When ‘Disco Sucks!’ echoed around the world

“Disco sucks!”

It was a catchphrase you couldn’t avoid hearing three decades ago when a backlash started to develop against the ’70s dance music genre that dominated Top 40 radio stations. The resentment culminated in an unexpected riot July 12, 1979 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. It was there fans charged onto the field during a promotional event called “Disco Demolition Night,” after Chicago DJ Steve Dahl blew up a box of disco records.

Smashing up disco records was a stunt Dahl did at area bars, but he got to bring his shtick to a wider audience when White Sox management started arranging publicity stunts to boost attendance. Over the years, the event has come to signify something larger in the culture — a point at which the implicit musical divide between whites and African-Americans became uncomfortably explicit. It also helped kill disco as a viable genre.

The hostility towards disco came to a head less than two years after the movie “Saturday Night Fever” was released, mostly because radio listeners grew tired of how dominating disco had become. Additionally, the music got associated with the lifestyle of the rich and famous because of its connection with New York’s swanky disco Studio 54. That’s ironic, because disco was forged much the way rock music was — by people who were considered outsiders.

“Disco was gay, black and Latin in spite of the fact that probably many of the people who made it happen in a very big way were white,” says Vince Aletti, the first music critic to write about disco. “Many, many people perceived it as a kind of undermining force, like rock ’n’ roll was, in a way.”

The music evolved in New York clubs (“disco” being an abbreviation of the word discothèque), where DJs would get crowds moving with exotic import records. When early club hits like Manu Debango’s “Soul Makossa” crossed over to the pop charts, a trend began to emerge. Before long American artists picked up on it and crafted music to fit the new market. One such artist was Gloria Gaynor, who had two of the first disco hits with “Honey Bee” and “Never Can Say Goodbye.”

“(Those records) were a conscious decision to supply the up-and-coming disco market,” explains Gaynor. “I was working in clubs up and down the East Coast and Midwest, and I was seeing these cabarets being turned into discothèques.”

Studio 54 fever
Soon, white artists picked up on the music. The underground rose to the mainstream when artists like KC and the Sunshine Band and the Bee Gees got Middle America to put on its boogie shoes. Even the sedate Barry Manilow was shaking it at the “Copacabana.”

“When black people dance, that’s regarded as normal, when white people dance it’s regarded as a phenomenon,” explains rock critic Dave Marsh. “Disco isn’t listening music. Disco is active dancer music. That’s what it’s for.”

With the release of “Saturday Night Fever” in late 1977, the trend became a craze. About the same time, Studio 54 became a tabloid fixture when it became the playground of celebrities like Jerry Hall and Andy Warhol and also barred non-beautiful people from entering. Disco was now being associated with social climbing and posh fashion — not exactly the qualities that brought smiles to the faces of metal heads or punk rockers.

According to Paul Natkin, who was assigned to photograph Dahl on Disco Demolition Night, disco became “a lifestyle thing — guys in white suits with their gold chains around their necks. Rock 'n' roll was kind of T-shirts and jeans.”

But Dahl (who did not respond to interview requests for this article) also had a personal stake in the matter, Natkin and Marsh note. He had been fired from his previous DJ job at a rock station when it changed to a disco format. “Here he was out on the street on Christmas Eve,” Natkin explains. “That’s the reason he hated disco as much as he did.”

In other words, one guy with a grudge changed the face of pop music in one night. And yet, radio stations that went disco were just pleasing the public. The “Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack” album sold 11 million copies and the Bee Gees scored four number one hits from it.

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