You're Wrong About - Disco Demolition Night

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

Mike tells Sarah how a silly sports promotion galvanized a reactionary movement. Digressions include “Charlotte’s Web,” Jane Fonda and German-language musicals. Songs are dissected; the honor of David Bowie and late-night salad bars are defended.Huge thanks to historians Tavia Nyong'o, Eric Gonzaba, Luis-Manuel Garcia and Gillian Frank for helping Mike with this episode! Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks!  Tavia Nyong'o's "I Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents"Gillian Frank's excellent article on disco and his delightful podcastLuis-Manuel Garcia's alternate history of club culture and dissection of the gay left's opposition to discoAlice Echols' "Hot Stuff"  Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey"   Tim Lawrence's "Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979" Peter Shapiro's "Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco"Undone did a great episode on Disco Demolition Night“The Flip Sides of 1979”“Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” the (fabricated) New York Magazine story that inspired “Saturday Night Fever”Tony Smith interview"Disco and The Queering of the Dance Floor"Support the show

I will probably cut this out. Did you know that the number one city for your wrong about listeners is Chicago? No, and I think we should keep this in. I think that'll make Chicagoans be like, yeah, another thing we're best at that no one knows about. ["Wake Up"]

Welcome to your wrong about, where every so often we stop being so depressing and get gay. ["Wake Up"] This episode is extremely gay and not depressing, so that was very good. Welcome to your wrong about the episode where whenever we take one fucking break from talking about street culture,

things get so much better. Ha, what a thought. I was thinking earlier today that the best thing about this episode is the worst thing that happens to anybody in this episode is somebody breaks a hip. Oh, good. That's pretty serious. But yeah, if that's the worst.

We're taking a break from all that this week. It's gonna be great. Amazing. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. And as I was just demonstrating to Mike

right before we started recording, Disco, which is our topic today, is very integral to this show because there is a song that I listen to every single week before we start recording. And Mike, what is that song? Rasputin, makings of a love machine or something. By Boney M.

Yes. And I love it so much. And it's just like, it puts me in like exactly the right energy for when we start recording, which is just like joyful and energetic and like ready for history. It's a bop. We're gonna talk about other bops.

I'm gonna introduce you to other unknown bops today. I'm so excited. But yeah, I guess I wanna start by saying the kind of steak I have in this topic, which is that like we're talking about Disco today. And Disco is a much maligned form of music. The Tanya Harding of music, one might say, because all it ever did was love us

and give us something to dance to and provide freedom and expression for the quote unquote tacky and mainstream American culture responded by being really, really mean. Or did it. Or did it. This is what we're gonna talk about today. Oh.

Oh, it's very complicated. It's much more complicated than I thought it was when I started looking at it. I'm super excited. Let's do it. So yes, today we are talking about a specific aspect of Disco, namely the Disco demolition night of June 12th, 1979.

What do you know about this event? So I know that this happened, was it at Camiskey Park? Yes. In Chicago? And that's, is that where the White Sox play? Yes. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

You can neither confirm nor deny that, but it is in Chicago. And it is a game of the White Sox, yes. And so they had, in the way that baseball games have like themes, they had Disco demolition night, which I, in my head, is like a bunch of people flung their Disco records onto the turf.

And they were, I guess, bulldozed or something like that. And I think it like damaged the field and it was bad for it. And I feel like it was like this publicized image of like the end of Disco. And maybe there was a Disco Sox spanner. Yes, there were many. And I feel like it cited as like the end of Disco, the way that like Altamont is seeing it

is like the end of the 60s. And it's like, well, obviously any narrative where like some huge social and creative movement ended on one night in a zip code is like on some level very silly. And so the question becomes, why did we start telling ourselves that story? Right.

I've done this before. Yeah, I know. I know. I'm sitting here panicking because you're spoiling all of the good stuff we're gonna get to later. Am I? It's like if I'm going into a Disney movie

and I'm like, so I'm guessing that that main character wants something and they're gonna sing about it. Like that doesn't mean I don't wanna hear the song. It means I'm excited to hear it. I mean, it was gonna be a big twist that like Disco Demolition Night did not kill Disco but that also doesn't mean that it didn't matter.

Right. What do you know about the sort of threads underneath Disco Demolition Night? So Disco Demolition Night, I'm pretty sure I learned about it in some kind of VH1 countdown. And I feel like I learned in retrospect that one of the big threads of like anti-disco sentiment

was that Disco was a world where queer culture flourished. Yes. And also it has not been lost to historians that the vast majority of Disco music was made by black people and always had been. Yeah, and VH1 did not talk about that as I recall. I mean, maybe they did and I missed it because I was 11.

I mean, one of the main stories that goes around about Disco Demolition Night is that if you came with a record, a Disco record to be destroyed, you would get in for 98 cents. That was a discount. Oh boy. But so one of the people who was an usher that night, who's a black dude, noticed that people were coming

with like Marvin Gaye records and like James Brown records. And so he started to think like, this doesn't seem like it's people that hate Disco. This is people that hate black music and this is how it's being understood by the overwhelmingly white crowd who went to the event that night. This is almost to the day.

I think it's five days off being the 10 year anniversary of Stonewall. Wow. So you have the image of an extremely white crowd in a ballpark that is in the middle of a very black neighborhood who are burning, destroying, chanting against extremely black and extremely gay music. As an image, it's not great.

And then it gets to like masquerade. It gets to like grow this epidermis and then sort of masquerade through history. He's like, Disco music is cheesy. And everyone's like, I agree. Yes. Let's talk about it on VH1. But so the narrative and the sort of the debate

I want to debunk in this episode is that a lot of the other podcasts and articles and stories that get told about this event, talk about how the sort of the original understanding of it was that it was just like, well, Disco sucks. There's no deeper anything going on. A cigar is just a cigar, whatever. And then we look back at it in hindsight

and we're like, actually, this is really racist and homophobic, like quite openly. And then what you find, whenever you go into the comment section of any random Chicago SunTimes article about the 25th anniversary of this event, whatever, the people commenting on it almost universally will say, well, I was there that night and I'm not racist.

I'm not homophobic. And so that creates this debate where it's sort of like, well, were the people there racist and homophobic? Were they not racist and homophobic? It really gets into like the motivations of the people who organized the event. And we will get into those, like we'll get into the evidence

for whether or not people who attended that night knew how racist and homophobic it was or not. But even if we accept the fact that many of the people who went that night honestly did not know that this event was racist and homophobic, they didn't go for those motivations. They just thought Disco sucked.

The deeper and more like troubling question about this is that if you're a decent person, how did you end up at what was sort of six inches away from a book burning? It's just worth thinking about how do a bunch of people who would never participate in an event that was explicitly racist and homophobic, how do they end up at what turned into really like,

it turned into a riot about halfway through. I mean, this was like a violent event that resulted in arrests and injuries. Like that's a much harder question than was the guy who organized it homophobic or not. Right. Well, and don't you think that it's, I mean, rendering moot for a second,

the question of the intent of the guy, how much do you tell an audience about what an event is going to be? Yeah, exactly. Cause I also feel like if you get like a relatively small number of people with a similar angry take on something, then like that can escalate pretty easily.

Oh yeah. And that's basically what we're talking about. Okay. And also this event was understood by gay people and black people as an assault on them. Really? Okay. Yeah, that Nile Rogers who's in the band Sheik,

you know who does that song, freak out. He says he was watching the footage of it and looking at the newspapers the next day. And he says, it felt to us like a Nazi book burning. And also it was not a coincidence that they use the term sucks, disco sucks. That term, like it's been completely normalized now, and you can say it on TV,

but at the time it was much more of a transitive verb than it is now. Like people understood it as having a homophobic connotation to say that something sucks in 1979. And even journalists at the time understood the effects of this. So this is from a Rolling Stone article

that comes out less than a month after disco demolition night. It says, white males 18 to 34 are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins. And therefore they're more likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. Wow, Latins.

So while I think the intentions of some of the people there were probably fine, I mean, one of the things that has totally been memory-hold about this event was that it was not only disco demolition night, it was also teen night. So if you were a teenager, you also got in for 98 cents. So there really were a lot of like teenagers there

who just were like, oh, I want to go to a baseball game for cheap. And like literally didn't know that any of this was happening. And so I just think the central question of this episode is how does such a wide range of people end up participating in an event with undeniably racist and homophobic impacts? Mm-hmm.

Let's tell it. Can we start with the beginning of disco? Oh, God, yes. Just a little? Yes. Okay. You say just a little, but I want to talk about this for like seven hours.

Good. I've got my provisions. I have juice in here. So the way we're going to do this is I'm going to walk you through the history of disco with a couple of songs. Wow, I'm so excited. So what's really important about the early days of disco, and I think this is very difficult for people

of our age cohort to understand, is that in early disco, the word disco did not refer to a genre of music because that genre of music did not exist yet. Did it refer to a place where you danced? Yeah, it kind of referred to like a scene. It's associated with a certain type of person and it's associated with certain activity,

basically underground dance clubs. One of the most interesting descriptions of this I found was from a guy called Tony Smith, who's one of the really, really, really early disco DJs. He grows up in the projects in lower Manhattan and he's in a band and he starts like playing records in between his band sets. So he'll have like a little intermission

of like an hour between performances and he'll play records during that time when he's like literally like 14 or 15. And he finds out that he's really good at picking which records to play and that people like his sort of like DJ sets more than they like his actual performances. And so what starts happening is people start holding

these like informal semi-legal dance parties. They would go into parks in lower Manhattan and they would break into the street lamps and they would plug in the speakers, like hack into the wiring of the street lamps and plug in speakers to it. And then they would just have these like all night dance parties in parks.

