JOHN NOLTE: HBO Bee Gees Doc Falsely Blames Death of Disco on ‘Racism, Homophobia.’
First off, the HBO doc doesn’t even mention Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an unforgivable lie of omission.
Secondly, based on a guy who worked at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979, where a local shock jock blew up a bunch of disco records in the middle of a White Sox doubleheader, we’re told that’s the evidence the backlash against disco was based on racism and homophobia.
Evidence?
What evidence?
For 98 cents you could purchase a ticket to that night’s doubleheader if you brought along a disco record to have blown up, and the guy who worked there was horrified to see a bunch of R&B albums thrown in the pile.
That’s it. That’s all they got. That’s the evidence.
It’s absurd.
First off, by 1979, white people had been devouring music from black artists for decades. People weren’t bringing R&B records to the ballgame because they suddenly decided they hate black artists. They brought those records so they could see a doubleheader for 98 cents. Duh.
Secondly, there’s no proof homophobia had anything to do with the disco backlash, but there’s plenty of proof it didn’t.
Guess who came out of the closet in 1976? Elton John! Right there in the pages of Rolling Stone! His career didn’t slow down one bit.
Also, by 1979 everyone — everyone! — knew Queen’s frontman, The Mighty Freddie Mercury, was gay, and almost everyone who freakin’ hated disco freakin’ loved Freddie Mercury. Queen’s biggest days were all ahead of them.
So please square those facts with this horseshit about racism and homophobia.
That racism and homophobia killed disco is a trope the left convinced itself of several years ago, and no amount of evidence will break it, apparently. As I wrote in a 2014 post on a documentary called The Secret Disco Revolution:
Naturally the film mentions “the infamous Disco Demolition Night of 1979, when disco-hating rockers blew up a bunch of dance records in a baseball stadium,” dubbing it and other anti-disco rhetoric from the period an attack on disco’s “mass liberation of gays, blacks, and women from the clutches of a conservative, rock-dominated world.”
Because, racism. And homophobia. And fear of white polyester suits as well, I guess.
But in reality, 1979 was a unique quiet highpoint for rock. MTV was two years away, and dinosaurs still thundered the earth: all four Beatles were still alive and recording, Led Zeppelin was still around and released their underrated last album as an intact band, In Through the Out Door, Pink Floyd released The Wall, and Bill Wyman was the only member of the Rolling Stones over 40. While Keith Moon had recently gone off to The Great Practice Hall In The Sky, The Who were more visible than ever, with multiple albums, movies, tours, and the debut of Pete Townshend’s solo career.
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However, as I said last year when I wrote a lengthy review titled, “Turn the Beat Around: A Reformed Disco Hater Looks Back at Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco,” had I known what was coming for black music – the non-melodic dead-end of rap music – I would never been as dismissive about disco.
But then arguably, rock would exhaust itself by the end of the 1980s. You could probably make a case that both genres ended on similar notes: Disco was the last gasp of the pop-oriented R&B professionalism of Motown; the hair metal of the following decade was the last gasp of the genre of hard rock invented by Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Yardbirds, and Led Zeppelin. Rap would replace disco, death metal would replace its more melodic predecessor, and both would quickly hit brick walls.
Today, as Mark Steyn recently noted, “A performance of the Village People’s disco classic “YMCA” by the Bennett Elementary School First Grade class has been canceled because …oh, go on, guess.”
“Wrong, it’s racist,” Mark added. A class of Fargo first graders can’t perform the song, not because of its camp gay single entendres, but because one of the kids’ mothers “said asking her daughter and her classmates to dress up like an Indian is offensive.”
And we certainly can’t have that in our music, disco or otherwise. Just as the Washington Football Team and the soon-to-be Cleveland MLB Team.
UPDATE: An Insta-reader writes:
Re: the death of disco. I met my wife at Casablanca Records, the ne plus ultra of disco labels, in 1979. We were both in the editorial department, turning out the bios and sales sheets and other dreck for a lot of dreck “artists”…as well as some real talent. Both of us hated disco, and both of us credit the Casablanca film, Can’t Stop the Music, for the death of disco. Can’t remember why the producers settled on the actress Nancy Walker to direct, but she turned what was going to be merely bad into one of the top three most atrocious things ever committed to film. You can trace the nearly straight off-the-cliff drop in disco sales to the release of the movie.
Heh, indeed.™ A glut of bad product, post-Saturday Night Fever, drove the genre into the ground. Cocaine is a helluva drug, to coin a Rick James-ism.
(Updated and bumped.)