Derived from the French discotheque, disco refers not only to a musical style but to a unique brand of dance-club decor, a sexy-synthetic manner of dress, a style of dance, and an attitude towardsexual promiscuity and night life, all of which came together during the 1970s as "disco," one of the most glitzy and celebrated fads in American popular cultural history. Between 1975 and 1979, the established sensibilities of rock and pop, which emphasized sincerity, emotion, and rebellion, gave way to the enchantment of dance floor rhythms, which colonized popular imagination as an alluring dream-scape of pleasure and sexual utopia. In disco, the boundary between commercial fabrication and real experience became blurred. Disco ushered in a new post-1960s concept of hedonistic weekends, holidays, and exciting after-hours activity that was open to anyone with a reasonable income, a basic sense of rhythm and a good body. However, for all its fashionable accouterments, what lay at the essential heart of the disco craze was the music. Characterized by an insistently repetitive base and a hypnotic beat, overlaid with teasing, sexy vocals, it captivated and mesmerized its adherents.
Though psychedelic dance bars had experimented with combinations of dance, music, and lighting since the 1960s ("oil wheels" and "sound-to-light" systems), it was during the 1970s that the technological, musical, and fashion elements that define the culture of the dance club were refined and popularized. In the early 1970s discos began expanding their equipment to include a wider array of musical and visual props. The "mirror ball," which could fragment a white spotlight into a million rotating dots, became the symbol of the new disco, along with synchronized lights that were matched to the bass track of a record. Later, with the appearance of the smoke machine and dry ice, came the "pin spot" light, which could stab through a cloud of smoke to cast an illuminated shaft across a darkened room. Throughout the 1970s, commercial dance clubs sprang up across the country, ranging from fashionable and exclusive big city venues like New York's Studio 54, to more modest hotel discos and revamped bars and clubs. The larger venues included advanced lighting and music systems controlled by a disc jockey, or DJ, who lorded over the collective euphoria from an elevated booth, cajoling the crowd to "get down and boogie." Disco fashions highlighted the tight fit, high heels, platforms, and the funky "gentleman's" three-piece suits, and displayed an unabashed preference for polyester.
Pop music had always been danceable and flamboyant, but what set disco apart was that it was not only music for dancing, but also music about dancing. The disco beat was the anthem of the dancers, the disco floor a wonderland of sexual promise where anything might happen, providing the perfect environment to indulge the pursuit of one's fantasy. Unlike the "be-ins," the pot parties, and other escapades favored by hippies, disco promised an experience of the exotic that could be easily slotted into a well ordered working week and coordinated with a regular pattern of one night stands. Film titles such as Thank God It's Friday and Saturday Night Fever reflected the compartmentalized nature of this package-tour utopia. Though disco's dreamland of sexual fulfillment is often remembered as the longing of the heterosexual male libido, the real origins of disco's sexual imagery lie in the gay club scene of New York and San Francisco, where its camp atmosphere of sexual reverie was first born. This fact was largely obscured from disco's audiences at the time. With hindsight, it is astonishing that middle-class, heterosexual listeners were oblivious to the homo-erotic suggestions that permeate the songs of such widely accepted groups as The Village People—songs such as "Macho Man," "In the Navy," and "YMCA." As it matured, disco sanitized and commercialized itself and, at its peak, it was targeted at an age group too young to be admitted to a real dance club, let alone have any clue as to what separated gay from straight dance culture.
Disco's real ground zero, however, was not the concert hall or even the dance floor, but the AM radio dial. Mainstream radio started playing disco music in the mid-1970s, and by December 1978, 200 disco-only formats aired across the country. Six months later, the number had increased by a further 50. In 1974 and 1975 respectively, George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" and Van McCoy's "The Hustle" introduced the sounds of disco to AM radio, though it was a few years before artists such as Kool & The Gang, Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, KC and The Sunshine Band, Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, and the Village People rode the wave of disco enthusiasm. By the time disco dominated the airwaves in 1979, even Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones were among those who had hopped onto the bandwagon.
No group stands out as more emblematic of the period than the Bee Gees, who began the 1970s as a British-Australian pop phenomenon with moderate sales, and made a sensational break through on the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever. The film, which made a star of John Travolta, focused on a working-class youth who escapes the mundane reality of life by becoming a demi-god of the local disco scene. The soundtrack was originally released as a double LP in 1977, becoming the industry's biggest selling soundtrack album and producing ten singles hits from its 17 tracks, of which "How Deep Is Your Love," "Stayin' Alive," and "Night Fever" dominated the pop charts in 1977 and 1978. The famous image of Travolta, wearing a white polyester suit, his pelvis thrust forward and his finger raised skyward against a background of disco lights, came to define the decade, an emblem of disco's garish eroticism. The Bee Gees, whose thumping, squealing ballads of sexual enterprise saturated the film, typified disco music for the remainder of the decade. Ironically, both Travolta and the Bee Gees later fell victim to the fickleness of fads and fashion, and became easy objects of ridicule for some years to come.
By the end of 1979, disco's celebration of the fanciful and the fake was beginning to wear thin. After a stream of "one-hit wonders," disco seemed to be more the product of producers and promoters than of the artists themselves. One of the problems was that disco music seemed to lack talented performing musicians: electronically manipulated sounds replaced the bass, drums and guitar that had typified rock, and in live performances disco stars came to rely increasingly on recorded tracks and off-stage musical support. The Village People, largely a stage act, kept back-up singers entirely out of view of the audience. More than this, disco proved notoriously adaptable to a variety of commercial marketing devices. A record called Hooked on Classics, whose cover featured a Mozart-like character mimicking Travolta's famous pose from Saturday Night Fever, mixed well-known classical music hits to a disco beat. Novelty songs like "disco duck" climbed the AM charts, and even the theme from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, was re-recorded as a disco hit.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about disco was its strange demise and long disgrace. Its commercialism, its ersatz sexuality and its reliance on radio to reach an average music consumer—rather than record sales to reach a "fan" market of countercultural listeners—seemed to violate everything rock stood for, and provoked a powerful backlash from fans of "real" rock. Hostility came to a head in 1979 when a "Disco Demolition Derby" was organized by radio DJ Steve Dahl at a baseball game at Detroit's Tiger Stadium. Anti-disco fans burned more than 100,000 albums, hoisted "disco sucks" banners, and rioted, forcing the cancellation of the game. The precise nature of this backlash remains unclear: Dahl's event, which has since been compared to fascist book burnings, may have been homophobic, sexist or racist, or it may have expressed a widespread disappointmentwith the increasing commercialism of a supposedly rebellious musical form. It was most likely a combination of these factors, but, whatever the case, not since John Lennon's fateful remark about the Beatles being more famous than Christ had there been such a widespread consumer revolt against the music industry. The reaction against disco's commercialism, cheap sentiment, and faux sexuality fueled the emergence of other more "authentic" expressions of youth culture, punk and heavy metal. By 1981 the disco boom was bust.
Further Reading:
Haden-Guest, Anthony. The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night. New York, William Morrow, 1997.
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