Pop Culture
The 1979 riot that ‘killed’ disco
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Nile Rodgers could see the backlash gathering in April when he told Rolling Stone, “Disco is the new black sheep of the family, so everyone has to jump on it”. Two days before Disco Demolition Night, the New York Times published a column called Discophobia, in which Robert Vare equated disco with national decline: “The Disco Decade is one of glitter and gloss, without substance, subtlety or more than surface sexuality… After the lofty expectations, passions and disappointments of the 1960s, we have the passive resignation and glitzy paroxysms of the Disco 1970s.”
Even in a world without “Disco Sucks”, then, pop music would have been ready to move on. In his book Major Labels, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argues that the disco crash made way for new forms of blockbuster dance-pop such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Madonna’s Like a Virgin (produced by a rejuvenated Nile Rodgers), not to mention the rise of hip-hop and the birth of house music. (In a pleasing twist, the first ever house record, On and On by Jesse Saunders, was co-written by Vince Lawrence, who had been an usher at Comiskey Park on 13 July 1979.) Far from dying, dance music became more innovative and diverse. Modern club culture is indebted to the rise of disco but also to its fall.
This is not to deny the toxic currents of racism, misogyny and homophobia that erupted at Comiskey Park. Dahl and his Coho army certainly wanted to kill disco, but they should not be credited with doing so. As a ubiquitous consumer phenomenon, disco was destined to collapse. As a form of music, and a fine way to spend a Saturday night, it lives on.
The Saint of Second Chances is on Netflix.
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