austrian tuner (can’t remember who made it). I don’t think any Disco was ever played through that system. (I still have the Kenwood amps, too and they work great after replacing all the caps a few years back).
There was a DJ on KOME 98.5 in San Jose who hated disco. He would start playing a disc tune, then suddenly scratch the record, shout some epithets, and then play something like “Smoke on the Water.”
Even fusionists derided disco:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lfXXRF-XoQo&pp=ygUVYnJhbmQgeCBkaXNjbyBzdWljaWRl
I am ashamed to admit that one of the first records I bought as a dorky freshman in high-school was a record that taught how to dance which featu4ed disco music. Bought it beczuse my girlfriend liked to dance and I didn’t have a clue how to- 40 years later and I still don’t know how. My gf at the time back then did grant me permission to abstain fro dancing after witnessing my incredible moves that I had learned from the record lol.
I’ve discovered over the years that when I was assembled, they forgot to install the rhythm gland- it took me while, UT I eventually caught on that this white boy can’t dance
many by artists of color,“
Leave it to the delusional children at yahoo to make it a race thing. I remember this it had absolutely nothing to do with race, nothing .
I would add that the rock disco tunes - the Stones’ Missing You, Rod the Mod’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?, and that piece of tripe from Kiss’ - sucked bigly.
FWIW, Chic transcended disco.
The list of homosexual classical composers and musicians is as long as the Mississippi, as is the list of black classical composers and musicians, going all the way back to John Blanke in the Renaissance.
This is an absolute lie. Hating Disco had NOTHING to do with black people or “black music.”
Disco was an abomination that swallowed every pop and rock station to the exclusion of some very good music being created at the time.
I loathed it from the beginning and it had zero to do with any race. It sucked. That’s all.
Black disco was fine, nothing wrong with Nile Rodgers and “Chic”.
It was the white versions of disco that sucked.
>Everyone I know who hated disco loved Hendrix, Queen, Elton John, jazz, the blues and scores of other similar musicians. Indeed, most disco haters also hated classical music, which is about as white and straight as a genre gets.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Everything is white racism to these knuckleheads. Even when it’s not.
The Bee Gees were extremely talented and did great work. Were they not hugely listenable? They deserved better than to have their efforts thoughtlessly cast into the ash heap that day, and after.
Other than the disco stuff.
Where was that picture taken?
Their best work preceded the disco phase.
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