Those who got sick were the ones who had no rhythm and couldn't dance..............
We scored our chicks on the dance floor while you rock-n-rollers needed drugs to get 'em.
Lets see you dance to "in a gadda da vida" or "Purple Haze"........
Posted on 05/17/2012 10:21:14 AM PDT by ConservativeStatement
To brighten up your day, a guest on MSNBC just said (indirect quote) "I have never seen a movement in America to quiet a musical genre as the anti-disco fever which was a slap to Donna Summer. It is similar to today's marriage equality: get back in the closet."
He said this while an image of Donna Summer was on the screen. Liberals have absolutely no shame.
In their 20s, the Beatles were ridiculing the idea of playing rock songs their whole life and went off into “Moms and Dads” music which certainly afforded them a paycheck as already established acts including Sinatra could finally record versions of their material.
“I find that hard to believe. People must all be real fools, then, because Disco was ‘popular’ or it wouldn’t have been on the charts so much.”
It’s not that people were fools, nor that it wasn’t actually as popular as it was. Disco was no mirage. You can’t fake something that big. But I must insist that it was a sort of madness. You can’t very well explain away something that big having that big a backlash against it and disappearing that quickly. It’s like every other fad, in that it was sudden, intense, and fleeting. Fads, to me, are a sort of mass madness.
Not that it really disappeared, as I said. Disco went on under different names, from new wave to pop to r&b to hip-hop.
“Meanwhile, ‘rock’ i.e. heavy metal and all that noisy twangy stuff, is/was really mostly underground fringe stuff. Lots of people talk about it and how they love it, but truth - didn’t make the Top 40 that much.”
In my post I likened the hard stuff, which was what I assume the people blowing up disco records in stadiums were acting in defense of, also by nature have a limited appeal. The anti-hair metal revolt of the early nineties was as virulent in many ways as the revolt against disco.
Also, you are right to suggest it isn’t as often in the Top 40. There’s a reason we reserve the term “pop” for lighter fair. However, don’t undersell the power of hard rock. Hair metal ruled the charts for a time, along with Madonna, George Michael, Whitney Houston, etc. The best selling album of the Nielsen soundscan era, which began in 1991, is Metallica’s untitled so-called “black album.”
I might be willing to stipulate that disco is relatively more comfortable in the mainstream than metal. It seems to have a bit wider appeal, though it can fly off to the unlistenable extremes of 10 minute funky base solos and such. Still, that’s not really the point. The point is that it was not fit to be as dominant as people thought it to be in ‘77. That was a fad, and people got sick of it as they should.
“BTW, who the hell are the Ramones? It keeps coming up on the Internet but I have no clue what the hell they ever did that ever got played. Fringe. Overstated. That and ‘the Smiths’. Internet legends.”
They aren’t internet legends, exactly. What happened there, I think, is that the sort of people who listened to punk and emo back in the day were the same sort of people likely to turn up in positions to influence popular taste later in life. They pick songs to be in movies and on tv, write in Rolling Stone and other rags, program classic rock radio stations, blog, etc. So the youth of today get a skewed view of yesterday.
I personally picked the Ramones as an example only because, along with heavy metal as exemplified by Black Sabbath, punk was a notable—though not very popular—hard alternative subgenre to disco. You’ll find them played on the radio today, and they aren’t so obscure that most people wouldn’t know who I was talking about, even if they were nobodies relative to Donna Summer.
Depends when you were born. The Gen-X are the baby "busters" born in-between the Baby Boom and the increase in birthrates as the Baby Boomers began to have kids and settle down in the 1970s.
And while people may have particular favored tastes and ideologies, there was at least at the time a shared experience in the collective consciousness of what people were often exposed to (even if it drove them nuts then/now).
The shared experience in America is becoming a thing of the past. The markets are too fragmented (and not just by niche marketing, but the ability to use the internet to shape your own individual experience with things from the past and contemporary culture). Too many people have unplugged from the MSM for them to sway the overwhelming majority much these days. Most conservatives outright distrust the media. Big labels have seen their market share go down (blamed on downloading but also withered to untracked used music sales as well as untracked smaller label sales).
And while your parents were alive during the beginning of rock and roll, they did not experience the first wave first hand as it was the music of bars and juke joints for adults in 1948-1952. Lieber and Stohler dumbed it down for kids and made it formula.
