A Change Is Gonna Come by Craig Werner

Author:Craig Werner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

38

Disco Sucks

On July 12, 1979, straight America took its revenge. Between games of a doubleheader at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, the throng gathered in support of DJ Steve Dahl’s antidisco crusade joined in a thunderous chant of “Disco sucks!” In center field, Dahl approached a wooden box overflowing with disco records doused in lighter fluid. As the crowd cheered, Dahl set the altar ablaze, igniting a drunken rampage that trashed the field and resulted in the cancellation of the second game.

Far from an anomaly, the Comiskey Park riot gave voice to the ugliest undertones of the antidisco sentiment that united segments of the population with almost nothing else in common. By the time the craze had faded in the early eighties, it began to seem as if everyone hated disco. (Which raised the interesting question of how the Saturday Night Fever sound track had managed to sell twenty-five million copies.) At one extreme, political progressives, of a distinctly puritanical sort, condemned disco as an expression of commodity culture, capitalism at its worst. Even though disco was the only popular music other than country in which women played a large role, many feminists felt that disco reduced women to sexual playthings. Easily confirmed reports of women bartering sex for drugs or admission to clubs certainly buttressed the feminist case.

Although antidisco feeling in black communities rarely matched the ferocity displayed at Comiskey Park, many doubted its musical and/or moral value. Taking a stand against what he labeled “sex-rock,” Jesse Jackson condemned disco as “garbage and pollution which is corrupting the minds and morals of our youth.” Threatening a boycott against records and distributors, Jackson’s Operation PUSH convened several conferences on the evils of disco. Less heated and a good deal less puritanical than Jackson, George Clinton simply found the standardized late disco rhythm boring. “Nothing get on your nerves more than some rhythm that’s the same thing over and over again,” commented the master of polyrhythms. “It’s like makin’ love with one stroke. You can fax that in.” By the time the Rolling Stones cashed in with their disco minstrel classic “Miss You”—which comes complete with the obligatory, if ironic, stereotyping of black and Puerto Rican women as objects of sexual taboo—many black listeners had turned away from disco and picked up on the new generation of funk bands that remembered how to get up for the downstroke.

Even as funk founder James Brown marketed himself as the “original disco man,” groups such as the Ohio Players (“I Wanna Be Free,” “Fire”), the Isley Brothers (“Harvest for the World,” “Take It to the Next Phase”), Brass Construction (“Movin’”), the Bar-Kays (“Cozy,” “Holy Ghost”), Slave (“Slide”), and War (“The World Is a Ghetto,” “Cinco de Mayo,” “Low Rider”) kept the faith with the Godfather’s vision of socially aware polyrhythmic complexity. Carrying on Jimi Hendrix’s tradition of guitar-driven rock and soul, the Isley Brothers rallied their listeners to “Fight the Power.” While the actual musicians faded further and further away into the shadows of the disco

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