And even earlier than that, there's also a lot of these house parties in Philadelphia where people are just like inviting over friends and there'll be like a DJ in the corner who's playing music. It's just like a big party of people dancing in somebody's homes and then like sometimes it's in like warehouse space or like lofts or like, you know, they start using this sort of like repurposed real estate

for it, but it's all completely underground. Like there's no sort of record label support. There's no institutional support. It's not really in nightclubs yet. When did record label support ever lead to anything particularly great? Yeah. Another thing that is really easy to forget about this period in the late 1960s, early 1970s

is that there was just a lot less music than there is now. Yeah. People didn't have sound clouds to tweet about. Exactly. It was a dark time. And as people are going to more of these dance parties, there's a growing demand for music you can dance to, but there's not all that much supply of music. So there's not that many songs that are sort of like, like what we think of as dance music now.

So basically all the entire culture of DJing that we're now so familiar with, right? Of like mixing records and making these nonstop mixes and continuing the beat going forever. That was something that DJs had to create because there wasn't enough dance music to keep people dancing forever, right? And songs are structured in these like three minute long bursts

and every song has its own like sort of little beginning and crescendo and then outro. And so what DJs started doing was they wanted to make the dancing the beat perpetual. And so the only way to do that is you take like little snippets of other songs and you start chopping them together and you can build in your own little crescendos to it, right?

So rather than just relying on the song, you can be like, no, I'm going to play something really fast and then I'm going to slow it down and then it's going to reach this crescendo on like a 40 minute long cycle rather than a three minute long cycle. So they're basically they're making collages out of music that already exists

to keep the audience at these dance parties dancing. I mean, this is what I love so much about it. Tony Smith talks about how there's all these different genres that people are playing at the same time. So disco is oftentimes positioned in opposition to rock but he says in his early shows that he would play Led Zeppelin, he would play Rolling Stones but he would also play like James Brown

and he would play Barry White and Isaac Hayes and this like all this soul music that was coming out of Philadelphia. There's one DJ that would play the theme from the movie Carrie which is like a really dark and ominous orchestral track and then he would mix it with Diana Ross. Oh my God, that sounds amazing. So you're basically getting these like really eclectic

really just interesting performances by DJs and they're stitching together genres from like all over the place. I mean, it's overwhelmingly black music what they're playing, a lot of it is soul, a lot of it is R&B, a lot of it is Motown but it's basically it's like you can go and see one of these DJ performances

and you'll hear 100 songs in the course of like 45 minutes. And so one of Tony Smith's favorite songs from this time is by a band called MFSB which stands for either mother, father, sister, brother or motherfucking son of a bitch depending on who you ask and when you ask the band. So we're gonna listen to the song together and you can tell that it's just on the border with disco.

Okay, three, two, one, go. I'd like to skate to this. It's just so dreamy, you know, it's got a nice beat. It starts off very gentle. Ah, this beat also it reminds me of like the morning intro on like a Chicago talk show. That's true, that's really, that's really insightful. Bringing you the news, entertainment, headlines

plus James Simmons with gardening hints. One thing I think is really interesting about this is you can hear how the sort of tempo and the tenor of the song changes throughout that like there's parts of this that you could dance to but then it sort of slows down and the crescendo sort of ends. So you can see how DJs would listen to this and be like, ooh, I'm gonna take that part and loop it.

I think that today this would practically be easy listening. I know, right? And it's also instrumental, there were a lot of like, this was a time in American music when instrumentals were like the shit. Yeah, you could sell like a million copies or just like a trumpet solo. It's wild.

I can imagine doing kind of dramatic like pose, you know to this like the womp, womp, womp. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can just do a little pose with each one of those, right? Yeah, it's really good. I interview a lot of historians for this because you know like how I get but one of the historians I interviewed for this

is named Tavia Nyong'o. So this is from Tavia Nyong'o's article about disco called Disco and It's Discontents about the way that before this, dancing had been something that was sort of implied that you were supposed to be doing with a partner. You know what I'm picturing the world before disco is like is that it's the peanuts kids, you know,

dancing around with their elbows out. It's whipping their little shoes around. Yeah, I mean, of course people, whatever, danced by themselves on planet earth before disco. But this really normalized the idea of going to a club and like you dance as one person and then you sort of turn around and you're dancing with another person

and you're dancing with a boy and then you're dancing with a girl and you're not there to dance with your sweetheart. You're there to dance with everybody. You're part of this giant crowd. Or that like you're there to dance to the music and the music will bring you partners. Yes.

Yeah, it's interesting. I can also see that perhaps there was some hostility to disco in this like, you know, technophobic way because it was like one of the first interventions of technology in live music, right? I read like four books for this. And one of the things that most of them mentioned is that sound systems and nightclubs sucked ass before disco

that apparently with live music and recorded music, it was all mono. So it was just like every speaker played exactly the same thing. And so all of a sudden in the 70s, you had these like $100,000 sound systems being created and music that was being produced with all these different tracks.

And so DJs could also start doing like the things that we see now where like you twist a knob and then the music only goes to like the tweeters. It's like. And then you bring in the bass like. You could start doing that in clubs in a way that you like physically technologically couldn't before this revolution and sound systems and in recording.

So it's about the kind of technology we can use to experience recorded music also. Yes. And at this time, the vast majority of people that were in this scene were people of color and gay people. Like this was the soundtrack to marginalized communities. This was something that like most of like straight mainstream in America had no idea what was going on.

This is an excerpt from Edmund White's 1973 book, The Joy of Gay Sex. There's no better proof of the strength of disco than the emergence of gays from their closets. Gone are the days of sleazy hideaway bars buried in basements. Now hundreds of gays troop into big spacious luxurious discos where the dancing, the sounds,

the lights and the company are great. In fact, the main problem that gay discos face is how to keep straights from moving in and elbowing out the original gay clientele. A problem with which I'm extremely familiar. Wait, was that you or was that the bar? That was me. Okay.

And so, I mean, of course it matters that this is the decade after Stonewall, right? And in 1971, New York lifts a ban on male male dancing. Really? So it becomes legal for men to dance with each other, which is also extremely important. Right. So the next song we're gonna listen to,

me and my boyfriend have been doing this thing where when we're on road trips, we'll often look up the Wikipedia entry of like a genre of music like jazz or house music or whatever. And it'll list like some of the early tracks and we'll listen to the early tracks like just to see what they sound like. Like what does early house sound like?

That's really cool. It's actually really fun on road trips. I recommend this as a hobby. So like a month ago, and I started doing the research for this, we did this with Disco. And so my boyfriend was like playing songs in chronological order.

And when he put this one on, I just like immediately started to cry. We will talk about why, but let's listen to it. This is, I swear to God, this is like one of my favorite songs ever. Okay. Do you know this song? Oh yeah.

Okay. Three, two, one, go. Last Bikini's MD prop larvi One thing that's interesting in the song is they start with the chorus. That's like a disco thing to start with, like, the crescendo of the song.

Really? Because if people are dancing, like, that's where you want to get to as fast as possible, right? Right, because it's made for dancing, not listening. I love that. I know what you mean about immediately starting to cry because I can feel my, like, my, like, weeping pleasure center being pressed on. Right. Like, with the the the knife that Catherine Zeta-Jones uses to depress the, like,

weight sensor and entrapment. I'm like, yep. It's just so, like, nakedly positive. Yes. Right? It's just, like, the most earnest fucking thing you can possibly imagine. I think that I first heard this song in a chorus commercial. Yeah.

Because this is, you know, there's, like, songs that just have good energy and they get sort of unmoored from their context and they end up in ads in the 90s. Yeah. I want to skate! I know! When do I skate again, Mike? But just have the rest of the show be the sounds of us skating. Just no more talking.

Don't you see us at a roller rink, like, linking hands with everybody there and just, like, skating around in a big circle? Ah. You're going to make me cry. I know. I'm sorry. No, it's so good. And it does that thing that I remember noticing that music was doing to me when I was in, like,

seventh grade. That feeling of, like, you just feel it in your chest. Oh, totally. Yeah. And so this song perfectly encapsulates what people love and what people hate about disco. Interesting. It is, like, extremely positive. Like, if you're on a dance floor, like, how can you not want to hug and hold every single person around you?

This song made some babies. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's also, there is the sort of the political significance of things like this, too, right? That in the 70s, the country is in turmoil. There's this sense of the end of the 60s, as you mentioned before, with, like, Altamont has happened. Kent State, where student protesters were killed, is seen as the sort of the end of, like, hippies. You know, Martin Luther King has been assassinated.

I mean, there's just a lot of disillusionment. And, you know, we're about to get Watergate. We're about to get the oil crisis. We're about to get inflation. I mean, there's just so much turmoil happening. This is a excerpt from a book called Last Night at DJ Saved My Life. Like the twist crazed before it, disco was forged amid a terrible recession and the deep scars of war, this time in Vietnam. People have always lost themselves in dancing when the economy's been bad.

