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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I’m talking about the major artists in the typical season at the local concert hall. Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, etc.
Over the past 5 years, the works of black and female orchestral composers has gotten more attention. Unfortunately that is driven by leftists who see racism and champion the vapid, and more than likely go home and listen to Ed Sheeran.
That said, some good has come of it: Amy Beth Kirsten and the late Florence Price have some compelling works. Hopefully some of their works continue being performed in the future.
Chicago, at the mentioned White Sox game.
Didn’t know the BeeGees were black
Nile Rogers is the ultimate. He can play, write, produce, score, and he never sucks. Bowie’s 80s run wouldn’t have happened without him.
I like that guy. I much prefer Smoke on the Water, especially Boyd Heath's version, over any disco tune.
Bowie’s “Stay” on Station To Station is a good disco song. They let him appear on Soul Train for a reason.
It was always on the hush-hush like most things homosexual then, but everyone in the days of disco knew that Tchaikovsky and Poulenc in the past, and Copland, Bernstein, Gould, Britten, and Barber then, were light in the loafers. Today the LGBTQ crowd has taken over pop music, but back in the day if you were looking for gayness you went to Juilliard, not Height-Ashbury.
For more years than can be counted, more blacks played, listened to, and loved blues guitar than ever danced to disco.
Disco was hated by the 1970s version of socially awkward incels, who couldn’t dance and couldn’t make out.
more better
The stupidity reached the heights with the release of a ditty called, “Boogie-oogie-oogie.”
When I heard the title I thought, “You’ve GOT to be kidding!”
I do too....
"Unrestful" white people? Haven't heard that one before.
Anyway, let's call "unrest" what it is regardless of color? A riot.
Guess you never had been to studio 54, the limelight or galaxy 500 etc;-)
In the mid 70s, I went where the pretty girls were. I realized that they liked guys that could dance. So I learned to, and was soon dancing with the prettiest girls at the discos. And often I had girls requesting a dance.
(The 3 discos I went to from 74-78 also played rock. After all, they wanted to give the rockers something to dance to. But lets be honest, the nightspots were all about selling booze. That’s where they made money.)
Once, sitting with a table of friends at a disco, the discussion about music likes and dislikes was discussion. The girls were unanimous: guys that hated disco simply were lousy dancers and too lazy to learn. I laughed as one of my best friends (a decent rock drummer) wholeheartly agreed with the girls.
But in the end, I began dating a girl I met in a bar (that my drummer friend liked to go to), that was indifferent to dancing and ALL popular music; wouldn’t cross the street to see a popular musician. To her, they were (and still are) way overblown in real-life importance.
A pretty girl with her head on straight. I married her, and soon she and I quit the nightclub scene permanently.
During those years barhopping and discos, I could tell the sinful drugs and sex lifestyles were found to be in nightlife everywhere, regardless of music preference.
That was nothing. The burning of the Beatle records, now that was something.
/s
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