I didn’t live in NYC then. Just NY state. My brother’s band got gigs in high school.
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With the Ma Rainey explicit-lyrics tradition continued in Dancehall music with Spice.
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Of course, that was not the actual lived experience of many punk rockers, either. There is always “that guy” seeking to enforce some weird ass standard, but it’s not the whole scene and never was. Just sometimes those guys are the ones with the loudest voice, and the biggest act of violence that others weren’t willing to stand up to.
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Personally, I quite enjoyed and still enjoy the live bands replete with full horn and percussion sections that played disco, like E,W&F:
ETA:
By the way, other people daring to have completely different opinions about a topic than you do is hardly “opposition”; this isn’t some battle or a competition, it’s a discussion… and your POV isn’t the only one that matters.
Different strokes for different folks…
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Weird how different Windsor is from Detroit, isn’t it? So close together physically, but there’s no mistaking there are 2 different countries on the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers.
@tcg550: What was CIMX playing in the early 70’s? Or did it not exist yet? Sad losing that station to ‘country’ recently, but probably inevitable since losing Dave & Chuck the Freak to WRIF (which is now, apparently “classic alternative”?! - all 90’s stuff whenever I flip to it).
@KathyPartdeux: wow, that’s hard to read. The same colors are used for multiple genres! Who does that?
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I think you mean WCSX. It started out as Honey Radio and than moved around a bit. WCSX came to be in 1987. It was welcomed as a classic rock station.
I never got into any morning shows after Jim Johnson and Dick The Bruiser (George Baer) left WRIF. Never a fan of Drew and Mike or Dave and Chuck. I did enjoy Harper and Gannon.
And Dick Purtan, how could I forget Dick Purtan.
Jim Johnson came back to WCSX with Lynne Woodison but they were let go after 15 years due to management/owner changes and then Lynne filed a sexual harassment suit against Johnson. I never heard how that ended if it even went anywhere.
JJ and Lynne along with WCSX played a huge roll in finally getting Bob Seger into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I haven’t any clue what’s on the Detroit dial anymore other than turning on a Tigers game occasionally.
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Have you considered dance lessons?
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No, I mean CIMX, recently known as 89 X.
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In that case I really have no idea. 89x was way too new rock for me.
But a quick search says they switched to country a couple years ago.
I wonder what classic rock stations there are in Detroit anymore. Next time I’m in the car I’m going to scan the dial.
I turned 13 in 1980, so my sense of disco comes from radio in Dubuque at the time, and going to the roller skating rinks where the video games and air hockey were more interesting. The stunt in Comisky Park wasn’t something I knew about until much later, after I had emigrated to Germany. To my friends and me, disco simply ran out of steam. It wasn’t as cool as The Police or the B-52’s.
But yeah, disco of the era was very formulaic, strict tempos and little variance. The good stuff was called funk or soul or new age, the term “disco” had degraded to mean something like Muzak. It was not the innovation that Giorgio Moroder had come up with in Munich.
Disco never really died, only the plastic knock-off called disco whilst disco retreated back to Europe and the subcultures where it could evolve and experiment. That’s why I wrote “jumped the shark” and not died.
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Maybe if you’re only listening to the Beegees?
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A lot of this has already been mentioned upthread, but I wanted to share the following, from 1980 (pretty much right after this event happened).
Saturday Night Fever … accurately conveyed the unintimidating and nonelitist aspects of disco culture, while conveniently sidestepping its gay elements.
[ …]
Although it didn’t last long – and terrified those who couldn’t stand the music – disco’s brief hegemony provided some beautiful pop moments. In 1978, in a disco-mad city like New York, you could walk down the street and every radio in a passing car, on a stoop, in a store, out an apartment window, carried down the street by a teenager, would be tuned to the same disco station. The cacophony of the city was suddenly a ripple of changing volumes on the same song. And it didn’t matter if you were in a ghetto grocery store or a hip boutique, in a limo or the subway. Disco had gone from an underground taste to the sound of everything from ad jingles to the Rolling Stones.
[ …]
Yet the most interesting thing about disco was not the popularity it gained and lost, or the boredom it induced in many, but the hostility it generated. “Disco sucks” was a popular graffiti of the late Seventies, and the same sentiment was more generally expressed in much of the rock press. There was even an anti-disco rally in Chicago’s Comiskey Park in the summer of 1979. Punk may have aimed for notoriety but disco got it without trying.Some of this, unfortunately, was just homophobia
*or racism. No pop music had been as directly shaped by gay taste before, and by the time disco came along with its black-white-latin mix of influences, producers, singers and consumers, rock had long since gone all white. A related problem was disco’s sensuous and sexual feel, as compared to hard rock’s angry and aggressive one. Disco was uninterested in expressing the adolescent sexual frustration that still inspired much rock. If disco often reduced women (and men) to sex objects, they were available sex objects, not cock teasers that required conquest.
– Tom Smucker, “Disco”, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll
I picked up this book in 1987 so I’ve long considered this from Smucker’s angle. I guess I take it for granted that others** knew about this (whether from that book or elsewhere) when the subject has (for whatever reason) turned to disco. But it’s been met with a lot of (for example) “Nah, that’s B.S., disco just sucks. Except Chic.”
*(Not that I’m any kind of scholar but that’s the earliest use of the term “homophobia” that I’ve personally seen. FWIW.)
**(Elsewhere on the internet, but going back almost as long as I’ve been online)
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So if it’s bad it’s disco, if it’s good it’s something else. (New age???)
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I saw an interview with Nile Rogers in some documentary-- I can’t remember which right now, but he said with absolute certainty that he thought the event was racist. I had never given it much thought until then, being too young to really be aware of it at the time it occurred. I think that he would have had a better perspective on the issue.
I do recall being swept up into the “Disco Sucks” mindset as an adolescent – more because we were taught to dance “The Hustle” in music class in about 4th or 5th grade, and I knew that if it was being taught in my school it had to suck.
When I got a little older and started going to clubs I realized at some point that the music that was being played really was just an evolution of Disco and so had to re-evaluate my childhood dislike of the genre.
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Similar experience, slightly different reason, and different music:
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In fact, that was a joke made by daily comics back in 1979 that still stuck with me. There was good disco music from the time, but it wasn’t on the radio. I didn’t discover it until much later.
My music taste back then was formed by going to folk dancing and digging into my dad’s Simon and Garfunkel records, listening to Switched on Bach and listening to weird stuff like Tangerine Dream and Laurie Anderson. I was hungry for anything that was on the fringe.
That was what the music scene around 1981 decided. It took a little distance, Daft Punk, Scissor Scissors, Gossip, artists that embraced the dreaded name to restore some credit to the genre.
And yeah, New Age was a big thing when I was a teen. I still unabashedly like Andreas Vollenweider.
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