“it is backlash against a vapid superficial cocaine fueled pop music field”
Superficial, yes, but so’s the rest of rock and roll, almost exclusively. I can discern gradations in quality of musicianship and poetry, but not so as to make it much different than comparing bologna to ham lunchables. It’s all the same crap, mostly. But what fun crap, sometimes.
“I also have no idea how anyone can make anything but a superficial comparison between hip-hop/rap and disco. Night and day.”
You ignore the fact that quite a lot of hip-hop is people talking/singing over old disco recordings.
That was the trend even in the 1950s once rock and roll broke wide.
Keep A Knockin' went back to the 1920s (and was later covered by Louis Jordon in the 1940s).
Blueberry Hill (1940), Blue Moon (1934), et al.
It was about publishing rights, not creativity.
Lightnin' Hopkins never charted either but the majority of your British rockers (and quite a few of your Chess blues musicians) cited him as a prime influence (including Pete Townsend and Ringo Starr). Ringo almost moved to Houston he was such a fan, the paperwork wore him out and 3 months later he was in the Beatles.
Think that maybe the members of Pearl Jam, U2, REM, and Red Hot Chili Peppers owned Ramones records and saw them in concert when they were growing up?
Time was when bands like Van Halen opened for the Ramones.
Those who got sick were the ones who had no rhythm and couldn't dance..............
We scored our chicks on the dance floor while you rock-n-rollers needed drugs to get 'em.
Lets see you dance to "in a gadda da vida" or "Purple Haze"........
“The ultimate insult (since people DO recognize that rock and roll and disco are different beasts) was enshrining disco acts in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Whatever. It doesn’t matter on the sense of scale of global events, but it is still an insult to the rock acts that are still kept out of induction.”
I do believe disco came from rock, or more specifically from funk which in turn came from rock, with salsa and probably various other hispanic forms thrown in. Here’s where it gets tricky, though. Because you can draw a pretty neat Euclidian box around rock from the mid-50s to the British invasion or a little before. It’s easy, country and western and blues or r&b played harder and faster so teens could dance to it.
But what do you do with folk, which pulled in an earlier form and mixed the rock with it?
What about what we generally refer to as “pop,” which changes from Beatles-rock to disco to hip-hop depending on the time, but often isn’t defined by anything in particular and could just as easily have been recorded by a Pat Boone or even Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, for that matter?
What about soul, which mixed r&b with gospel? Is that still rock, or something else?
What about jazz fusion, and all the jazz and blues-influenced hybrids like Pink Floyd or Steely Dan?
Heavy metal seems easy, in that it’s a simple backtrack to roots blues amped up until your ears bleed. Some of it, though, loses its danceability, and that seems to defeat the whole purpose of rock in the first place.
It’s confusing, but I’m of a mind that, okay, you can either restrict yourself to something that resembles the main line stretching from Elvis to the future, or you can accept anything that has an element of rock, even a sliver of it, so long as you don’t care what’s piled on top of it. That way, when one person’s confused at the inclusion of Sam Cooke, another Madonna or the Beastie Boys, yet another K.C. and the Sunshine Band, eventually you’ll get people scratching their brows at Slayer, if that hasn’t already happened—I honestly wouldn’t know, you can tell them all to take the good with the bad.
“The hippies were too old to really be the backbone of the disco movement. They were different people.”
I don’t want to get anymore into the fuzzy math of generations. Suffice it to say that mostly they were different, and ten years or so is long enough, if not to be a new generation, at least to be at different poles of the generation. But I could imagine, perhaps, a 15 year-old in ‘69, old enough to appreciate the moon landing and Woodstock, just out of college at 23 in ‘77, cruising the clubs to the tune of Donna Summer.
“KISS started out glam anyway.
‘Beth’ certainly wasn’t rock and roll.”
Beth wasn’t glam, either. It was the ballad that eventually all usually hard rocking glam acts would be expected to record, from Def Leppard to Poison to Bon Jovi. As I recall eventually bands followed the very strict pattern of breaking out with a rocker then releasing the “girlfriend song” which brought the girls, who in turn brought more boys.
” Link Wray”
Ah! He is the reason why I learned how to play, and made my living as a musician! “Rumble!”
The one legit Disco band was Chic....Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson were some of the best musicians around, period.
“Bands like the Ramones and the Smiths may not have been much for ‘chart hits’ but that should never be the barometer for ‘quality’ or mass appeal.”