The discos now are doing the same thing that the big dance halls with the crystal chandeliers did during the Depression. Everyone's out to spend their unemployment check, their welfare, to lose themselves. And I do think that's one of the main appeals of, like, a song like this. That it just makes you feel good. And it's very emotional. It's super emotional. And I mean, people later on will sort of deride disco as like simplistic. It's apolitical.

It has no social consciousness. It's just like bumper sticker, like love everybody, boring bullshit, which find like that's not incorrect. Sometimes the best messages are stupid, though. Yes. And also people at first didn't call it disco. They just called it dance music. And they meant that literally. It's like music that you dance to. Which is really quite an indictment of like all previous music.

It's like, what were people doing then? But it's like if you're making music for a dance floor, which is what early disco like explicitly was designed to do, people don't want like complicated thoughts about like Israel, Palestine, when they're like trying to dance, right? Like, of course, it's simplistic. That would be great, though, if you had like a 17 minute long disco hit that was explaining the Munich Olympics. Yeah. I find it interesting when people get upset about like about other people wanting to feel good. Like how dare people want music to make them feel good.

And it's like, what would you have them do? Yes. And also, I mean, a lot of the people that were complaining about disco later in the 70s, like these same people were listening to like, we all live in a yellow submarine. There's also a theory which I do not subscribe to, but is an interesting way of looking at this that things like Love Train and sort of early 70s, like love, peace, love, togetherness, a lot of that is kind of like the extension of the flower children hippie stuff of the 1960s. I mean, a lot of that stuff is still really around. Yeah, these things don't suddenly evaporate.

Yeah. But what happened was is it's all the same people and all the same emotions and messages, but they all switched from LSD to cocaine. I don't think that that's true. So it's like, let's get Slavic Heather right now, right now. Yes. So I don't like I don't find that theory convincing, but I also like I like thinking of it as sort of the fast forwarding of the same ethos. Yeah. One of the other things that sort of makes me cry to Love Train for a different reason now

than it did a month ago is that the early days of disco actually were pretty peace, love and understanding. Like they were very integrated by race. They were very integrated by sex. Like some of these values actually got implemented, which is so rare. Right. I'm sure people were afraid of disco because you do start to truly believe something that makes you, you know, so positively imprint on an idea. And this is an underground movement.

Like you're not getting the sense that like the mainstream is watching you. Yeah. And so you can go out and just be yourself. Like for the first time in your life, potentially, you're a gay person. You can go out and like dance with other dudes and it's not illegal. So disco refers to the world where this happens, basically. I mean, actually, one of the things that I came across in my Stonewall research that I didn't get to mention in that episode is that Greenwich Village, of course, was like a hangout for gay people and sort of homeless people and sex workers.

And it's all these sort of groups that are sort of on the margins of society. But it was also a place where people in interracial relationships would go to hang out publicly because they didn't feel safe in other parts of New York. And so part of the appeal of these clubs was like you could dance with people of another race. You could go there with your like go there with your girlfriends. Yeah. And so this is an excerpt from last night at DJ Save My Life about an early disco club called Sanctuary. It had an incredible mixture of people, recalls Jorge La Torre, a gay male dancer.

There were people dressed in furs and diamonds, and they were the funkiest kids from the East Village. I would say that women made up 25 percent of the crowd from the very beginning, probably more. People came from all cultural backgrounds and all walks of life. And it was the mixture of people that made the place happen. And so like love train is inspiring because like it kind of happened. In the early 70s, we also get something called the loft,

which is started by a DJ named David Mancuso, which is basically like a literal loft, like a former industrial space that he turns into these private parties. This is where sort of DJ mixing becomes a big deal. This is also the invention of the disco ball. Really? Well, apparently it was invented in the 1800s. I've heard I've seen different sources, late 1800s or early 1800s. But like old and it was a big thing in nightclubs in the 1920s.

Wow. And then it disappeared. And then David Mancuso had one in his loft that he would shine the spotlight on. And that was the only light in the entire club. And that was like something really special. And so yeah, then people start iterating on it and they start. They open in Street 54 and they open. There's all these like copycat clubs that open. They all just like straight up steal his idea of the disco ball.

Wow. So David Mancuso is the father of the disco ball. Yes. Wow. And he also, interestingly, he shuts it down at 3 a.m. because he's like everything that happens after 3 a.m. is bad. But it's all it's all going to turn to like people too drunk, too high, too whatever. Like everybody goes home at three. Yeah, that's fair. This guy sounds smart. He sounds like a smart person.

Yes. I don't want to go too overboard with this because I think the loft is a really good metaphor for sort of these values and then planting the seeds that become the perversion of those values over time, that the loft itself is like it's very racially diverse. It's very gender diverse, it's very open, but you need an invite to get in. So it's a walled garden and within the garden, it's very diverse. But you need to know someone who already is in there. Exactly. And so I like the model of the loft.

I think that everybody there had really good intentions. But another one of the historians that I interviewed, a guy named Louis Manuel Garcia, he's written a number of articles about the early days of disco. He does like ethnographies in Berlin about nightclub culture. And this is an excerpt from one of his articles. Despite these utopian and nostalgic visions of open and egalitarian belonging, systems of exclusion were part of the disco scene from the very beginning. In the form of members only policies,

these were initially justified as self protected and legally necessary to keep the cops away, but later turned into a form of elitist social curatorship, selecting and excluding people based on beauty, celebrity, glamour and social connections. This is a stark reminder that while utopias may feel inclusive and egalitarian, they are often created, maintained and shaped through exclusions and hierarchies of coolness. And so I don't want to like cancel David Mancuso's parties in 1971. I think that like everybody was doing their best. Well, it's also like if you're having a party in a finite space.

Yes. And you don't want people who are going to like upset the vibe to show up. Like I don't know a better way to handle that. Exactly. It doesn't appear at those parties that people were being turned away for like, sorry, we don't let fat people in, sorry, we don't let black people in. It doesn't sound like that was the ethos, right? But we're already seeing the seeds of the way that ethos sours over time. But like the most known thing about Studio 54, which is apparently going to be, you know, birthed from this is its exclusivity.

Yes, absolutely. And the fact that its owner famously said that he would not let himself into his own club. Yeah. So all of the music that we've heard so far has been like proto disco, like Neander disco. It's not quite there. The disco of the cave bear. Yes. But what happens is over the early 70s, radio stations and record labels and musical artists start to realize like there's these weird songs that are selling like a hundred thousand copies.

Like famously, there's this import called Soul Makasa by this Cameroonian artist named Manu Devango. And it's like very funky and very cool. And it sells a shitload of records and radio DJs are like, we haven't been playing this. It's not on like a record label. Why the hell are so many people buying it? And it's because people have been hearing it in clubs. And so the record industry in the mid 70s starts to wake up to

the power of the disco consumer. Yes. And so this song, which fucking slaps, it's the first song, I believe the first disco song that charted. Wow. It's the first song that I listened to for this that I was like, this is fucking disco. Like there is no way you can see it as anything else. I am so excited. So OK, here. Oh, Gloria Gaynor. Right. OK, I'm ready.

All right. Three, two, one, go. Fast from the start. We got these flourishes. You get the high hat. Very important. High hat. And then we have Gloria Gaynor is very important. And he has such a beautiful voice. I know. And you know, I never think of this, but like this is this is the lyrical

stylings of a soul song, you know, this could be totally in place and, you know, with totally different instrumentals. The fact that a lot of disco artists are like former gospel people, former Motown people. And Donna Summer was in a German language production of hair of Vasaman. Wow. And so these all of these things seem important, that it's these like very like crescendoy, powerful female vocalists. Yeah, very vocally oriented, vocally talented.

Yeah, I just love that it's like it's hard to define what disco is, but it's like this is it. But like, you know, I want to hear it. Oh, yeah, it's like pornography. I mean, it's also it's Gloria Gaynor singing like this emotionally plaintive song and her vocals are doing so much work on their own. And there's so much emotion in there. And then she has like all this energy and dance ability

provided by the instrumental part. Yeah. And then one of my other favorite disco songs is Don't Leave Me This Way. Oh, my God, I know. Which is like, how can you listen to that song and think that it's emotionally vacant? Right. Someday, Mike, someday we're going to skate together. A really another really important thing about this song. Check out how long it is.

Yeah, six minutes, 18 seconds. And this is on an album where the first three songs are continuously mixed. So the first 19 minutes of the album plays out like one song, which also shows how much the sort of the club sensibility is taking over actual recorded music. People lost their minds when this came out. What year is this from? This is 1974. Wow.

So that's early. That's earlier than I would have guessed for this sound being so complete. Yes. Gloria, I know. So good. And so this is really the period when like disco goes mainstream between 1974 and 1977, partly because this comes from a black gay scene. The main record labels are really not taking this seriously. But like, we don't know if we think black people and gay people can make music.

Hasn't been proved. History tells us. History shows us that white straight people are the best at music. So. And so like they're really leaving money on the table in that this is booming in the underground like clubs are opening up all over first New York and then all over the country. These clubs are popping up everywhere. The number you come across a lot is that between 1975 and 1977, 12,000 discos opened across the US.

Wow. Also, the only lesbian discos open in 1976. Wow. So it's actually really hard to find stories of what lesbians were doing in this time. It's actually really frustrating if you look through the books and like control F for lesbian stuff. They're actually like barely mentioned. So all we have is that there were lesbian discos. I feel like lesbians are like giant squids.

