Where is the line between disco and post disco drawn?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by lc1995, Oct 25, 2019.

  1. CRJ

    CRJ Ski Patrol

    Location:
    East Devon
    I think Grace Jones' discography is spot on here.

    First, second and third albums - Portfolio (1977), Fame (1978) and Muse (1979) were collected in a 2015 compilation titled Disco. Her sound changed with her fourth album, Warm Leatherette (1980).
     
    crankybruh likes this.
  2. I may be a little late to this discussion but I have to dispel this . True 1981 may have been the first full year of the post disco era but there were plenty of post disco releases in the 2nd half of 1980, even some in '79. So the post disco era actually started in 1980. Here's some post disco releases in 79/80.

    1)Never Knew Love Like This Before - Stephanie Mills 1980
    2) Uptown- Prince 1980
    3) And The Beat Goes On- The Whispers 1979
    4) Celebrate- Kool and the Gang 1980
    5) He's So Shy- Pointer Sisters 1980
    6) Burn Rubber On Me (Why you Wanna Hurt Me)-The Gap Band 1980

    Those were just a few of my favorites that came to mind. There are way more.
     
    jtsjc1, Merrick and joemarine like this.
  3. Kingsley Fats

    Kingsley Fats Forum Resident

    On the dancefloor
     
  4. mwheelerk

    mwheelerk Sorry, I can't talk now, I'm listening to music...

    Location:
    Gilbert Arizona
    Where is the line between disco and post disco drawn?

    In the sand.
     
  5. rangda

    rangda Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA
    I discovered disco in 79 as a teen and to me you can see rumblings of post disco in late 79 but it’s really late spring 80 where the music shifted. For me Disco led to funk led to hip hop led to dj’ing as a side hustle. Pretty much all of the old timers in my record pool agreed that 1980 was the year disco died.
     
    greystone08 and Purple like this.
  6. crankybruh

    crankybruh Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
    For Americans it was over after the Disco Demolition Night. Australia followed its lead. Seemingly overnight, disco vanished from radio. I remember as a young teen in 1979 being really sick of nothing but disco on the radio; the tail end of commercial disco really did suck. Dance music went underground as Oz returned to its pubescent diet of alcohol and pub rock.
     
  7. crankybruh

    crankybruh Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
    Speak to anyone who heard it when it was first released - it was a bombshell. I bought the "cassingle", which was actually very good quality, and flogged it to death.
     
    joy stinson likes this.
  8. Kingsley Fats

    Kingsley Fats Forum Resident

    Funk came before disco. Funk = James Brown
     
    joy stinson and blutiga like this.
  9. rangda

    rangda Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA
    I've always considered James Brown to be more Soul than Funk, but this is all admittedly splitting hairs. Funk to me is what evolved out of Disco/Soul when you get into the late 70's/early 80's, the BPM's dropped, and the musical style shifted. Excluding P-Funk of course which really evolved out of psychedelic rock more than anything and was around 10+ years earlier. But this could easily be a personal bias as that's what I lived. Bands like Fatback, Cameo, Bar-Kays were doing funk well back into the 70's, and if you want to include Italo/Hi-NRG you've got"Disco" going into the mid 80's depending on how loose you want to be with its definition (although to me Italo shows its Disco roots up until early 83 when it evolves into more of a variant of synth pop).
     
  10. rangda

    rangda Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA
    Giorgio Moroder was way ahead of his time, I Feel Love and The Chase were almost surreal when they were released. In that respect very similar to Kraftwerk.
     
    9 Volt and Biscuit Warehouse like this.
  11. “Post-disco” is disco whose fans and performers don’t want to acknowledge that it’s actually disco.
     
  12. dwilpower

    dwilpower Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glasgow Scotland
    This is more of a retro sub Motown/Girl group vibe
     
  13. dwilpower

    dwilpower Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glasgow Scotland
    The dico demolition night has been hyped out of all proportion. This event happened in July 79, the disco era was still riding high and was a crossover cultural phenomena. Take a look at the columns in Billboard from the period to get the contemporary perspective. Rock journo's have fixated on the July event when a few thousand white rock fans burned records in an organised promotional stunt. Meanwhile millions more continued to dance at the weekend around the world and still do to this day. Like all musical genres disco evolved.
     
  14. Merrick

    Merrick The return of the Thin White Duke

    Location:
    Portland
    Funk definitely existed before disco and influenced the sound of disco.

    Regarding "I Feel Love", I love this story that Bowie told about recording Low in Berlin with Brian Eno in '76 and one day Eno runs into the studio with a 45 single in his hand and says "David I've just heard the future of popular music!" and Bowie replied "I thought we were creating the future of popular music!". Eno then put on "I Feel Love" and Bowie knew that Eno was right, this was the next wave of popular music.
     
