DISCO DEMOLITION
A few years back I was reading the message boards over at British DJ Norman Jay's site. One cratedigger asked why it was so hard to track down disco records from the late 70s, why were they so rare. Norman Jay responded by talking about the Disco Demolition Rally organised by a radio station DJ named Steve Dahl 25 years ago. Jay was visiting family in the US regularly during the 70s and 80s, experiencing the rise of disco and hiphop first hand. He also saw the underlying racism behind the anti-disco sentiment.
On 12 July 1979, 90,000 angry people converged on a baseball game in Chicago to burn disco records. What began as an effort to sell seats at a White Sox/Detroit Tigers double-header turned into a mass anti-disco movement that would later be credited as the official “day that disco died.”
Two Chicago radio DJs [Steve Dahl and Garry Meier] came up with the idea of having people bring unwanted disco records to the stadium. The spurned records would be burned between doubleheader games with the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Lead by the chant, “Disco Sucks!”, most of the records weren’t burned, but sailed through the stands during the game - nearly inciting a riot. Some fans started their own fires and mini-riots. There was so much commotion that the ballplayers couldn’t even finish the last game of the doubleheader; the White Sox forfeited.
Dave Haslam: "The 'Disco Sucks' campaign was a white, macho reaction against gay liberation and black pride more than a musical reaction against drum machines. In England, in the same year as the 'Disco Sucks' demo in America, The Young Nationalist - a British National Party publication - told its readers: 'Disco and its melting pot pseudo-philosophy must be fought or Britain's streets will be full of black-worshipping soul boys." (from Jahsonic)
More links... Disco music was gay music; Press coverage from the event; photos
3 comments:
Disco music may have been black and gay, but it still sucked for this wee gay punk.
You probably know it already, but Tim Lawrence's book Love Saves The Day is possibly the best book on disco I've read - for (I assume) a straight British whitey, he does a pretty good job of describing the mostly black NYC gay clubs where it all started... Best of all, he's now best mates with David Mancuso and brings him over to London for Loft parties every 3-4 months. Which is just fine by me.
but try as they will they didn't kill it. It just reinvented itself as house / techno / hip hop / electro. S'funny that even to this day disco is still seen by most as a Bee Gees / Carwash thing rather than a vast legitimate black musical phenomena. Philadelphia Int may well be the most influential label of the past 30 years (since Stax and Motown)
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