They're like this powerful, mysterious creature that like if you look at history and are like, where are the lesbians? The books are like, we don't know. I know the lesbians live deep in the ocean where no one can see them. It's like, I don't think that's true. I think that we can ask the lesbians what they're doing. So all of a sudden we're getting a real business model. And so it's profitable.

So suddenly it becomes worth being interested in. And so this is the thing. It's not just profitable. It's wildly profitable because most nightclubs are based around live music. And live music is really expensive and it's a huge hassle to organize, right? Like you can't have eight hours of a live band playing, right? You'd need like three or four bands and you'd have to coordinate their tours and you'd have to pay them and you need to do like sound checks. Doing this consistently would require a team of like a hundred people

to organize this much music, right? But so what the disco turn starts to do is it allows nightclubs to just hire one DJ. So Tony Smith talks about when he's I think he's only 17 or maybe 18. He gets a job in a gay nightclub called Barefoot Boys. And he starts DJing from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. every single night, seven nights a week. How is school going for him?

It's not clear. And they're also they're spending the days scouring record stores to get these like weird, you know, Jamaican import, B side, whatever. And DJs start forming clubs where they're like trade records with each other. Like some of them apparently are dicks, but there's also like the utopian ethos of disco also extends to DJs, like not necessarily seeing each other as competitors, but almost like collaborators. Here's five of my records that do really well.

Give me five of yours and I'll play them for a week. You play mine for a week and then we'll swap back. Everyone just wanted everyone else to do well. It was like Great British Bake Off. And clearly this would be so attractive from a financial perspective because you're maximizing your profits at the same time that you're minimizing your overhead. And Tony Smith talks about this, that like the fire department capacity,

you know, over the doors is like 369 people. And he's like, we started turning people away after about a thousand. So they're just like packing these clubs. And you know, you can sell people drinks for like seven, eight hours a night now. And you're only paying one DJ and they're not paying the DJs like particularly well. One of the reasons that we get like, you know, bootleg, like people start selling like bootleg mixtapes. One of the reasons why DJs start doing that

is because they're not making enough from performing seven nights a week. So they start recording their shows illegally and selling reel to reel tapes to like clubgoers for $40. Oh, wow. In like 1970s money. But people are so desperate for this. I mean, you can't get this music anywhere. Yeah, I'm sure it would be kind of a status symbol to own, actually. Oh, totally.

So as this is happening, it's all ramping up. Then we get you knew it was coming. 1977 Saturday Night Fever. Yeah. Boom. What do you remember about the actual movie? So it's basically about John Travolta is a young disenfranchised guy who feels like his life is going nowhere and he wants somebody to help him. You know, and he is the king of the disco club.

And that's kind of he's a big fish in a small pond. It's how the movie wants us to see him. Yeah. I mean, I didn't fully under. I remember watching this with my best friend and her stepmom, who was like, we're going to work Saturday Night Fever girls. It's fun. And I truly believe must have misremembered how incredibly dark this movie is. The cultural place that that movie has is something similar to like dirty dancing.

Yeah. It's a two hour long movie that resembles fucking mean streets or like taxi driver. A lot resembles dirty dancing. Yeah, we've taken this like BG. It's about disco. Yeah, it's amazing. The soundtrack is much more fun than the movie. Oh, yeah.

And it's still, I think, the second top selling soundtrack ever. Yeah. So I bet that like a lot of people saw Saturday Night Fever and we're like, whether I enjoyed that or not. Yeah. That was a distinct experience and one that I can't have again in the near future because the VCR won't be invented for a few years and won't be popularized until Jane Fonda releases her wonderful workout tape.

But then you buy the record and you listen to the record all the time and you remember the record. Did you know that it's based on a cover story from New York Magazine? I do know that. I also know that that cover story was faked. You knew that? I didn't know that when I started researching this. Yes, because I really am interested in journalistic hoaxes.

And so my understanding is that this young British writer had been commissioned to write a story about the disco scene and he was too shy to research it. And so he like basically made all this up. Yeah. Do you know what actually happened? Why he didn't write it? No, what happened? The club that they describe in Saturday Night Fever,

both the article and in the movie is a real club. It's called Odyssey. It's in Bay Ridge, which apparently is part of Brooklyn. And I guess he got a cab out there with a friend on some, you know, one in the morning on a Saturday Night kind of thing. He got there. The cab pulls up. There's a fight outside, like a rough fight. Guys are getting shoved around.

He opens the door to get out of the cab. The guys in the fight like get shoved into him or something and somebody pukes on his shoe. And so he is just like, oh, fuck this. He gets back in the cab and he's like, take me back to Manhattan. He never goes back to the club. He bases his entire story on one guy who he saw sort of like leaning nonchalantly

against the wall as this fight is going on. He's just like watching this fight. And he says that all of his descriptions of like a down and out guy who's like working at the paint store and like dancing at night, all of that stuff is based on like 60s mod kids that he knew in the north of England. Fascinating. But I want to read you an excerpt of the actual article

because like you, I am fascinated with journalistic fabrications. And as soon as I found out that it was fake, I was like, I have to read this immediately. Yeah. So this is a scene where the journalist is pretending to be like a fly on the wall at this Odyssey nightclub. Vincent was already at work on the floor. By now, the dancers had gathered in force, his troops, and he worked them like a quarterback, calling out plays.

He set the formations dictated every move. If a pattern grew ragged and disorder threatened, it was he who set things straight. Under his command, they unfurled the Odyssey walk, their own style of masked hustle for which they formed strict ranks, sweeping back and forth across the floor in perfect unity. Fifty bodies made one while Vincent barked out orders, crying one and two and one and tap and turn and one and tap.

They were like so many guardsmen on parade, a small battalion uniformed in floral shirts and tight flared pants. It's like, how do people not know this was fake? A guy is leading a unified dance of 50 people on a dance floor and they can hear him like counting time. Also, I mean, what jumps out at me is that everything you have said to me so far is that what this scene is about and what makes it appealing is that it's sort of open and queer.

And here it's being described as like, no, it's appealing because it is rigid and militaristic. And because one guy is in charge and he tells all the other guys what to do and they do it in perfect, synchronized fashion. And it's like, it's not a they're not Rockettes. Like that doesn't sound fine. And the whole idea of sort of a rock star dancer sort of goes against the disco ethos too, right?

Because it's very democratic. It's all about like the DJ. It's not really about like this one guy is an amazing dancer and like, let's all stop dancing to watch this guy. Yeah, it's a very interesting misreading, isn't it? I mean, you know, it's the kind of misreading that happens when you do literally no work and make something up out of your brain. But I mean, the real sort of legacy of Saturday Night Fever

is that both the article and the movie strip all of like the blackness and queerness out of the disco scene. They really do. They go so far out of their way in that movie to make sure you know that John Travolta is not gay. Yes. There's a scene where him and his friends beat up a gay couple, or at least harass a gay couple.

Yeah, that shows that they're not gay. Nothing like harassing gay people to show that you're not gay. You can tell I'm not gay by how I'm really mean to gay people. It's proof. There's also a scene where they're in a burger joint and one of John Travolta's friends calls David Bowie a half fag because he's bisexual or half fag. It manages to be offensive toward gay people,

bisexuals and David Bowie all at the same time. And so and also the New York Magazine article, it's a cover story. So there's this actually beautiful illustration on the cover that goes with the article. And the illustration is of a bunch of people in a nightclub with like big lapels and everything and they're 100 percent white. So the the image that people got from Saturday Night Fever was that discos were white and straight.

Like that was the overwhelming message that people got. A safe place for homophobes is what a disco tech is, really. Yes. Also, John Travolta did an interview. I think it was in 1980 and he says it like he learned all of his moves from watching Soul Train. He had two different private teachers that taught him how to dance and they were both like black dudes. So it's also just this like explicit sort of appropriation of like black

dancing styles and black music and black fashion trends. And it was so successful that we, you know, that I certainly grew up with no inkling that that had happened. Like this was so successfully coded, like not just white, but something that like cheesy white people do. Yes. Yes. And so this basically creates the crescendo of disco that will eventually produce the backlash. Yeah, that makes sense.

Within two years of Saturday Night Fever's release, the number of discos across the country triples. One of the most important things that happens is 200 radio stations across the country switch to disco only formats. Wow. There's a station that plays like Mellow Rock. It then switches about a year after Saturday Night Fever comes out to all disco and within a year, it's the number one radio station in New York. Wow. So all of these other radio stations around the country are seeing this

and are like cash, like let's do this. Like if we switch to disco, we're going to get all this money. So basically any time something is seen as a proven cash cow, it's going to over saturate the market. By the end of 1979, it's a four billion dollar a year industry. It actually reminds me of reality TV, where like we're earlier iterations of it gradually and like the real world existed for a long time. But like there was something about survivor. Yeah.

And what amazing ratings it got that suddenly made everyone, you know, post the first survivor be like, oh, yes. And then we see the backlash because suddenly it is everywhere. Yes, exactly. And people are like, wait a minute, like I do still like other things. This gets us to the next song I'm going to play for you. This is a living nightmare. Oh, God. This is emblematic of disco sort of over saturation at this point.

