ABSTRACT
The disco explosion that swept through the recording industry in 1978 was a true musical and cultural phenomenon symbolized by the unprecedented success of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, an album whose international sales of 30 million copies made it the best-selling record in history at that time. Disco’s popularity ensured that it was instantly polarizing, especially to numerous rock fans who saw disco’s orchestrated and synthesized style of dance music as the antithesis to rock music’s ‘naturalized’ mode of authentic expression. The four music critics assembled to discuss disco’s “musical question” by the Chicago-based “independent socialist newspaper” In These Times highlight the tensions surrounding the movement, from its unabashed commercialism to its roots in urban gay audiences. Not long after this article was published, the vilification of disco reached an apex in July 1979 when Chicago rock radio DJ Steve Dahl organized a “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park as part of a between-game exhibition stunt for a White Sox baseball doubleheader. With nearly 50,000 frenzied fans looking on, Dahl exploded a pile of disco records, inciting the crowd to swarm the field to thundering chants of “disco sucks.” Years later, disco has assumed a more privileged place in popular music history. The notorious exploits of nightclubs like Studio 54 have passed into myth as one of the last bastions of pre-AIDS-awareness hedonistic abandon and disco has been reevaluated as a pivotal moment in both the history of electronic dance music and the emergence of a significant gay presence in American culture.1
