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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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)
In my neck of the woods there are always 80s nights at some local bar somewhere. I’ve always wanted to take one of those classic rock cruises with those performers who are still left but I learned a while ago that most of those cruises are basically the promoter renting the ship and they aren’t always the best service/food etc… plus germs, so I’ll probablly never do that.
For the most part my musical world ends around the late 80s early 90s. I have a playlist of about 300 songs featuring pop, rock, and disco from the 70s and 80s with some folk music from the 60s. Not necessarily, mainstream, there is a lot of music rarely ever heard on the radio, even back then. My wife and daughter know where that list is should I become incapacitated at the end so I can listen on the way out.
As far as disco sucks, when I was a teenager it was required to hate disco and love rock and roll. I listened to disco in the privacy of my own vehicle with an awesome stereo I built from Radio Shack. Most bars back then were still live cover bands and you couldn’t avoid disco, I loved it. And the roller rink, lots of disco there.
When I was 15 or 16 I worked at a 24 hour restaurant, every Tuesday evening around 8 the local square dancing club would come in all dressed in the square dancing outfits and all senior citizens. They would fill the joint, nice bunch of people with goofy clothes.