OK, I'm sending you an MP3 entitled Mystery Song. It's OK. Here it is. All right. All right. Three, two, one, go. Oh, I love this song. I love this. I listen to this all the time. This is the Star Wars. OK, I know this is terrible, but I love it. I listen to this all the time.

It's deeply embarrassing, but it's pretty good. I love it. I love it. This one, I assume, has the disco canteen abandoned in it and the little blaster noises. Oh, I don't know because I've never listened that far. I can only make it like a minute into it. I love it. But think about this. Think about you.

You've just seen this great new movie called A New Hope and you're like, oh, my God, I love this movie so much that I want to dance to it and like you can. Yes. So the point of this interlude, I guess, is that I really love the like crassest, most openly commodified crab crabs of the disco genre. Cash crabs is a great way to put like this next phase because what you get is this just huge overinflation of disco output between 1977 and 1979.

So there's disco versions of like jingle bells. An album called Sesame Street Fever, which is all of the Sesame Street songs turned into disco. I think I've seen that. It's actually pretty good. There's also Mickey Mouse disco. Oh, no. They start doing like disco versions of breakfast cereals,

which I don't even know what that means. How can a cereal become? And this is a great example of like when something that starts off is like underground culture for like marginalized populations. It's kind of like nothing good happens after 3 a.m. Nothing good happens after it's a cereal. Yeah. I mean, basically the two things that really piss people off.

Existing bands start making disco songs. Kiss infamously comes out with a disco song. Rod Stewart comes out with a disco song. Blondie does Heart of Glass, which everyone loves and is now like the iconic Blondie song. But like at the time, it's like, oh, they're selling out and doing disco. Right. Because they're like New York punk rockers, right? Yes.

And the second thing that really drives people crazy is because there's so much fucking disco coming out all the time, the quality just like completely tanks. Yeah. This is like slasher movies in the 80s. Right. Yeah. Anything that starts off as something that is like made cheaply and lovingly by people that are invested, like once it generates a certain amount of money, it's going to be very hard

to wade through all of the sort of cynical cash grabs. And then the genre will come to be seen by a lot of people as a cynical cash grab genre, which is really especially heartbreaking considering how it started. Another one of the historians that I interviewed, a guy named Gillian Frank, who wrote a great article about the anti-gay elements of the backlash and who also has a podcast, which is very good. He said that what explains a lot of this period is that finally

the big record labels got involved. But they were all convinced from day one that this was a fad. They thought it couldn't last. It wasn't a legitimate form of music. So they deliberately flooded the market. They're like, it's not real music. Make money while the getting is good. OK. That also kind of ended up creating the thing that they were worried about.

Right. Because that created the sense of overexposure of disco and the sense that like everyone has a disco album now and all the disco albums suck because there's like 10,000 of them. And because people make them in like three weeks. Yes. I also my favorite symbol of this is that some company. I don't know who puts out something called the disco Bible, which is a encyclopedia of songs based on their beats per minute. And so you can just look up like two songs have exactly the same tempo.

And so that makes them easier to mix. But what that does is, you know, the original DJs were doing like unexpected stuff. They were putting in the same to carry. Right. Yeah. Whereas now we just get this like total sameness of the music. They all have the same tempo. And then the DJs start just going from like disco song to disco song to disco song with the same tempos. And it doesn't seem to require any creativity.

Right. And it's like, yeah, a lot of the DJs were really crappy and they're playing crappy songs. And they're like, and here's disco duck. Yeah. Again. This is from Alice Eccles' book, Hot Stuff, which is a history of disco. In December, 1978, Andrew Holler in the novelist who had written with affection about the earliest gay discos, decried the terrible uniformity of beat in style that now characterized disco.

The music being cranked out for the mass market, fast, mechanical, monotonous, shallow stuff was he contended light years away from the old dark disco, which did not know it was disco. It was simply a song played in a room where we gathered to dance to the outside world. It looks like disco. But to people who were actually dancing in those clubs in the early 70s, it has none of the factors that made that nightlife special.

It doesn't have the heart. Yeah. This is also when we get fucking Studio 54. And this sort of very celebratized, very commodified version of disco, where even when Studio 54 was empty, they would make sure that there was a huge crowd outside. The exclusivity of Studio 54 was a huge thing that they wanted to project and promote. From all of that, like Tony Smith used to DJ there, it sounds like it actually was really cool on the inside.

It's just like for the rest of the country who's reading about this, there's all these clubs in midtown Manhattan that basically become just like celebrity VIP spaces. And like that's their main purpose. It's like mainstream, white, straight, rich American culture found this beautiful utopian subculture and colonized it and ruined it and sold it and like made everyone hate it. Like it's really like this evergreen colonization

and destruction of a subculture story. Totally. And my favorite example of this is Nile Rogers, who's in the band Sheik. He and his partner Bernard Evans aren't allowed into Studio 54, even though Studio 54 is playing their music. Oh, my God. Apparently in anger after this happens, they go back to Nile Rogers' apartment. They're just like jamming. It's like two in the morning. And they come up with a song about Studio 54 called Fuck You.

And then eventually as they keep playing with it and make it more commercial, it becomes Freak Out. And that's how we got that song. That's so good. Isn't that great? So, OK, here's a question. Were they not allowed into Studio 54 because, A, they were gay. Were they gay? Or is it a songwriting partner? Songwriting partner. OK.

Were they not allowed into Studio 54 because they were black? It doesn't seem like it. I also interviewed a guy named Eric Gonzaba, who I also interviewed for our Stonewall episode, who studies gay nightlife in New York and a bunch of other cities. And he was saying that this was the time late 70s where it kind of became cool to have like a black friend and like a gray friend. This was when we started to get this tokenization. OK. It was apparently actually quite diverse in Studio 54.

It was much more about whether or not you were a celebrity. Right. But then we also this is a time when the gay nightlife starts to get more stratified. So this is when we move from the sort of the early loft parties that if you're into disco, you can kind of get in to de facto white only gay spaces. And Gonzaba mentioned to me that like this has always been a problem. Like you don't want to idealize early gay nightlife.

Like they used to do this thing where they would ask you for ID. And then if you were black, they would tell you, oh, you need two forms of ID to get in. Black people are less likely to have ID in the first place and who the fuck has two forms of ID. Right. I think that most changes in history, whether they're good or bad, are not differences in kind. Most of them are differences in degree that, you know, exclusion was always a problem in the gay community, but it got worse.

Like going from, you know, a club being 25 percent black to being zero percent black. That's not a difference in kind, but it's still extremely significant. And then in the midst of this like total over exposure, total saturation, we get the backlash. This is when we finally circle back to disco demolition night and the DJ named Steve Dahl, who organizes disco demolition night. OK, he was like a shock jock rock DJ guy in late 1978, six months before disco demolition night.

He gets fired when his rock station switches to disco. And it takes him three months to find a new job. And apparently he has a lower salary at the new radio station. So he has been disenfranchised by disco. He's like a disco MRA. Yes, exactly. And so rather than like being transparent about the fact that like I have a petty personal squabble related to my income, he of course turns this into this entire

like disco sucks movement. So like disco essentially like moved into his house and like is taking care of his dog now. Yes, exactly. Yes. He calls it the dreaded musical disease. I mean, this is the thing is like he starts talking about disco in these coded racist and homophobic ways. First of all, second of all, in these completely grandiose ways, he's saying that like disco represents at one point he says is a cultural void

in this country. This is just dawning on me. But like cultural criticism is such a great way of just being racist. Oh, yeah. And it's like incredibly violent rhetoric that you are allowed to get away with by being like, I just have specific taste in songs. Totally. And this is also, I mean, so much of the rhetoric at the time was about this sort of zero sum casting of culture. And I mean, I was correct, right? In that every rock station that flips to disco is like one fewer rock stations.

Yeah. And there is a finite number of stations of radio stations in the country. And it is hard to get access to music in other ways. And it's expensive and like, yes, like these are we have to take that into account. Just like the scarcity of access to music that is something that is really difficult to imagine now. Yes. You see a lot of this language of like invasion and takeover. And it's funny because like disco didn't take over. It's just that the people who invest in live music decided that it wasn't worth the money anymore. I mean, I talked for a long time with Louis Manuel Garcia,

this historical researcher about this. I think a big part of it, and there's no way to prove this. But when I heard, I will survive for the first time. I was probably 13. And like after I heard that song for the first time, I listened to nothing else for like a month. Yeah. Little tiny gay kid had never kissed a boy, didn't know what the hell was going on. And I like deeply felt everything about that song, like the way it sounded, the words of it, the voice, everything. It really spoke to me. And so Louis Manuel said the same thing that like this music hits him on like a gut level.

