JayCrawford said:

Good question....Some friends of mine and I were just discussing this recently....To me, there was disco music "before Saturday Night Fever" and "after Saturday Night Fever". Before "SNF", R&B radio always played artists like Van McCoy, KC, Donna Summer, CHIC and others....To me, that is what's known now as classic R&B...After "SNF", it seemed like every artist was cashing in on that sound (blame the record labels)...older R&B artists from the 50's and 60's, jazz musicians, rock artists..even Ethel Merman had a disco record....As mentioned in the Bee Gees doc, it became very commercial, cartoony and watered down..There were short lived, bad TV sitcoms that were G rated versions of "SNF"..and other sitcoms had their own special "disco" episode...dance contest TV shows and some of the late 70's disco themed films...to me, it became overkill and that's when I stopped enjoying it........my little brother even had the "Sesame Street Fever" album...By late 79/early 1980, everyone knew disco was played out, tired and uncool.

Thought it was a weird phase...

[Edited 12/25/20 14:55pm]

It was my first love and what got me heavy into music in the first place. I just wish I had been grown at the time so I could have fully enjoyed the era even more. When the backlash began on pop radio, it was because of disco that I discovered funk and R&B radio because I desperately searched for more of it and funk was the closest sounding thing to it. Even with the different changes in funk in the 1980s, it still had that faster tempo than funk previously had before disco. Plus, disco seemed to take away most of the jazz influence from funk and modernized it which I loved. When funk died, it's like the further that R&B got away from disco, the more I hated it. I enjoyed house in the early to mid 1990s because it felt like disco's reincarnation but toward the end of that decade when acid, trance, etc. took over house, it felt less and less like disco so music was finally officially over for me.

vainandy said:

SantanaMaitreya said:

JayCrawford said:

vainandy said:

It was my first love and what got me heavy into music in the first place. I just wish I had been grown at the time so I could have fully enjoyed the era even more. When the backlash began on pop radio, it was because of disco that I discovered funk and R&B radio because I desperately searched for more of it and funk was the closest sounding thing to it. Even with the different changes in funk in the 1980s, it still had that faster tempo than funk previously had before disco. Plus, disco seemed to take away most of the jazz influence from funk and modernized it which I loved. When funk died, it's like the further that R&B got away from disco, the more I hated it. I enjoyed house in the early to mid 1990s because it felt like disco's reincarnation but toward the end of that decade when acid, trance, etc. took over house, it felt less and less like disco so music was finally officially over for me.

Was the backlash that crazy? Because I'm from the UK and back in the late 70s... Nothing happened at all in terms of backlash

https://www.youtube.com/w...1zN-oLCKo4

S2DG said:

JayCrawford said:

vainandy said:

It was my first love and what got me heavy into music in the first place. I just wish I had been grown at the time so I could have fully enjoyed the era even more. When the backlash began on pop radio, it was because of disco that I discovered funk and R&B radio because I desperately searched for more of it and funk was the closest sounding thing to it. Even with the different changes in funk in the 1980s, it still had that faster tempo than funk previously had before disco. Plus, disco seemed to take away most of the jazz influence from funk and modernized it which I loved. When funk died, it's like the further that R&B got away from disco, the more I hated it. I enjoyed house in the early to mid 1990s because it felt like disco's reincarnation but toward the end of that decade when acid, trance, etc. took over house, it felt less and less like disco so music was finally officially over for me.

Was the backlash that crazy? Because I'm from the UK and back in the late 70s... Nothing happened at all in terms of backlash

It was awful. "Disco Sucks" T-Shirts, bumper stickers, and merchandise everywhere you looked. Pop stations openly badmouthing it vowing to never play it again. Before punk and new wave fully kicked in, pop radio had started playing a lot more slower stuff and even added some country/western. It's like they were trying to get as far away from the even slightest hint of the disco sound as possible. It was anti-black, anti-gay, ..... hell, anti-anything fun. During the disco era, pop radio was full of black artists. After the disco era, very few black artists remained on pop radio. Take Prince for instance. "I Wanna Be Your Lover" was all over pop radio during the disco era. Hell, that's the song that made me discover Prince. The backlash began during the time that the "Prince" album was out and once it began, the only stations that played the second single from that album "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad" was the R&B stations. You can't tell me they weren't purposely keeping black artists off pop radio at the time because that song is rock and much more appropriate for pop radio than R&B radio. It's certainly more appropriate for pop radio moreso than country/western.

