I think one problem with disco is some people have a hard time distinguishing disco from funk and soul. I've seen songs here labeled as "disco" that I don't. To me disco had a beat, a glam, and drum tracks with synthesizer programming. Much of the backlash against disco in the day was "music programming" vs. "musicianship". It's no coincidence that session musicians saw their work decline during this period. Disco artists seemed to use "fake" instruments in a lot of their work. It wasn't racism and homophobia. Nobody I knew even mentioned these things. They were playing Michael Jackson, Queen, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, etc. Explain that. Disco was a formula that suffered backlash because of that. The 80's had it's sound and MTV would boost that and it wasn't disco. The times changed. Disco was plastic music and there was a backlash against the plastic lifestyle.
I don't want to start a big major debate about this, but I never understood the racism aspect of it. If it truly was only Disco records that were destroyed at the Comiskey Park event, that tells me that they had some kind of grudge against the music and how popular it became, not necessarily the race or sexual orientation of the people who recorded it. If they had brought records by say, Jimi Hendrix, Sam Cooke or The Temptations to be demolishhed along with Disco records, then I could understand it more, because then it would appear to be more than just about Disco. The homophobia angle is also lost on me, as I would venture to say that the average listener/record buyer probably wasn't aware of the connection between Disco and Gay culture. I know I wasn't until about late '78/ early '79. To me, it was just music I heard on the radio and bought when I could.
I heard this on rock radio a lot back then. It's yet another forgotten Paul McCartney/Wings song. It was from his first Columbia Records album.
I would not be surprised if at least some of the participants in that event had the attitude that but for disco, punk rock and the first wave of "new wave" would have sold larger numbers. After all, the Sex Pistols - considered a joke in the U.S. by the time Warner Bros. took a chance on them - had a #1 on "another" chart while the "official" chart kept them off it, in their native Britain. How many of those records burnt were cash-ins like Saturday Night Discomania, for example? Some 11 months before this event, NBC ran a pilot for a show entitled Le Disco! One of the judges was Edie Adams - who I had to figure took that gig to finish not only paying off her late husband Ernie Kovacs' massive tax debts, liens and interest, but also buy anything that survived of his video and audio legacy, as she had done with every other project she'd been involved with since he crashed his Corvair into a tree in January 1962. (In a bit of irony, this video below was taped off the air from the Chicago NBC O&O.) One other thing I surmised by this, by that point she looked almost like a redheaded cousin of Heart's Ann Wilson.
I agree with you. The confusion often comes from those who aren't vary familiar with the R&B genre past the early 70s. It's also a personal interpretation based on one's familiarity with the R&B genre. If, by "music programming", you mean producers and D.J.s, I agree. The backlash was because disco was a producer/D.J. driven type of music. Not that there were self-contained bands and writers, but, for the most part, it was where the D.J.s and producers took the spotlight. Jacques Morali, Van McCoy, Giorgio Moroder, Tom Moulton, and many others, including those who were also artists such as Barry White and Nile Rodgers/Bernard Edwards. That didn't happen until the 80s. True synthesizers became the norm in the late 70s, but they didn't get phased out until the recession hit the industry starting around this time. It was more economical for bands to drop members in favor of the synthetic sounds. It's your personal anecdote, but when you look at other areas of the country, it indeed was racism and homophobia. It was probably more of a midwestern thing, but it was there. I didn't feel it in my corner of the world, either, until sometime in the 80s when I started to meet people from other parts of the country, and on this forum.
You see, disco started out as R&B, a Black musical form. There it is. When these people hear disco, they hear Blackness. To a lot of people, Black people = disco, just like to many people rap/hip-hop = Black people. I now live in an area with a lot of racists and people with racist attitudes. I hear it all the time. Maybe you grew up more sheltered or innocent, but, even back in 1975, we kids and young teens knew what it was. Listen to "Get Dancin'" by Disco Tex & The Sex-O-Lettes? Yup. We knew Sir Monti Rock was gay. We immediately knew what was up with the Village People when they came along, too.
If that's the case, why stop at just demolishing Disco records? Why not any old R&B or Jimi Hendrix record? Most people I know would probably think "Saturday Night Fever" and The Bee Gees when thinking of Disco. Not once did I ever hear any negative comments about the race or sexuality of the performers. No one I knew cared about that. All the complaints I heard about Disco were just based on the music alone. Most of those people just weren't that crazy about Dance Music in general, but still liked a few individual disco songs. That's exactly why I don't believe the whole race aspect of it. If anyone wants to believe it, that of course is their right. I'm about 5 years younger than you, and the whole sexuality thing of celebrities wasn't on my radar in the late 70's and as far as I know, not on any of my friends' radar, either. It wasn't about being sheltered or innocent, it's just something that never really occurred to us to think very much about. Again, no one I knew really cared. Even after it became common knowledge they were gay, I didn't hear a single person say "Don't buy or listen to their records anymore because they're gay".
I think it had reached such saturation that people were starting to get sick of it. And hey, like most genres of music, 5% of disco was great and 95% was crap -- and the crap often dominated the airwaves.