And I do feel like a lot of this backlash is from the fact that this was one of the first times that mainstream music, mainstream culture was embracing a form of expression that didn't speak to straight men, the way that like Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones and Beatles do, right? It wasn't for them. Yeah. There are like, obviously, there are straight people that love I Will Survive, there are straight people that disco really resonated with for whatever reason. But sort of on the whole, you know, these messages of like, we are family, and I'm coming out, these are things that resonate really deeply with people living on the margins. Like these

statements of love and acceptance and self confidence and self love, it hits you when you're from one of those communities in a way that I don't think it really did on a large scale with straight people. And I think a lot of the backlash was like, well, this isn't, this isn't mine. Like this isn't for me. I don't, I don't see myself and I will survive. So like, fuck you, why, why is this being shoved down my throat? Why is it on cereal boxes? Why do I have to see it in movie soundtracks? Well, and it's not an accident that the first place I heard I Will Survive was Ally McBeal. That song certainly was a song that straight women cared about and was part of the sort of mainstream like white straight lady culture, I think in the United

States, at least in the 90s. So it also makes sense that like it could carry over in this like lust from its original meaning, commercialized way, because straight women are allowed to have feelings and are allowed to say I will survive. And you know, one of my broader arguments about music that's coded for white straight men is that those songs are very often about feelings too, but like you have to get really like harsh and like, and it makes you feel like you're like really brave and extreme for having your emotions and like, and that's pandering to the kind of masculinity that we have built like a wall around emotional self acceptance for white straight men in this country. And so yeah, I can see a lot of hostility towards disco,

because also you're not going to not feel it like I don't think that disco doesn't work on people. And that's why the hostility, I think that the people who were hostile to disco weren't like, this isn't making me feel feelings. They were like, this is making me feel feelings, and I don't like it. I mean, there's also, I mean, we talked about this with the John Lennon and Yoko Ono episode that there's I mean, there's a long history of anti blackness in rock generally. I didn't actually know this before I started reading about this, but apparently Prince was opening for the Rolling Stones in 1981 and he got booed off the stage. And also that Prince is, you know, is an androgynous performer, which is funny too,

because like Mick Jagger is allowed to do that quite. Yeah, that to me like speaks to the importance of race to this, right. And disco flipped the power structure of music in that rock music is all about the performer. You go there and you see like Robert Plant doing this amazing guitar solo, right? And you're glorifying this heroic individual figure. And yet what disco does, it's partly about the DJ, but it's really about the crowd. It's really about this feeling of collective joyful experience. I mean, again, you can't, you know, read into people's motives because nobody knows why they feel the things that they feel. But it does feel like there is this sort of revolution in music that it becomes about the audience rather than about the performer.

And so I want to be clear here as we talk about the deeper reasons why people didn't like disco. I just want to say for the record that it's actually fine for people not to like disco. I don't want to in any way imply that everyone who disliked disco is like somehow a Philistine or Square or racist or homophobic. I think saying that disco is objectively good is just as silly as saying that it's objectively bad. We don't choose the aesthetic preferences that we have, but we do choose the way that we talk about them. And I think that the real problem with this movement was not just that it was a bunch of people who didn't like disco. That's completely fine. But we need to be able to talk about those things without acting like they are objectively

less sophisticated than other forms of expression and that the people who like them are somehow worse than us. I also actually feel like this is some of the hostility towards jam band music too. Like people really strongly dislike jam bands and it's like, just don't see jam band. Don't go. It's fine. What can I tell you? So now we get to the part where we talk about was the backlash to disco explicitly anti-gay, explicitly racist? Like how much can you read into the motives of people who went to disco demolition night? And also how explicitly do people have to be describing their feelings in order to be having them? So one of the main arguments of people who were like, I was there,

I'm not homophobic. And I think to some level, this is true that a lot of the backlash to disco was partly, it was a backlash to like the Bee Gees. And they hated the sort of mall disco and they hated breakfast cereal disco. A lot of people genuinely didn't know that this started in this sort of gay black underground. I didn't know that. And I love disco. Right. What's important about this moment sort of after Saturday Night Fever when disco gets really big is there are actually a lot of popular articles that talk about disco as something that originated in the gay black underground. So there's infamously like a Newsweek article called the disco takeover that says what started a few years ago as all night dance music in African American and gay

clubs has moved into the American heartland. The Washington Post says disco began among the bayous and backfields of the cultural landscape, gay clubs and black clubs. You know about, you know gay men, they love hanging out in bayous. I mean, I, you know, not everybody reads these articles. It's not clear, you know, I mean, they're long articles, one or two sentences that mentions this. But if the opening sentences of both these articles have the exact same alarmist gist, yes, then like perhaps that is a rhetoric that people are absorbing casually elsewhere. Exactly. There's also, it's also important to note that this is the time when we get more just visibility for gay people, especially in disco music. This is when we get the village people.

And this is also when we get, are you familiar with Sylvester? Yes. What's important about Sylvester is that he's like designed in a lab to make straight white America uncomfortable, right? He's like a gay black man from San Francisco who like wears very like gender androgynous or like explicitly feminine clothing. He wears eye makeup. And he's unapologetic about it, right? Like he shows up on American Bandstand and he does this interview with Dick Clark where he's just like extremely flamboyant and like totally himself. And it's just like it's in people's living rooms. And so the visibility of these artists is increasing as this disco backlash is ramping up. And maybe that's a coincidence and maybe it's not. We also have at this time

the rise of the anti-gay movement. This is Anita Bryant. This is, you know, Harvey Milk gets assassinated in 1978 right in the middle of Disco's peak. There's just like anti-gay laws are just entirely the norm and have been basically unchallenged at this point. There's been no legal civil rights movement. Right. And there's, you know, they're still being passed, right? Like this is what Anita Bryant wants to do is to make it illegal for gay people to become teachers. This is another thing that straight white America is being exposed to for the first time like this extremely explicit movement against gay people. At the same time, they're seeing people like the village people in Sylvester on TV. So this is a backlash against gay rights

on some level for some percentage of people. It absolutely is. Yeah. You're like, I don't want these gay people on TV. Yes. What Gillian Frank told me and he spent all this time diving into the archives of like what Steve Dahl said and all of this Disco sucks stuff. Like he's read all of the sort of articles from the time talking about why people hated Disco. And what he said was, what you find is very explicit homophobia, but most of the racism is coded. He says, this is kind of a preview for a lot of the fights that we had in cities later about like school desegregation where nobody like said or very few people said, I don't want my kids going to school with black kids. Like people didn't say that. It was about like, oh, it's about local choice.

And it's about the distribution of resources. Like we're now in a place in America where all forms of prejudice, like we talk about everything and fucking code now. It's all dog souls now. But this was a time where black people fell into that category, but gay people didn't. But within that is the idea that gay people are basically perverts, right? Yes, exactly. And I feel like a lot of people who are like not overly hateful at that time would be like, well, you know, I don't think we should be murdering gay people or anything and they're citizens and stuff. And I even know gay people, but like, would I let them teach my children? Yes. Yeah. There's also this has totally been memory hold. This, this didn't come up in the other podcast

that I listened to or other like popular accounts that I read. But there's also a lot of weird, like misogynistic incel shit. So one of the main arguments of Steve Dahl, the guy who eventually organizes the disco demolition night, was that like gay men are coming to take your women away or something. Are they going to start podcasts with them? I guess there was this sense that women would go to discos explicitly to get away from straight men and explicitly to dance with gay men. I'm sure that they were and like take it as useful information. I know. So he actually, despite the fact that Saturday Night Fever goes so far out of its way to establish that John Travolta is straight, he is convinced that Tony Monero in that movie is

actually gay because he like does his hair. Oh my God. And that it's like, this is a threat to me because I'm being like forced to be metrosexual to compete because women don't want to dance with me anymore. Okay, well, and that's just an expression of how, you know, men know how much they're torturing women and how the hygienic and beauty standards to which women are held and like the amount of time that they're expected to spend on their appearance at a bare minimum is like exhausting and miserable. Yeah. It's like, great, like stop making women do that then and just like live your life, be free. And so this is from Tavia Nyong'o's article. The Disco Sucks Movement represented a kind of collective stage fright, an aggressive shyness that transmogrified

into a male demand for a return to the position of gazer rather than gazed upon. A demand based in the fear that the sexy male body might already be irrevocably on display. Okay, but what are the gay men going to do with all these women once they get them? Well, exactly. They're like, great, now we have all these women. I know. But you can see the same threads that we see now of sort of like the pacification of men, like this idea that men are sort of being forced to be women and like men can't even be men anymore. What if we stop abusing boy children and start being nice to them? Like what if they grow up into like nice adults? Right. What if masculinity dies because we're nice and we stop raising anyone assigned male at birth to be like emotionally shattered and mean?