vainandy said:

JayCrawford said:

vainandy said:

It was awful. "Disco Sucks" T-Shirts, bumper stickers, and merchandise everywhere you looked. Pop stations openly badmouthing it vowing to never play it again. Before punk and new wave fully kicked in, pop radio had started playing a lot more slower stuff and even added some country/western. It's like they were trying to get as far away from the even slightest hint of the disco sound as possible. It was anti-black, anti-gay, ..... hell, anti-anything fun. During the disco era, pop radio was full of black artists. After the disco era, very few black artists remained on pop radio. Take Prince for instance. "I Wanna Be Your Lover" was all over pop radio during the disco era. Hell, that's the song that made me discover Prince. The backlash began during the time that the "Prince" album was out and once it began, the only stations that played the second single from that album "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad" was the R&B stations. You can't tell me they weren't purposely keeping black artists off pop radio at the time because that song is rock and much more appropriate for pop radio than R&B radio. It's certainly more appropriate for pop radio moreso than country/western.

Man... Thank fuck I was living in the UK in those years then 😂 People can shit on disco all they want but... I'd rather listen to disco than anything of the last 27 years of music if you ask me.

What trips me out is that all those people that attended that Disco Demolition were told to bring a disco record so they could blow it up. If they actually hated disco so much, how did they even have any disco records in their possession? Even locally, I remember people that listened to disco prior to the backlash and after the backlash, they all of a sudden hated disco overnight. It's like they didn't have a mind of their own and were told not to like it so they no longer liked it. And they used to make the most racist and homophobic remarks concerning disco.

vainandy said:

JayCrawford said:

What did you guys and gals think about Disco at the time throughout the late 70s? I personally loved it. I definitely had people making fun of me for liking it then but there was no disco demolition in the UK. Bee Gees and Donna Summer were my life then lol. Enjoyed it a lot... If anything they were the best times of my life. Glad to have been at the right age for it. The only bad memories I have is my mum beating my ass for playing Donna Summer songs since 90% of them were all about hooker's LOL. I tried to be a great roller skater but I fucked up my ankle and went to hospital for it lol. But overall it was amazing and it was great music then What did you think about it back then and what are your fondest memories of that era? [Edited 12/24/20 18:57pm]

I got the era second hand from my older brother who really bought all types of music so it was all around. But having just watched this Bee Gees Documentary, I realized that "disco" was a very wide range thing. I never really called the Bee Gees disco mainly because as someone put it in the show, the Bee gees were all about the writing and harmonies where as I saw disco more about just the beat and dancing all that. So I cant really compare songs of the Bee Gees to Silver Convention or Santa Esmeralda who literally would have twenty minute songs or albums with four tracks on it. I get why the Bee Gees where in there mainly because SNF was that era but i Still see them as an RB group as Eric Clapton said, during that time. Others like Donna Summer who i loved also did have a time of a few songs on a record, and also I think Disco at times was viewed as the Sexier music, I mean just like at Donna those days and others like Linda Clifford etc... it was all this I felt that combined to give us PRINCE and Rick James a few years later. But I think there are some classics in there for sure, outside of Donna and the Bee Gees there are some other very good records in there.

JayCrawford said:

vainandy said:

What trips me out is that all those people that attended that Disco Demolition were told to bring a disco record so they could blow it up. If they actually hated disco so much, how did they even have any disco records in their possession? Even locally, I remember people that listened to disco prior to the backlash and after the backlash, they all of a sudden hated disco overnight. It's like they didn't have a mind of their own and were told not to like it so they no longer liked it. And they used to make the most racist and homophobic remarks concerning disco.

