It was loud. Dancing expended energy, yes. But the whole disco thing seemed like empty calories, enjoyable in the moment, nothing to give your life new depth.
Understanding disco calls on a certain understanding of the decade of the 1970s. It has been called the Murphy's Law decade. There was failure and a general descent into bad taste.
Should we try to develop a more charitable attitude about the music? Did it become a victim of its own popularity? Anything popular in America gets seized upon for commercial purposes. I suppose we wouldn't have it any other way. Disco started with some real merit. We might forget that it changed or really revolutionized social dancing. No longer was it assumed that a man and woman would dance with each other. On came the "freeform" approach.
Dancing was done in the form of crowds! This was hugely impactful for gay liberation. Disco became a means of expression for various aggrieved elements of the population. Disco picked up energy and momentum from all such people. African-American female performers found a very welcoming platform for their talents. Who could forget the likes of Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor? They'd sing about triumph in the face of legacy hurdles. Gay people gravitated to the themes.
The liberating message should have appealed to all, but progress in America is never achieved so methodically. Regressive forces loom, wary of any over-arching change. It is also an American trait that we like to take down our heroes. The burgeoning popularity of disco came to invite naysayers.
Popular culture has always had some problems in academia, for one thing. But America simply wants to examine its naval sometimes. I'm reminded of the Woody Allen movie "Zelig." People enjoy sniffing for scandals, to cut our heroes down to size sometimes.
Anything that is popular invites heavy commercialization. And with that comes oversimplification. It's like how we oversimplify today about understanding "Christians." The media has decided that "evangelicals" is more or less synonymous - of course it isn't.
Art vs. reality
So while disco's early years reflected originality and a diverse approach, our big bad "mainstream culture" wanted shorthand, a structure easily recognizable for all. Television through the 1970s was like this too, under pressure to develop a homogeneous product. So when Newton Minow talked about "vast wasteland," he was assessing that fact. People called TV the "boob tube." Remember that? Wouldn't that sound odd today? But in the days before niche programming, TV seemed to flail about artistically, never mind there were many highly talented people behind it.
Disco's popularity planted the seeds for its decline by the end of the 1970s. As with Zelig, we wanted to see some warts, maybe to be assured that our own failings were fully typical of the human condition. The obvious fun of disco with the freeform dancing and bright lights wasn't good enough for us in the end.
Commercialization can be like a tribute to an art form, right? But it tarnishes the art form by pushing aside any and all subtleties. Our popular media and culture decided to run disco up the flagpole with the general floundering of the decade, as if it was all one big package. It is distillation in a misguided way.
Disco had its "run" like all popular art forms. At the end, its artistic merit started to get overlooked. Our attention span had gotten maxed out. All popular entertainment has this problem, of getting stale and having to be put on the back burner for something new.
Radio DJs got tired of the Bee Gees and their disco, so what happened? Chuck Mangione burst onto the scene with his big hit "Feels so Good" which made DJs feel good because of its departure from the droning-on norm of disco. A small combo featuring of all things a flugelhorn? Mangione got his "run." Meanwhile the Bee Gees were able to sock away what was surely a fortune. Congratulations.
Disco waned, became even the butt of jokes, and then we decided it symbolized the flailing-away nature of the '70s itself, i.e. the questionable taste in clothes, the colors, the elevator shoes. But the music itself? The best disco music always had the essential strengths of good music. People in the business know this.
But to the extent people today remember disco, we might well remember the nadir that was climaxed ignominiously by "Disco Demolition Night" at a major league baseball game. A music form must be pretty good and successful to end up in such a phenomenon.
Imagine anything like "Disco Demolition Night" happening today in connection to anything. For years we have been so much more optimistic, expecting things to turn out well, compared to the '70s. I have suggested that if a typical young person of today were to step into a time machine and go back to the '70s, we're talking profound culture shock. Things moved so slow. We expected so little improvement in our lives. Cynicism was common. Cynical wisecracks were mainstream, whereas today they're dated just like "boob tube."
"Think I should care?" said the jaded soldier in "Bridge At Remagen," when told that he wouldn't want the Russians to beat the U.S. to Berlin.
A decade of misfires
In the '70s we had Comet Kohoutek. Scientists touted the comet's coming as if it would turn night into day! In the end it barely showed up on powerful telescopes. Jimmy Carter called for the rescue of hostages in Iran but what happened? The helicopters broke down. So 1970s! A scientist proclaimed he had photos of the Loch Ness Monster. In the end, he had photos of muddy waters and only thought we could make out a "fin."
When one of the biggest names of the decade was a guy who did breakfast cereal commercials by saying the cereal reminded him of eating "wild hickory nuts," well, you know. The best understanding of 1970s cynicism comes with TV's "The Gong Show." I shall not elaborate.
And all along we got the mechanized beat of disco music, churning away, while lyrics spoke to the yearning of aggrieved classes. Everyone join in on the dance floor. Everyone! It really seemed an egalitarian revolution. Which I suppose became a problem, just as today's Trump element of society feels threatened by inroads from outside of traditional white or Anglo-Saxon society. We're talking "backlash" of course. And it happened with disco.
Disco has not gotten buried in the ashes. We can largely thank disco for our contemporary dance music culture. You might say that the term "disco" faded because of the overcommercialization thing, but its elements have remained most viable. And, who cares what a crowd of baseball fans thinks?
Would you believe that up until 1971, it was illegal for two men to dance with each other in NYC? We have come a long way, aided in no small part by disco and its "freeform." Thank you Donna Summer et. al.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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