"
Disco Sucks!" is one of the
rallying cries of musically
closed minded people everywhere, yesterday and today. This phrase is heard mainly from
rednecks,
hair metal freaks,
bigots, and various other flavors of uptight
white people.
In 1978, Chicago's WLUP-FM DJ Steve Dahl got scared that disco was going to knock rock'n'roll right off the airwaves with its popularity. Dahl, being a rock DJ and not much liking disco, didn't want to see this happen. He used airtime during his morning show to popularize the aforementioned phrase, and within a few months the whole country knew it. There were Disco Sucks! T-Shirts, Disco Sucks! bumper stickers, and even a Disco Sucks! album; the meme had gone national in a big way.
Even if it was about the music for Dahl (who once characterized all disco as "the same song with different lyrics"), it wasn't for most of the rest of Disco Sucks! America. To them, it was about fear. Fear that disco, with its beginnings in the inner-city gay and black underground, was going to corrupt their white washed utopia of a country. Fear that their very own children might go out and get down with those vile, demonic black and/or gay people. When it was pointed out to them that they could protest the disco movement with a movement of their very own, they did, and with a vengance.
By 1979, the movement had built up a full head of steam, and Dahl decided it'd be good to do something for all of the Chicagoans who had helped him spread the word. His radio station would throw a full-scale "Disco Sucks!" event (to be called Disco Demolition Night, as the term "suck" was considered a profanity), in between the games of a Chicago White Sox vs. Detroit Tigers doubleheader. Listeners were asked to bring their unwanted disco records, to be burnt in a fireworks display. The crowd brought the records, but most of them didn't end up in the display, they ended being thrown all over the field, at players and others. There were riots in the crowd too, and fires. The police had to break it up, and the Sox had to forfeit the second game. Too much ignorance in too little space.
But that was many years ago. People all know better than that now, right? Wrong. I hear the sentiment "Disco Sucks!" in response to electronic dance music at least once a month. There are still people that don't understand (and therefore fear) participatory music. There are still people who fear gays, minorities, and freaks wearing phat pants. In many places -- for instance, Kansas -- it's still a "Disco Sucks!" world.
Sigh. It's like nobody's learned anything over the past twenty-odd years. Everclear has anti-disco lyrics in a song (AM Radio) that came out less than two years ago. Some folks still seem to think that dance music is going to rise up and crush rock. It's utterly insane.
Let me make it perfectly clear for everybody. Different people like different music. This is okay. Some people enjoy dancing to it, and some people like to concentrate and listen. This is also okay. Not everybody looks alike and does the same things in bed. Even this is okay. What is not okay is saying someone "sucks" because they happen to hold a different opinion on one of these matters than yourself. Make sense? Alright then, lets all go enjoy whatever music we happen to like in peace!