And there was the cr-p that didn't make the airwaves, but nonetheless was ubiquitous anyway . . . And that this was put out by A&M . . . ?!
"Sad Eyes" is one of those songs I remember hearing when I was a little kid (I was 6), but never really knew anything about it until years later. Still not a favorite!
If that was the backlash, those people were d-u-m-b. Virtually all disco bands sported musicianship far superior to that of most rock acts of the era. Unless by "musicianship" you mean electric guitar wanking. Disco bands tended to have far less of that idiotic crap.
Yeah, I don't know when, but at some point not long after they arrived on the scene, I figured out what that was all about. Uh, because Jimmy Hendrix records and old R&B records weren't parked at #1 on the singles charts for half the year, and plastered all over the radio non-stop 24/7. Quite a few rock stations switched format to disco during this period. The babies were having a tantrum because pop culture wasn't catering solely to their needs. It's how brats behave.
I'd have thought this would have gone to #1 on the AC charts as well, but I see it only made it to #10. Maybe the electric guitar solo was too much for the blue hairs! Still, this one had a long life on oldies radio, although it had mostly dropped down the memory hole by 1990. Prior to this, John's biggest hit had been a #3 cover of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" from 1972. He'd been absent from the charts for a whopping 7 years before this self-penned tune took him straight to the top. It's something of a laid back, classic Motown-styled pop hit with vague R&B overtones, not all that different from the yacht rock that was really heating up on the charts around this time. Something about this one feels a little too downmarket to qualify as yacht rock though -the musicianship and production is a bit generic and pedestrian and feels cheap (although Darlene Love is singing backup on it, so...). The cut is fairly forgotten today, managing to rack up only 5 million plays on Spotify. To put that into perspective, Amii Stewart's #1 hit "Knock On Wood" from 1979 has pulled around 18 million plays in its various available versions. While there's nothing remarkable about this cut, I think it's a great example of the kind of material that absolutely dominated the pop charts in the wake of the 1980 collapse in disco. For about two years we were inundated with these bland, generic, pleasant enough, light rock, R&B tinged, exceedingly white, often helium-voiced cuts - the musical equivalent of a room with Navajo white walls and a beige carpet. So in that regard "Sad Eyes" was the tip of the wedge, although being a pioneer didn't do John any favors - he'd only have one other top 40 hit (1980's cover of "Hey There Lonely Girl") before fading into complete obscurity. A fate that would in fact befall most of the acts who'd bring us the next few years full of generic pop product.
I do think there was a racist element to the anti-disco thing, but mainly I think it was just really dumb.
For me to honestly address this any further would lead us into the topic of race that the moderators want to keep us from because people get very angry. Maybe you didn't grow up in the same kind of area I did, or deal with some nasty people like I do. You probably grew up more sheltered than I did. I grew up military. When you live in a military community, you get exposed to a wide variety of people from all walks of life. Five years is also quite a bit of distance you you to have experienced a different world than I did.
There was one genre of music that was about to shine with a huge hit movie that was set in Houston...
A very mean little song. The character in the song is a real *********. Having said that, we need more songs like this in pop music today. It would liven things up.
They got a LOT of press in the media. There was lots of negative controversy with the YMCA. It wasn't just about a few people's impressions of what they were, it was blatantly out there! Unless one was sheltered from all of it, there's no way anyone could have not known. Thanks for putting it in a way that makes some people comfortable. I wanted to be more blunt and explicit about why, and am not capable of putting it like you did for reasons. It wasn't until this forum that I discovered that radio stations, and record companies would edit or mix out guitars on easy-listening songs. I think of it as very odd. The funny thing is that R&B records were increasingly incorporating rock guitar solos in ballads.
From what I'd read about "Sad Eyes' " trajectory, the record was out for about half a year with virtually no movement when, out of nowhere, it exploded onto the top of the charts when it did. And that in the meantime, Mr. John had put out another record - "Only Time" - that all but stiffed due to "Sad Eyes' " success - and thus the record after "Only Time," "Lonely Eyes," was tagged as the "Sad Eyes" follow-up.
I'm with you there. I recall reading about Can't Stop the Music in one of the Medved Brothers books in the early 80s and being totally surprised about the gay aspect of the Village People. I don't recall hearing anything about the urban homosexual lifestyle of the time until the AIDS epidemic started, and certainly my friends didn't ever equate homosexuality with disco. I basically thought the VP dressed that way as a gimmick to promote themselves in much the same way that Kiss did, and that there was nothing more to it than that. And it's not like we didn't know about homosexuality, I think most of my classmates thought that Elton John and Bowie were gay, and no one I knew really cared. I also got the impression that no one in my grade really liked disco that much; it was a thing, like Neil Diamond, that other (older?) people liked, but we all preferred rock. By that I mean all disco, including the white artists like the Bee Gees and KC. When the disco bashing started, I was surprised to find out how many others out there didn't like it.
But that's exactly the point he's making: that people hated the music for its ubiquity, not because it was black music.