  15. Kingsley Fats

    Kingsley Fats Forum Resident

    During the late 1960s, Brown moved from a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a profoundly "Africanized" approach to music-making, emphasizing stripped-down interlocking rhythms that influenced the development of funk music.[6] By the early 1970s, Brown had fully established the funk sound after the formation of the J.B.s with records such as "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" and "The Payback".

    Funk is a music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of soul, jazz, and rhythm and blues (R&B).[2] It de-emphasizes melody and chord progressions and focuses on a strong rhythmic groove of a bassline played by an electric bassist and a drum part played by a percussionist, often at slower tempos than other popular music. Funk typically consists of a complex percussive groove with rhythm instruments playing interlocking grooves that create a "hypnotic" and "danceable" feel.[3] Funk uses the same richly colored extended chords found in bebop jazz, such as minor chords with added sevenths and elevenths, or dominant seventh chords with altered ninths and thirteenths.
     
    joy stinson and blutiga like this.
  16. Trash Panda

    Trash Panda Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atlanta, GA
    I think the distinction between the disco and post-disco eras is more cultural than it is musical. Disco (at least in the U.S.) dominated pop culture in the late '70s, more or less culminating with the release and popularity of the film Saturday Night Fever and its soundtrack (and possibly the film/soundtrack of Thank God It's Friday as well). So then "post-disco" would refer to the point in time when that music and its attending styles no longer dominated pop culture, and disco clubs begin to die out as fewer and fewer people went out for that sort of "nightlife" experience. (If you insist on a line of demarcation, I would say the summer of 1980 sounds about right.)
     
  17. Trash Panda

    Trash Panda Forum Resident

    Location:
    Atlanta, GA
    All true, but even JB dipped his toe in that sparkly water.

    James Brown - Get Up Offa That Thing (1976)

     
  18. Kingsley Fats

    Kingsley Fats Forum Resident

    Everybody dipped their toes in the sparkly water. It was a viral pandemic.
     
  19. Vangro

    Vangro Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    Never heard of 'post disco'.
     
    Kingsley Fats likes this.
  20. Vangro

    Vangro Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    James Brown and his musicians pretty much invented funk.
     
    Kingsley Fats likes this.
  21. UnderTheFloorboards'66

    UnderTheFloorboards'66 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco, CA
    People need to chill on these labels and categories. If it sounds like disco, just call it disco. I never fully understood the post-punk label/category either.
     
    Kingsley Fats likes this.
  22. Say It Right

    Say It Right Not for the Hearing Impaired

    Location:
    Niagara Falls
    None of what you wrote had anything to do with my comment (which was from over 2 years ago.) Plus, it's not as if you're going to educate me about Disco Demolition Night. It was all over the news the next day. Nobody made a big deal about, and life went on.
     
  23. Pastafarian

    Pastafarian Forum Resident

    Not really my area but Material - Bursting Out from 1980.
     
    blutiga and Svetonio like this.
  24. TheSeldomSeenKid

    TheSeldomSeenKid Forum Resident

    The Gap Band, including the Song you listed from them is FUNK. You can dance to FUNK Music, but that does not make it Disco. I think George Clinton using his Brides of Funkenstein Side Project, even made a Song(Disco to Go?) that poked fun at Disco.

    The only Disco Music Artist I like is Chic, but when playing a 2CDs Set Best of Collection, I have by them, seems like only their real early Songs were Disco, then it was a shift to some FUNK and R&B Style Songs, mainly with Nile Rodgers Guitar Style and the Bass of Bernard Edwards I know their Freak Out Song is labeled as Disco, but sounds more like a FUNK Song to my ears.

    Although, before my time, I have accumulated a large Collection of CDs by FUNK Music Artists from around 1975-1984(then New Jack Swing replaced FUNK in the later 1980s, with Albums from Guy, Bobby Brown, etc.).

    I grew up thinking of The Pet Shop Boys and New Order as Disco Music during the 1980s.

    I read an article around 15-20 years ago, that described Disco Music as Corporate Made Beat Music, which was lacking in substance, while it overshadowed so much Great FUNK and R&B Music by Talented Musicians from the same years. I would have to agree, as only like a few Disco Songs, including the already mentioned Song(I Feel Love) by Donna Summer, along with Funkytown and a few others. Michael Jackson's 'Can't Stop Til You Get Enough', if considered a Disco Song, is a Great One with substance.
     
    Last edited: Jan 28, 2022
    joy stinson and blutiga like this.
  25. dwilpower

    dwilpower Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glasgow Scotland
    EXACTLY- re read my comment carefully. It was a rock DJ's promo event. SINCE that event HISTORY has given it more importance than it ever had WHEN IT HAPPENED. THE EVENT DID NOT END DISCO- That's exactly the point I was making!
     

Share This Page

molar-endocrine