It has something to do with mass appeal, in that sometimes there’s a reason music appeals only to a limited audience. That wouldn’t affect, quality, no. Part of the point of making rock music is to appeal to a mass audience, but not the whole. If your aim is to appeal to nerds crying into their pillows or coked-out sweaty dancers in dank clubs, well, the proof of your pudding is in how those limited audiences eat it.
This is not to say, of course, that all music that fails to gain popularity failed on its merits. It very well could be popular, given a chance, as has been proved countless times by surpise comebacks. Like I said, by now the Ramones are rather well known and still get plenty of airplay, even if they weren’t tearing up the charts in the 70s.
“Lightnin’ Hopkins never charted either but the majority of your British rockers...Think that maybe the members of Pearl Jam, U2, REM, and Red Hot Chili Peppers owned Ramones records and saw them in concert when they were growing up?”
That’s another thing, in addition to them influencing nerdy rock critics and movie directors and producers. The relatively obscure band Velvet Underground released something that is now widely known now as “the album that launched a thousand bands.” I might think this is somewhat misguided, as surely Elvis, the Beatles and others influenced many, many more musicians than Velvet Underground. But there’s something to be said for the fact that so many people cite them as an inspiration, compared to how well they were known to the general public.
The original poster’s point was something slightly different, though. It wasn’t that the Ramones and the Smiths weren’t influential, people seem to pretend they were more popular than they actually were. And this is undeniable, history does get rewritten as we tend to forget the bigness of disco in emphasizing the influence of punk in the 70s, just as we’ve no doubt already started downplaying the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys in my teenage years in favor of whoever’s more palatable to the hipsters.
Excuse me what is MSNBC?
They use other types, too. It really doesn’t matter what they sample; that doesn’t make it the same type of thing.
(BTW, I can appreciate some hip-hop, but I can’t take it forever because it all seems exactly the same, same beat, same monotone. Rap is worse because it’s more intense and violent.)
Oh you’re correct. It’s just that it didn’t define them as much.
My sister, who has always been hip (to this day), was into discos at the formative age. She transitioned pretty well to ‘80s rad stuff as a post-college young adult, but it really isn’t her defining period.
“it didn’t define them as much... it really isn’t her defining period”
Then there are people who sorta tune out during what is supposed to be their formative years, and therefore are defined more by what happened in other generations. This doesn’t work for current events and such, but for entertainment surely. It’s very common, for instance, to grow up with music, movies, tv and books from 20 years ago, since people from 20 years ago are now in charge of music, movies, tv, and books and their nostalgia rubs off on you.
Take me, again, who feels a certain nostalgia for stuff from the ages of about 5 to 14, but who tuned out of what was contemporarily popular as a teenager in favor of older stuff. If ever I go to a high school reunion they’ll probably be playing Eminem and Creed, or somesuch godawful crud, instead of what I listened to when I was in high school.
Such are the vagaries of generationhood.
LOL. I just grew up loving music. I’m very eclectic and was sort of trained that way. I was indeed influenced by the elder generation, both pop culture (Happy Days, L&S, and the blatant influence I could see in the ‘80s from the ‘50s including retro music) and directly by my parents. They were listening and singing in the car all the time, as well as playing music when working at home. Mostly early ‘50s-type pop and also REAL musicals (not the R-rated garbage post-’60s). Also watching old movies influences that, which we did as much as possible in the limited-TV then.
Then there was my sister, my idol. She was always into pop music, so ended up a disco queen in the era. I was always in her room and she was always playing the radio. My brother didn’t seem to hang around as much so he didn’t get to me as much - he had Aerosmith and the like around, but I didn’t hear it much because he wasn’t around.
When I was living through the ‘80s it was a double life. I was pretty much emblematic of the era, dressed/hair pretty radical without being genuine punk, listened to most of the regular music, but right in high school I - as well as a shocking number of my classmates - was listening to the local oldies station (i.e., rock era ‘50s-’60s) and buying latter-day tapes of the old stand-bys. We sang and parodied old songs in class and working at the theater.
Sorry to go on. I do love nostalgia! Even for history I was never part of.
Lol. You have an educated palate. There really ARE people who think that THEIR genre of pop music is the best music ever. Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Bach and such put them to sleep. They couldn't FATHOM music that puts them to sleep as CLASSIC a la da Vinci.
So, YES, the comparison is fair because people HAVE to figure out SOMEDAY what "classic" really means...not "classic rock" either. Folks OUGHT to know what "high art" really is.
My 2 cents.
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