If this seems like a contemporary social-justice-in-hindsight POV, keep in mind that Dave Marsh wrote in the last Rolling Stone issue of the ’70s that “White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. On the one hand, you’ve got the perspective that the whole ordeal was a disgrace of aggrieved-whiteboy anger, the backlash of thousands of future Reagan (and Trump) voters revolting against the idea that the most popular music in America could be black or gay or feminine. The story of the event is told in two different ways. Hating disco was just the start.Īnd there are wider implications, too. And while rock music still did big business, its slow dissolution into the subgenre factionalism that dominated the ’80s was the first sign that a generation that came of age amidst the debris of Disco Demolition Night found its rebellion in pettier scale: not through rock as a mass movement focused primarily against the stifling mores of their parents’ generation, but as a tribal rite meant to wall off outsiders one’s own age. So even if the heshers and the punks agreed to hate disco, they also agreed to hate each other, too.
/disco-dancing-56a965713df78cf772a69dc8.jpg "disco songs")
Meanwhile, all the countercultural charge of rock ‘n’ roll was being siphoned off into new, underground-rooted strains - punk rock, then new wave - that were intent on knocking all the old dinosaurs down. The future of rock in the Top 40 sounded a lot like Foreigner, Styx, and REO Speedwagon - stuff that was too micromanaged and slick to feel rebellious, much less dangerous. Sure, the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was surging, but the likes of Judas Priest and Motörhead hadn’t yet caught on in the States. Even less dirtbag-adjacent releases like Wings’ Back To The Egg and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk just confounded people. Even the hot-selling blockbuster successes felt off: Led Zeppelin had art-rock synthesizers all over the divisive In Through The Out Door, and even if Pink Floyd’s The Wall was a huge smash, it wasn’t exactly kickass feel-good hard rock.
But many of the decade’s other hard rock and AOR warhorses - Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Peter Frampton, Blue Öyster Cult - were struggling to even keep it together.
Sure, there were great albums that year - Neil Young, Van Halen, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, and AC/DC all dropped classics. And his new station WLUP’s publicity stunt to blow up a bunch of disco records in the middle of Comiskey Park during a baseball doubleheader was all the excuse an already anxious, recession-choked record industry needed to downsize their tulip-fever investment in a genre they didn’t realize was just slightly more divisive, niche, and under-lucrative than they’d anticipated.īut the other death was that of mainstream rock ‘n’ roll. Disco itself was one of them, of course: Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl, infuriated that his still-young shock-jock career was derailed when WDAI changed format from rock to disco and shitcanned him in the process, waged war on the genre. Disco Demolition Night, which happened 40 years ago today, is the day two genres were marked for death.
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