That's strange lol. Why buy the records for a genre they hate lol? When I was growing up then in the UK all people did was make fun of me and asking me if I'm a "fag" that's it really. From my experience in those years. Rock music fans back in the day were the worse kind of fans. They never ever gave other genres a chance. They would always say "This is crap, only queers love this type of music." What were your thoughts about it at the time when it was going on? Did people make fun of you for liking it? Call you a "fag" or "queer" etc etc? Then when Donna Summer was mega star from 75-84.. My life was never the same 😍😍😍😍😍. I'm sorry if I feel I have to mention her all the time throughout my comments but she was just amazing and meant a lot to me. You'd know this since you're part of the golden age. Man I miss those fucking days for music of the 60s-80s. I don't want to sound like a prick but the millennials are the worst generation of fans. They missed out on so many things! Man only if a time machine was built again they can relive it.

I was called all the homophobic slurs long before I was into any kind of music. I was called those slurs before I even knew what they meant. As years and decades have passed and gay people have more rights than they used to, what I find hilarious is when I hear people say.... "I have no problem with gay people as long as they keep it to themselves.". Oh really???? Well, if that's the case, then why did the motherfuckers constantly ask me about it and accuse me of it when I was growing up? If anything, they should be happy now that I've finally given them the answers to their questions that they wanted to know after all these years. However, I haven't given them their answers by being their joke and crying about it like a little bitch for their entertainment. They weren't expecting to get rattlesnake venom.

.

As for disco, I was a child and had no idea of it's gay roots at the time. None of the other kids in my area had any idea either. Before the disco backlash, I remember most of them liked disco themselves. After the backlash, I still don't remember people associating disco with gay until years later in the 1990s. After the backlash, that's when I started being called the racial slurs for liking disco. I was called the gay slurs long before I was into music so now I had a second set of slurs I was being called. This is The South though which is a total different world from the rest of the country. People down here, not even adults, had no idea what The Village People were referring to in songs like "YMCA", "Macho Man", "Fire Island", etc. "San Francisco" maybe, but I don't remember that one being played down here. And The South sure as hell knew nothing about "Fire Island". Actually, when I found out as an adult that disco had deep gay roots, that made me extremely proud of it. Naturally, I was going to be attracted to it because hell, it was gay music. But it was not the type of music or lifestyle that I had previously thought of when I thought of gay people. I thought of them being nerdy types into classical music and if they liked other kinds of music, it was show tunes or Barbara Streisand type shit, and certainly no fast music whatsoever. But disco was the furthest thing from that. It was hard and fast. Hell, it was gay people's version of rock and the rock lifestyle to go along with it. Partying all night until the sun came up, drugs, permiscuous sex, group sex, anonymous sex.... Hell, sex, sex, and more sex! Damn, I wish I had been grown back then.

Are you n a midlife crisis?

nextedition said:

Disco is cool. Even though i was a little too young to experience the disco club scene, I've always liked the music. And that's what i remember the most. That and the 70's clothes.



To me music is music. Besides certain Rap and Opera, i like it all.

Oops.

[Edited 1/3/21 0:43am]

JayCrawford said:

vainandy said:

JayCrawford said:

vainandy said: Man... Thank fuck I was living in the UK in those years then 😂 People can shit on disco all they want but... I'd rather listen to disco than anything of the last 27 years of music if you ask me.

What trips me out is that all those people that attended that Disco Demolition were told to bring a disco record so they could blow it up. If they actually hated disco so much, how did they even have any disco records in their possession? Even locally, I remember people that listened to disco prior to the backlash and after the backlash, they all of a sudden hated disco overnight. It's like they didn't have a mind of their own and were told not to like it so they no longer liked it. And they used to make the most racist and homophobic remarks concerning disco.

Yep...they referred to it as "n****r" or "f*****" music. Disco became such a hated word, radio stations started calling it dance music (at least here in NYC) around 1981/82.

Ottensen said:

JayCrawford said:

Was the backlash that crazy? Because I'm from the UK and back in the late 70s... Nothing happened at all in terms of backlash

From what the generations before mine have shared, there would actually be the occasional public gathering where people would set disco records on fire

There's two Disco influenced cuts(Get You Some Love and i Know What i Like) on the new Black Stone Funk Revival Album. And they're hot ! Give em a listen(samples on Amazon).

[Edited 1/5/21 23:04pm]

Funny thing is, Disco never died....it just morphed into other forms. The haters didn't win.

uPtoWnNY said:

uPtoWnNY said: