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2 December, 2014Discovery Channel Magazine, December 2014
You could make a case that disco is the most vacuous musical movement ever devised. Look at the clothes! Do the Village People look like people with something intelligent to say? And listen to the lyrics! “It was so entertaining when the boogie started to explode.” “Shake, shake, shake your booty.” “Boogie yourself to death.” “Clams on the half shell and rollerskates, rollerskates.”
Yes, it would be easy to make that case.
But you’d be wrong. It’s true that disco is beloved (or be-loathed) for its escapism, for its meaningless love of the beat, for its costume and its simplicity. But it emerged from the bleakest of roots. After all, if music’s going to be based on escapism, then there must have been something that people felt the need to escape from.
Disco needs defending. It has driven people mad for decades now. In the late 1970s it triggered a backlash so vicious that in July 1979, when the Chicago White Sox baseball team filled a crate with disco records and blew it up with dynamite in the middle of the ballpark as a mid-game promotion, more than 50,000 people turned up and eventually had to be dispersed by riot police. There was a well-known DJ at the time, Steve Dahl, who formed his own army called The Insane Coho Lips who rallied around this strident mission statement: “Dedicated to the eradication of the dreaded musical disease known as DISCO.”
What had disco done to deserve this? Why, to this day, is it mocked and derided, something that most of us only dance to with a sense of self-mockery when drunk at a wedding? Something’s not right. It is time to stand up for disco.
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