Like what if we get a generation of nice people? Like what then? I think that's a real fear that people have and they wouldn't describe it that way, but that's how I would put it. There's also, I mean, there's a bunch of other arguments against disco. Like the gay left, like left socialists hate it because it's like capitalistic and like apolitical. So there's like essays written in these like obscure, far left-wing journals about how like disco is not collective enough or something. I mean, there is a certain amount of leftist politics that's run by like dudes who just enjoy gatekeeping their political fan culture. Yes. And I think a lot of the like fun thing is bad arguments could arguably be coming from that sector. This is from a New York Times article

called Discophobia that's published in 1979. The disco decade is one of glitter and gloss without substance, subtlety or more than surface sexuality. In the 1960s, Americans would have given anything for something as mindless and impersonal as disco, an escape hatch from the social responsibilities from shouting and shoving in the streets. Now we have found the answer. All we have to do is blow dry our protein enriched hair, anoint ourselves with musk oil, snort another line of cocaine, and turn up the volume. After the poetry of the Beatles comes the monotonous base pedal bombardment of Donna Summer. Fuck you. You know what's weird to me is that like 60s music, the best music of that time was also about euphoria, right? Like, you know, popular music and music

that is popular among youths will always be different than the music of the previous youths. Because youths can't share music once the previous youths are no longer used because it doesn't work that way. It's also this this fake thing that like rock music is somehow not commercial. Yeah, what the fuck dude? Like rock music is not glitter and gloss. Like, what are you talking about? The Rolling Stones did a Rice Krispies commercial in like 1964. It's this idea that everybody wants to believe that their own aesthetic preferences are somehow like objectively pure, like they match their principles objectively when it's like, no, everybody's music is dumb. And that their adolescences were better than other people's

adolescence. Totally. Which they're not. We're just sad that we're not adolescents anymore. So it's sort of, I mean, I think of the backlash against disco, everybody finds something in disco to hate. It's this perfect storm because disco is at once, it's sort of it's too black and it's too gay. But it's also it's too mainstream because it's on cereal boxes. And it's too underground because it started in these sort of nightclubs that I'm not familiar with. But then it's also it's too elitist because like Studio 54 is this bullshit that's only for celebrities. And the Christians think that it's too illicit because it's too sexual. But then like the actual like young kids that are having sex with each other think it's like kind of square because it's like,

you know, Sesame Street. So literally, it's like every segment of society finds a reason not to like disco. It's perfectly set up for everybody to turn on it on a dime. Yeah, it's everyone's whipping boy. Yes. The sentiment against disco also reminds me of something that we talked about a little bit in our Jessica Simpson episodes about how like, if something is being aggressively marketed to you as a youth demographic and you know that you're being pandered to, yeah, like you kind of have to rebel against the forces that are pushing that face. And unfortunately, you can't really take that out on the people who are doing the marketing because you can't see them and you don't know who they are. And so you take it out on the

artist. Yeah, that's very insightful. Thank you. One of the other things that people don't talk about that much is that this disco sucks movement was not just disco demolition night. So Steve Dahl started a club for people that hated disco that eventually had 10,000 members. The purpose of these clubs, this is fucked up. They would go to village people shows and they would stand outside and they would throw marshmallows at the people waiting in line to get in. What? And they would go to other shows and like throw peanuts at people. It was called like feeding the animals. So okay, so this is an excuse for organized homophobia. Like full on. Yeah. I do think there are people at disco demolition night who like genuinely didn't know and were like, I like

baseball. But then there's also people if you're in a fucking club that is dedicated to hating a form of music and throwing things at people waiting in line to go to a fucking show, like no, you get zero good faith forgiveness for me. Well, and it could be a group that's like, we're, we think that American radio has been taken over by a commercialized art form and we want to take back the airwaves for rock. It's like, yeah, that's, I get that. But like that's the goal of that is not to destroy someone else's good time and to like target them in a hateful way and kind of use their tastes as an excuse to scoop up a big group of people. Yeah. I also think that the thing of throwing marshmallows, it's sort of one of those things that like you have some plausible

deniability of like, oh, this isn't abusive. Like we're not throwing, you know, we're not throwing wrenches. We're not throwing bottles. They're just marshmallows. Yeah. When it's very obviously designed to humiliate another person and humiliating them in like an anti gay, like an explicitly anti gay way. Yeah. And it seems like the kind of thing to me that is specifically calibrated, that when somebody gets really mad at you and fights back and like punches you in the fucking face, you can be like, oh, I was doing was throwing marshmallows. There are some experienced bullies in that group. Totally. So this is from Alice Eccles' book. In Los Angeles, a radio station released a promotional anti disco record with songs like Disco's What I Hate, Disco Defocation,

and Death to Disco. Lord. In New York, radio listeners protested a rock radio DJ because he played disco singer Donna Summers, so called sex anthem Hot Stuff. This is the worst one. Two DJs at a Detroit station formed an anti disco vigilante group called Disco Ducks Clan. They were laying plans, which were later aborted to wear white sheets on stage at a disco that was switching back to rock. Oh my God. I mean, it's like it doesn't get much more explicit than that. Yeah, the subtext is the text. Yes. So if you were there that night and you're a good person, I believe you. If you remember one of these clubs and you say like I had no idea that it was racist and homophobic, I don't know, man. And so Steve Dahl, of course, participated in the same coded

shit. He gives an interview right before Disco demolition night, like trying to promote it. We're like, yeah, why do you hate disco so much? And he says, I hate the taste of pina coladas. I'm allergic to gold jewelry, so there's nothing there for me. You have to spend so much time blowdrying your hair. I just think it's a waste of energy. You don't have to blow dry your hair to like a funky beat. Fuck you, Steve. He also says this is also a nice little coded language thing. He says, I have a problem with the culture, not the music. Oh my God. Do you care to tell us what you mean by that, Steve? Can you just keep talking, Steve? What do you mean by the culture? So we finally get to the event. As I mentioned, it's disco demolition night. If you bring a

disco record, it's 98 cents to get in. I think it's ordinarily like four bucks. It does suggest a kind of a dedication to destroying personal property because like records aren't cheap. I know. I bet a lot of teens are like going to their sister's record collection. Yeah. And also, as you and listeners will know, I am an expert in sports, and there's also some baseball context here. Yeah. You're Mr. Sports. That's what we call you. Apparently, I have no idea why, but apparently baseball was also just like in the dumps at the time. And they were doing increasingly like desperate gimmicks to get fans to come. So infamously in 1974, Cleveland had 10 cent beer night. Oh boy. And then that turned into like basically a riot,

and they never did it again. Steve Dahl is friends with the son of the owner of the White Sox, who like also hates disco. And he's like, let's do this. This will be a fun thing. So they start cooking up this idea of having a disco demolition night. They advertise it around. Camiskey Park holds 50,000 people-ish. And depending on which source you read, 90,000 people show up. Good God. Or maybe 70,000, like some huge over capacity crowd shows up. And there's 15,000 people outside hanging out as the game is going on. So it's the White Sox versus the Detroit Tigers. And it's a doubleheader. Basically, the entire first game, like no one's paying attention to the game, and they start chanting, disco sucks. Disco sucks. When do they demolish disco? Like at between games?

Yes. Or when? Steve Dahl has a crate full of 50,000 disco records. Big crate. Steve Dahl comes out dressed in like military fatigues. He has like a army jacket sort of thing on and like an army helmet on. And so he has this giant crate of records that he puts in the middle of the field, and then he sets off a ton of fireworks around the crate. And then I guess there's just like a big ass explosion, like shards of records go everywhere. Wow. Because the fans are bored and they hate disco, I guess they've just been like whipping their disco records at the field all night. So like they've been throwing their disco records like Frisbee. So the field is just littered with like random disco albums. Are they throwing them at baseball players at all? Yeah, they have to stop

the game a couple times. Because people are getting disco records thrown. Yeah. Like it's just like you got like an eight track whip at your head. And then this is wild. After this explosion, it basically becomes a riot like 7,000 fans storm onto the field and start just like picking up disco records, breaking them over their knee. Somebody starts a bonfire. And so there's just like a giant fire in the middle of the baseball field and people are picking up records and throwing them on the fire and like dancing around this giant fire. Fans from outside storm in. I'm not sure how like they're like climbing the fences or like pushing against the chain link fences or whatever. They start climbing up and like threatening people in the luxury boxes and like

trying to get into the clubhouse. Wow. I guess the players are just like whisked out. All the players are like really afraid for their lives. They've given interviews after this. They're like, what the fuck is going on? Wow. And you know, the famous announcer, Harry Carey, who does the Chicago Cubs, he is for whatever reason doing the announcing that night. And he starts singing, take me out to the ball game over the speakers to try to quell the unrest. That's beautiful. That's like all you can think of to do. That isn't like just the most beautiful surreal vision. Like I want a montage of that. And then at 9 0 8 p.m. This is about 25 minutes after the start of the riot. Riot cops come on the field and like start arresting people.

This is where we get our broken hip. There's one guy who runs one of the vendors in the stadium. He breaks his hip in sort of the shoving matches that ensue. They make 37 arrests for like disrupting the peace or whatever. I think most people end up getting released the next day, but it's like a legit riot and like police crackdown since 1954. There's only been five instances where baseball teams have forfeited games and this is one of them. What are the other ones? One of them was the 10 cent beer night. There's one in 1995, apparently in Oakland where it was like novelty ball night. Like they'd give you a ball when you walked in and then everybody throws them on the field like 50,000 balls on the field, which like guys, what were you expecting? I think they're

so funny because it seems like something that a child would put together that if you give baseballs to like everyone who comes in to a baseball game that they're going to throw them on the baseball field. Also, the idea of like we're going to blow up a bunch of disco records and it's also team night. Yeah, explosions and teams. Yeah. And then we're going to go have them watch something that while beautiful is very long and boring and relies on the long stretches of time where nothing is happening. Yeah. But why were people so ready to like make a disturbance? Like what do you think about that? I love this. Gilly and Frank read all of the news coverage from the newspaper the next morning and this is so typical of like when sort of racist and homophobic things

happen. There's this leap by elite institutions to be like, it wasn't racist and homophobic like the thing that happened. And so almost immediately, the theory that forms is basically that like if you get 50,000 teenagers anywhere, they would have done this, which just isn't true. Also, that a lot of them were smoking pot. Oh, pot. The drug that makes you riot. Like if it was like free, eat an entire Vianetta box. Yeah. But like riots don't come from a bunch of stoned people. I don't know, Mike. It's Satan's lettuce. I think that really speaks to the idea that people had at the time. And really, I mean, some people still that like all illegal drugs because they're equally illegal, I guess, are equally extreme. And like, yeah, a bunch of

