Why Was Disco Ever Popular? Blame Fake News – IOTW Report

Why Was Disco Ever Popular? Blame Fake News

Wednesday, 19 September 2018, 18:30 MJA Uncategorized 37

American Thinker:

While Donald Trump has become famous for railing on about “Fake News,” the media have become quick to defend their integrity.  However, the depth of the media’s lies is apparent and may be deeper than most imagine.

Let’s start with what is probably one of the greatest cultural frauds in recent history, though it is mostly unknown today: Saturday Night Fever.

Many of us were roughly the same age as Tony Manero, the hero in the 1977 movie, when it came out.  The movie hijacked American culture for about two years, rocketing disco up the charts, until a Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in 1979 put an end to genre almost overnight.

Three months before disco’s demise, a Newsweek April 2, 1979 cover confidently proclaimed that disco had won the culture wars.  Rock ‘n’ roll was dead.  But a few months later, by the fall of 1979, disco was gone.  What happened?

What happened was that the disco culture was a house of cards.  The signature statement of that culture, Saturday Night Fever, was a total fraud.  MORE

37 Comments on Why Was Disco Ever Popular? Blame Fake News

  5. It took shallow people’s minds off how much Carter sucked. Gas lines, 18% home mortgage rates, the 2nd Wave of the Beta Male and America choosing to be in decline following the media overthrow Nixon, etc.

    Re-watch Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech on Youtube.

    You’ll be doing the Disco Duck and begging for Calgon to take you away too.

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  6. I loved the seafarer denim bell bottoms we were still wearing as part of our work uniforms when I was in the Navy back in the early 70’s. Never had platform/pimp shoes but was guilty of wearing earth shoes which were even dumber than my wife’s Birkenstocks. And I got married wearing a brown corduroy suit in 1977, hey it was the 70’s. And Disco still and always will suck. We also had matching Save the wolf T shirts, don’t ask me why we just did. My dad hated them and said so every chance he could, thank God I grew out of that green weenie crap.

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  7. Disco was for jive turkeys and Sunday morning kids…. Sunday morning kids cuz they had NO CLASS.

    Most of us said “up your nose with a rubber hose” to disco. It was not dy-no-mite. It was total felgacarb.

    Anyway, Sid Vicious was dead by 1979. No one wanted to boogie down. It was all about puttin’ the pedal to the metal and truckin’ on down the line.

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  8. I was 11 and 12 with an older Sister when People started moving in what I thought were silly moves, my Sisters overweight girlfriend became a Dancing Queen in her own mind and the whole thing was sort of Embarrassing.

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  10. Everybody sez the music and fashion all sucked, of this I cannot disagree, but there was one reason to participate. That was the split tailed beaver that had never paid attention to you before and I have always danced like a frog in a blender….Disco gave me some hope….Lamb chop sideburns, bell bottoms, frye boots, wide belts, silk shirts….I KNOW you all comformed to a point…..LOL…

    Brad chose the “Urban Cowboy” route….C’mon puddin’, you know you did….LOL

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  12. “…until a Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in 1979 put an end to [Disco]…”

    Naaah. PUNK ROCK killed off disco. Certainly not late 1976, but by sometime in 1977, it was DOA.

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  13. Brad even the worst whiny cowpie music is still better than disco will ever hope to be. I like Charlie Pride’s music and he’s black. Disco, soul music, hip hop/rap are all junk music but I like authentic blues and R&B as well as doo wop. In fact doo wop is on XM channel 5 right now with Cool Bobby B playing doowop classics.

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  16. https://youtu.be/_Qx7Ocykp-4

    You’ll want to stick a gun in your mouth and KC and the Sunshine Band in your ear.

    What is sad is that you can read the comments on Youtube and see all the people talking about what a spot on, smart, finger on the pulse of the nation kind of guy Carter is. Would love to vote for some morw of that.

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  17. As pop music goes? Pretty good actually and that is coming from a ROCKER and country blues genre type of ear.

