“If you wait by the river long enough,” Sun Tzu wrote, “the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
Disco had no hate, but plenty of enemies. Some didn’t like the people involved — too Black, too queer, too much like the parts of America that lived long in the shadows and closets and had boldly stepped out. The war on disco was a violent attempt to shove them back in.
As unlikely as it seems, what was basically an R&B-based music genre that grew out of the same roots (and involved some of the same people) as rock’n’roll was essentially driven out of existence. Pop culture mocked, ridiculed and shamed anyone that identified with the scene. Comedies featured stock character “Disco Guys” getting punched and knocked out. People laughed at the scenes. As recently as four years ago, the Reinsdorf family that owns the White Sox thought Disco Demolition Night was a thing they could play for laughs rather than a racist, homophobic, ritualistic purge.
The important thing to realize is that this didn’t come from nowhere. It wasn’t like tastes changed — you could characterize the most interesting music of the 1980s, like New Order’s Blue Monday, as reconstructing disco from scratch. It wasn’t that people just didn’t like the music. Records from Black artists who never made a disco track were also burned in the fire of Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979.
Culturally, disco was a threat — multiracial, queer as fuck and okay with it. And it was dealt with how cultural threats are usually dealt with in this country, from the Tulsa Race Massacre to O’Shae Sibley.
That is addressed by a series of revisionist takes on the disco movement and the backlash against it. The latest entry is The War On Disco, a provocative but thoughtful documentary directed by Lisa Quijano Wolfinger that airs starting October 30 on PBS stations in the US as part of the American Experience program.
The program “explores the culture war” — they use that term, “culture war,” correctly I think — “that erupted over the spectacular rise of disco music.”
None of these sentiments are new — it’s been decades since Blaze boasted that house music is disco’s revenge. Many rock critics pushed against the backlash as it was happening. Dave Marsh deserves mention here, for noting that disco probably had more cultural impact than punk rock and calling Disco Demolition Night a “horrible pogrom.” Wrapping up the year of Disco Demolition Night, Marsh wrote in 1979 that:
The script was being corrected in realtime, even as it was being written. But it doesn’t matter what we say. Disco, broadly interpreted, took over many of the institutions that drove it underground. Citadels of rockism like Rolling Stone wouldn’t have much to cover without it. For two decades disco was beneath contempt — it was hardly ever mentioned in the music press, except as a punchline. But disco won anyway. It took over every tool that was used to drive it out.
It’s been awhile, but this time, pop culture might get it right.
