“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.
Lightnin' Hopkins never charted either but the majority of your British rockers (and quite a few of your Chess blues musicians) cited him as a prime influence (including Pete Townsend and Ringo Starr). Ringo almost moved to Houston he was such a fan, the paperwork wore him out and 3 months later he was in the Beatles.
Think that maybe the members of Pearl Jam, U2, REM, and Red Hot Chili Peppers owned Ramones records and saw them in concert when they were growing up?
Time was when bands like Van Halen opened for the Ramones.