    Think about it, a English country folk band, singing in PERFECT harmony, helping to usher in the disco age.

    https://www.allmusic.com/album/saturday-night-fever-original-motion-picture-soundtrack-mw0000650741

    Yvonne Elliman singing a Bee Gees tune?? GREAT song. She was singing back up for Clapton for several years just before.

    Fashion – BAD but @ Different Tim that earth shoe
    look? Yikes! Post Hippy correct?

    Disco was late middle school for me but my parents at the time learned how to “do the Hustle” then in their late fifties. To them? They probably thought “holy crap music we can actually dance to again!” Being of the greatest generation type…

    Me? I was listening to Tommy (by the Who) at that time…ya just CANNOT dance to that.

    Both albums have 4-1/2-5 star ratings. Equivalence?

    https://www.allmusic.com/album/tommy-mw0000392525

    Then we get to the 80’s music and well, how bad THAT was, for the most part, oh that is a different thread…

    For everyone that hates disco rule out David Bowie, The UnGreatful DEAD, Queen, The Kinks, ELO, The Stones and YES Pink Floyd in which the Wall came out two years after SNF.

    ALL experimented with the hated disco.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U

    Animal House came out a year later and Dire Straits first album two years after that…yes disco WAS short lived.

    This is not about news or politics, it is about an objective EAR.

    That’s IT!

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  19. Give disco it’s due…

    We were all sitting in a club in our big bells, stack shoes, and acetate print shirts listening to music and drinking beer.. suddenly.. Toto. Hold the line started playing..

    Hey everyone… It’s a rock song..

    We hit the dance floor for about 45 seconds when it occurred to us that you really can’t dance to most rock songs… We sat back down

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  20. Another aside.. I loved soul and rythym and blues… We all said disco sucked . Still I loved Hot Chocolate and Disco Queen et al.

    Abba Dancing Queen.. and I didn’t brag about it but I had Saturday Night Fever.. all good songs.. the bee gees had been getting funky since Nights on Broadway… And they are still good music today..

    It lasted, but the bulk of disco was crap and is recycled by Madonna and now Lady Gaga..

    And still sucks..

    I’ll take bee gees and Saturday night fever over any millennial crap the last 20 years

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  22. I had two gay older uncles who long before Sat Night Live were bringing home some really amazing music- back when Gloria Gaynor was the Diva Supreme ( not I will survive Gloria but never can say goodbye Gloria) and Donna Summer was making basically early techno records ( I feel love) you had to be on drugs to really really appreciate. It was a continuation of the Girl Groups that boy rock stole from and then killed off the airwaves. Like most underground subversive cultures, once disco became mainstream it sucked big time. But by then it had starting morphing with electro and techno and we got some truly glorious house music. Then house music got super popular and started to suck…

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  23. Grew up in NW Indiana. Listened every day to Steve Dahl, who pulled off the Comisky Demolition night. Remember it well.

    Never saw Saturday Night Fever, but I don’t have a problem with disco music. I began playing bass guitar at 12. Motown, Soul, Black Gospel, Funk was part of my musical experience, as well as hard rock.

    And all you hard asses danced to it and later had the Thriller album, too. Admit it. You liked it.

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  30. Willy

    “Brad chose the “Urban Cowboy” route….C’mon puddin’, you know you did….LOL”
    Interesting story kind of. There use to be this bar in downtown San Jose called the Saddle Rack. A real dive. LOL. But they attracted big name talent back in the day. Watched Merle there twice. Ruff place. And then it happened. Urban Cowboy. Holy shit, we were invaded by Wrangler Wearing, Dan Post outfitted computer programmers. Management moved a mechanical bull in immediately after the movie was released. Smart biz move. After that we never went back.

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  33. 99th

    OMG, I think that’s still my wifes favorite song. Be interesting to see if you two can still communicate in disco. Which I’ve witnessed. It’s when one woman/girl finishes another girls sentence. Totally freaks guys out. LOL

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  36. I think disco is similar to doo wop in this sense: there are some good records in the genre but many of them were done using formulaic cliche’s. Those records are the one that made people sick of disco.

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