Originally published at: Boomer Dance Party gets older adults out of the house and on the dance floor | Boing Boing
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I used to volunteer at seniors centre’s. Those dances used to be a lot of fun – fox trots, waltzes, two-steps, et cetera. The greatest generation really was the greatest.
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Did they invite killer mike along?
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I’m gonna die looking forward to dancing the fucking macarena if I live long enough I guess.
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What, no slam dancing in the retirement home?
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My Godmother and her husband did square dancing well into their 70s. We went to a dance to watch them one time, and they were having a great time.
Wonderful people. Real “salt of the earth” farmers in North Central Kansas who used to watch me some as a baby/little kid. As a younger kid on visits, my Godmother treated me like a little adult and I always loved her. Her husband had a deep, baritone voice that I found fascinating as kid. He use to flick out his dentures at me (which I didn’t understand what they were at the time.) and I was like, “I can do that!” and proceeded to flick my tongue over my teeth in a vain attempt to copy the trick.
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To me “boomer dance party” says ‘70s funk +.
I DJed a boomer birthday party about 10 years ago and played tracks from, for instance:
The Ohio Players, The Gap Band, Earth, Wind and Fire, Aretha, Cameo, Tower of Power, Stevie Wonder, Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, The Dazz Band, Prince, Rick James, Talking Heads… etc.
And this being a cosmopolitan crowd, I threw in some nineties worldbeat like Maryam Mursal, Jota Quest, Carlinhos Brown, Natacha Atlas, Ali Hassan Kuban, Cheb Mami, Shabaz, Chaba Fadela… etc.
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Yeah that definitely was more of the music my boomer parents played. Dad would throw in pink Floyd, tom waits, johnny cash, and the grateful dead… Maybe credence.
That being said when I’m old and can’t hear anyway I’m definitely going to any and every free show I can.
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Disco still sucks!
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Your dad has good taste. I went for funk rather than rock because of the beats. But if someone can dance to Tom Waits, good on ‘em. 
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If you’ve still got the moves go for it!
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No.
The unspoken subtext was obvious: disco music was for homosexuals and black people.
… as the record producer Simon Napier-Bell tells Timeline : “The ‘Disco Sucks’ movement was totally anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-gay, anti-everything else that didn’t subscribe to the right-wing rednecks’ idea of what America should be. The people who joined it were the Trump voters of the moment.”
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I’m pretty sure that disco sucks was a saying long before some racist homophobic movement came along in 1979 and latched on to it.
I just don’t like disco, and resent that the 70s gets labeled as the disco decade when so much else was going on, but it you want to explain to me my motivations for not liking it, knock yourself out.
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Every time…
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Like it, don’t like it, that’s not the issue. “Disco sucks” was spawned by the movement you describe. “I don’t like that music” is fine, but find a way to express it that doesn’t use the phrase that came from what you acknowledge as a racist homophobic movement.
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No, it was an existing phrase latched on to by them years down the road.
I’d say “disco blows” but I don’t like to stigmatize oral sex through generalized negative phrasing.
/facetious
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How did this go from a sweet story about dance parties for the elderly to a debate on the origins of “disco sucks” and whether or not disco does, in fact, suck? (It does not, if anyone cares about my opinion)
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