Quote:
Originally Posted by knowledgeiskey
So in essence, it came from those who preferred more "grassroots"-type music? It had nothing to do with gay or black resentment?
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Your getting a lot of fragments about this music, and its environment from which is difficult to see the continuity of its development and decline.
As for whether there was any resentment, aka hatred, of blacks and gays I can tell you that in 1979 in NYC grafitti proclaiming "disco sucks" appeared scrawled on the bus stop kiosks all over Manhattan, and I
never saw it not accompanied by "kill ****."
The first discos in the NYC area were the notorious Sanctuary (1969-1972), which had all the flashing lights, chaser lights, etc. of the later discos, plus the legendary Francis Grasso as DJ...but no disco music
per se. Except there was Francis Grasso, a genius who could put together a bunch of those f***ing little 45 rpm's or LP cuts just like he knew he was inventing the scene and sound. Lacking the classic disco sound, Grasso had the crowd flyin' on a mix of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Booker T. & the MG's, laced with rock 'n' roll and ethno tracks - Chicago Transit Authority, Santana, the relentless Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Olitunji and the Drums of Passion....a smokin' version of Bob Dylan's
I'll Be Your Baby Tonight by a gospel choir called The Brothers & Sisters, and a favorite of mine Little Sister's hypnotic "You're the One."
Others attribute the bringing together of music with the classic disco ambience to Michael Fesco when he took the dance space of the gay Cherry Grove Hotel on Fire Island, renamed it The Ice Palace, and did essentially the same in the summer of 1970 with disco lighting set up and limiting the music to almost exclusively to black funk and upbeat soul, even though his clientele was overwhelmingly white gay men.
Black and gay clubs in NYC seized on the decor and their DJ's had taken up Grasso's style and techniques. An early disco hit was the crossover African hit
Soul Makossa by Manu Dibango (1973), followed by the essentially early disco of the Hues Corporation's
Rock the Boat and B.T. Express with
Do It and
Express and Tavares with
It Only Takes A Minute, all pre-1975. But disco at this time was a black and gay thing, with a small following of white straight couples who could gain entrance to black or gay clubs. But disco had a definite lack of appeal among straight white people beyond its association with blacks and gays.
Rock music might have had its sex
symbols, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, for example, and it even managed to look like sex sometimes, though usually in the form guitar masturbation. But no one would confuse - or ever compare - Morrison and Joplin with James Brown and Tina Turner. And no one in the next couple of years would have thought that Woodstock was taking place in the same world as the Apollo Theater and the Ike and Tina Turner Review – they weren't.
Rock did not have a bootie, Rock would never shake its groove thing.
Rock did not "get down," and Rock was not about to go near any
it that was paired with
get down, as in "get down on it!"
What had come to be called "soul music" was urban, gritty, defiant, full of sass, challenge and ridicule, and it was emphatically physical. It breathed hard, it growled and when it let go, it yowled. And people got up and shook their butts to it.
Rock and its largely white male audience went in another direction, with the audience assuming a very passive role compared that of black music.
There was also a fascinating behind-the-scenes battle going on in the music business involving radio station management and radio DJ's which impacted disco music negatively for a long time. Pop music historian Beebee Garafalo has a good narrative account of this in his classic
Rockin' Out!: Popular Music in the USA. By the mid-70s some stations were willing to exploit the large metropolitan audience of blacks and gays, and disco music became the format of some NYC stations virtually overnight. And some less markedly black disco music began to cross over into the pop music charts...the BeeGees finally brought respectabilty to this trend. The music had become safe for whites.
I know from personal acquaintance that DJ's who played both the black & gay disco scene, and the straight white disco scene brought considerably different playlists to the latter. Much of the better dance music from gay and black discos never ever was heard in mainstream discos. As a DJ said to me one night, gesturing to the space above the dance floor: "If I played
that there, it would clear the floor!"
And so disco music came to straight whites, and became mainstream, which was acknowledged as such by capitalizing on it with the hit film
Saturday Night Fever, the film and its sound track remaining mainstream money makers for most 1978. But its mainstream popularity was also its downfall, mainstream disco music began to suck in a major way, and some black artists who had become popular in this milieu were moving now into other types of music.
But the rise of mainstream disco had put a big dent in the profits of hard rock oriented stations, and they mounted a concerted anti-disco reaction. A
Rolling Stone article in 1979 summed it up: "As competition becomes fiercer, each station must settle for a narrower demographic range. Right now the goal is males, ages eighteen to thirty-four. White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as a product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they are the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threat to their security...." Thus, the genesis of a station created Disco Demolition Night referred to in another posting.
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