people smoke pot and they're going to have a huge riot, basically. I mean, I do think there is something interesting in the fact that the crowd was overwhelming young. Yeah. I think some of the teens were just like the crowds rushing out of the field. So like, I might as well, too. Right. Well, there are a lot of teenagers who just want to be part of a disturbance. And if a disturbance starts, they're going to get in on it. Yes. It's ironically the same feeling that you would be trying to get by dancing to disco music. Exactly. This is also immediately like literally within 24 hours. We have Steve Dahl saying that like, well, I didn't know it was homophobic and racist. And like, I would just like making a couple jokes on the radio. I didn't know. So

this is what he says. He actually says this to the Chicago Tribune on like the 40th anniversary of the night. But this is like very typical of his rhetoric. He says, we blew up disco records, made fun of the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever. It goes no deeper than that. Sometimes a stupid radio promotion is just a stupid radio promotion. It's like, I don't know, Steve. I think like he used to say the word disco with a lisp. He would say disco. Like, yeah, okay, you're joking. Officially, you're joking. But how many bigoted movements have used humor as a weapon, dude? Right. And again, gay people and black people understood it as racist and homophobic immediately. It's not clear that we should be judging things like this on their intention.

We should be judging them on their effect. Right. It's also interesting that in sort of mainstream reporting on this, there's not the sense generally that a marginalized community knows what it feels like to be marginalized and understands this experience more intimately than the person who throughout their entire life has had plausible deniability whenever they do something that is harmful to another community. Because the whole point of being the perpetrator of these kinds of behaviors is that you don't really think that much about them. Exactly. And it's kind of amazing that within basically a year, disco becomes this societal embarrassment. The disco radio station in Chicago, the day after disco demolition night, they play Donna Summer's last dance for 24 hours

straight. And then they turn off and turn on again as a top 40 rock station. Geez. And this begins a wave of disco stations across the country switching back to rock or switching to other formats. This is also the rise of oldies stations. That wasn't something that had really existed before. And because the whole disco sucks backlash showed the power of nostalgia as a marketing tool, I guess, because what people are expressing through that is like, I feel threatened because this thing that I love is no longer culturally ascendant. And so an easy way to get money from those people is to just make a little space for all the stuff that they like. And also the way that nostalgia can be weaponized. Yes. I mean, if you look at almost any reactionary,

authoritarian regime across the world right now, I will make things like they used to be is the message at the heart of all of them. And I don't think Steve Dahl obviously rises to that level. But he's like, he's like a tiny little taster of like how easy it is to turn nostalgia into a weapon. Teeny little demagogue studio 54 closes in 1980. Also, weren't they cooking their books the whole time too? Oh, yeah, they go to jail. Okay, because of the rise of disco, the Grammys had a disco category. And then it's so derided by 1980 that they cancel it. So best disco song only existed for one year. Do you want to know which song won it? Okay, so what something that came out in 1979? Is it love to love you, baby? Oh, no. Is it by Donna Summer?

It's by Gloria Gaynor. It's not. Is it I Will Survive? Yeah. Oh, well, that really feels right. Doesn't it? I know. Yeah, one song is going to be the only ever one best disco song. It's like, yeah, right? Yeah, we as a society, it's fine. We did something right. Yeah. And so that's it. That's the that's the death of disco before we were going to do a slight debunking. But for now, that's that's the death of disco. So is the debunking that disco didn't die because it was always in our hearts and it's still there. Blow on that ember and turn it into a raging disco inferno anytime we want. Stop spoiling my episodes. I can tell because I can feel disco in my heart. Yes, we will you are absolutely correct. But before we get there, okay, we have

to do a slight debunking of all of these nationwide anti disco movements. It turns out all of these were orchestrated. So what Alice Eccles finds out when she looks into this history is that radio stations figured out that having an anti disco club was a really good marketing opportunity. Interesting. There's like these consultants to radio stations that start doing focus groups and they find pitching yourself as an opposition to disco is a great way to get listeners and keep loyal listeners to keep them from switching stations because disco disco stations are of course your main competition. Wow. So you want to instill in people that disco is the sort of some sort of enemy of rock. So this is an excerpt from Alice Eccles' book. What he discovered through his

focus groups was that most people in these groups were fairly neutral about disco until one or two disco haters began ranting at which point the entire group would turn decisively anti disco. Wow. Abrams managed within a week to convince 60 radio stations to appeal to their base by launching anti disco campaigns. So it's like I mean it's like Coke versus Pepsi. Well and it's turning the feeling of I love rock into I hate disco. Exactly. I must protect my baby rock from disco. Yes. And one thing Gillian Frank mentioned to me was that like this was actually the beginning of identity and music being very closely linked. Most human beings like listening to many different genres of music. You're in different moods. Nobody is like I only listen to rock. But once you have

radio stations that are competing with each other and record labels that are competing with each other it makes a lot of sense to try to lock somebody into one genre because you're basically making them a loyal consumer. Right. It is Coke versus Pepsi. Oh my god. Taco Bell wants you only to eat Taco Bell. It was capitalism all along. Yes. I was waiting for you to say that. It's not just a clever saying. The only group that works out for are like record labels and especially radio stations. Yeah. Radio stations are very different incentives than record companies because they're not selling you music. They're selling you as a demographic to advertisers. And so another theory for why disco crashed during the late 1970s was that it turned out from

advertisers that because disco audiences tended to be less affluent radio advertisers didn't want disco stations. So a lot of the disco stations that switched back it wasn't necessarily because everybody hated disco all of a sudden. It was just a financial decision. Right. It's like where are the best profit margins and that's where the culture will go and then we'll be told that all of us spontaneously decided we didn't like the thing that makes less money now. Yeah. There's also if you look at the actual sales data disco records had been falling in sales for like months basically because of oversaturation that there was just too much disco on the market. People were getting really sick of it and like there's been dozens of other musical genres that have had

this sort of fad peak pretty steep decline. Like the Lombada. Gillian Frank compared it to the rise and then crash of boy bands in the 90s. There's some of that in there. Tony Smith, the DJ who we met earlier in the episode, he says that by 1979 he was already playing like New Wave and like synth stuff like early electro. And so the club scene has sort of already moved on. Right. And Donna Summer is putting out like I Feel Love which is like one of the first electro songs like things are already becoming obsessed with synthesizers and moving on from the sort of soaring strings. Right. What it turns out is that disco demolition night didn't kill disco. But what it did was it killed

the word disco. People just stopped calling it disco like they switched the name to dance music very quickly. The music itself basically just became the DNA of what we now know as like EDM and also especially rap, right? That like one of the first rap songs, Rapper's Delight, is a loop of a chic song, Good Times. And like all of the DJing techniques from disco became standard in rap songs. And there's a really famous DJ named Frankie Knuckles who used to DJ at a gay bath house. Would that be like Lower Tempo stuff? No, no, like real like bathhouses used to be dope. They would have like a place where you could have sex, a place where you could dance and they'd also like serve food and stuff. It's like why would you ever leave? I didn't know there was food.

Yeah. It starts like a fucking salad bar. It's amazing. After sort of a lot of the clubs start closing in New York City, he moves to Chicago. He starts DJing at a club called The Warehouse and he starts selling these bootleg tapes. And nobody really knows like what genre they are because the music is so weird and they start calling it warehouse music. And then eventually they shorten that to house music. And basically that becomes like Chicago, Detroit house music. So basically this is like Charlotte's Web, like disco died, but then it had all these babies. Yes. And we're Wilbur. This is from Alice Eccles' book. If disco died, it was not immediately obvious from the pop charts of the 1980s. Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince made music that many would argue was

disco in all but name. I would use the Star Wars metaphor for this, which is as Obi-Wan Kenobi says, if you strike me down now, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Yes. And like that happened, like we tried to kill disco. And in response, disco was like, I am so great that I will just become the bones of like most great pop music of the next decade. And you won't even call me disco because I am everything good. This is a quote from Tavia Nyong'o. The perceived failure of disco was really the failure of a form of disco that valorized the patriarchal, the heterosexual and the bourgeois, not the queer disco. As such, the failure was not so much a failure of queerness as a failure of the regressive attempts to contain queerness

and appropriate disco. Yes. So it's like, yeah, we got sick of disco, we hated disco, but like we hated like the least interesting kind of disco. It's like trying to capture a skunk to keep as a pet and then like it becomes domesticated and sad and lonely and it wastes away and you're like, there are no more skunks in the world because we found this one and it didn't do well in our care. And so the quote I wanted to end with, this is a lovely quote from this book, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, disco was a whole movement. People really felt that. They felt disappointed later on that the idealistic quality of it was being trampled in favor of money and celebrity. As much as disco was glitzy and certainly loved celebrity culture,

there was never a sense of it being driven by that. It was much more driven by an underground idea of unity. The manifesto was the music. Love is the message. Goosebumps. Love it. Yeah. And just in conclusion, if a piece of media makes you feel joy, maybe don't get mad about it. Yes. Let other people have their things. Don't join movements with the name clan in the title. And you will survive. Yeah. Yeah.