This is one of my favorite opening scenes to a movie.
It’s from 1977’s “Saturday Night Fever.”
♪♪
Tony Manero’s walk, the BeeGees in the background,
the paint can, the double-stacked pizza,
this!
I love this scene because there is this weird sense of glamour to everything.
And that’s actually pretty reflective of the moment in history this film
tries to capture.
A moment in the '70s that left a lasting impact
on American sexuality,
especially with the American man,
and prompted a backlash.
♪♪
That beat is known as four-on-the-floor,
created by drummer Earl Young and it changed the way we danced.
And the genesis of the beat was,
according to Young in a BBC interview,
something kind of mundane.
It's just like a walkin’ move like this
[drum beat]
It’s a walkin’ feel.
[drum beat]
So, when the people hear that, you automatically wanna move something
and I said, well jeez, this is - this is, pretty cool.
So I said I’m gonna put this to a groove.
Now, here is Young playing with the Trammps on a classic disco hit
that you probably will recognize.
♪ Burn baby burn ♪
That’s the sound most people would categorize as being disco.
But the type of music people were dancing to in actual discos in the '70s
didn’t always fit that description.
Disco was a very eclectic sort of music.
It started out being a little bit of everything, and I think at its best
it still remains very, very unpredictable.
And it was those at the margins of society
who really defined the direction that disco would take.
The venues where disco flourished and first took root,
and the communities that fed into that
and that served as its dancers, as its music producers, as its DJs and so on
came directly out of especially Black and Brown Latinx communities that
we might describe now as queer.
Gay liberation in the '60s and '70s ,
and crucially the Stonewall Riots in 1969, were very important for disco.
Up until the Stonewall Riots, the survival strategy of queer
communities was to be as invisible as possible to not get noticed.
Despite the 1960s being characterized as the decade of free love
being gay was still illegal in most of the country.
Even in New York City, gay bars didn’t allow dancing between same-sex couples.
Enter the Stonewall Inn, opened in 1967.
Its clientele included drag queens who were often turned away
from other gay bars,
as well as runaways and homeless youth.
And gay men weren’t told that they couldn’t dance together.
In June 1969, Stonewall was raided by the police, and the people
who went there fought back.
The police were actually forced to take cover inside the bar,
where the angry mob locked them in and set the building on fire.
In the aftermath, the regulations that ruled New York City nightlife relaxed,
including the ban on same-sex dancing.
Gay nightlife in the city exploded, and everyone wanted to dance.
Most of the clubs that existed before Stonewall were really very underground
with one or two exceptions.
And after that, there was a much more comfortable gathering of people.
You were going to celebrate a kind of openness that really hadn’t
been possible before.
That’s where the disco DJ comes in.
Disco really gave birth to the modern DJ.
These guys were innovating with technology and music in a way
that hadn’t been done before.
And maybe for the first time,
they had devoted followings that followed them from club to club.
The DJs that were playing what became known as disco
were, I think, really adventurous.
You could go to a club and hear music that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else,
and hear it put together in a way that you wouldn’t hear in any other format.
Now, while disco was pretty much defined by gay men,
club owners, prominent DJs, producers, record promoters
as it evolved as a genre, it was the voice of female artists
- particularly women of color — who came to dominate the sound.
And these women were breaking with tradition.
♪ Mocha chocalata ya ya ♪
♪ Creole lady marmalade ♪
Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade” was an iconic '70s song,
unabashedly sexually aggressive and it was about a sex worker.
literally translates to:
Lady Marmalade happened and I’m really happy and we’re happy that it was
as big as it was.
And as big as it was in the clubs and in disco.
But that was really just, kind of, like the icing on the cake of
who we were as a group.
Four or five years before that track was released, the then-called
Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles traded in their matching dresses
and hairstyles for a look that was, well, a little more radical.
I think, at the time, for a girl group to shed
their wigs, shed their gowns, shed their
you know, kind of, that kind of look and become much more
assertive and more vocal,
political, social statements.
This was really a group of women who were making their own decisions
about the music they wanted to write and perform.
In her book “Hot Stuff,” Alice Echols discusses how female disco artists
like Labelle and others expanded the idea of what was socially acceptable for
women by singing about female sexual desire.
Labelle was early on the scene with tracks like
“Lady Marmalade” and later “Going Down Makes Me Shiver.”
♪ Going down to your river r-river m-makes me shiver ♪
Then came Donna Summer.
♪ [moaning] ♪
Although not quite literally, with her 17-minute-long moan-a-thon
“Love to Love You Baby.”
♪ Love to love you baby ♪
And Anita Ward’s 1979 hit “Ring My Bell”
wasn’t actually about ringing any literal bells -
a fact that escaped me when I was singing along to it as a kid.
♪ You can ring my bell, ring my bell♪
Now, Hendryx is quick to point out that Black women had been singing about
sex and sexuality for a while.
That was kind of a part of the, you know, the Black music
that sexual, sensual, energy and lyric was always, you know, “Let’s get it on.”
I don’t think it was something that we felt was a taboo.
It didn’t seem strange or odd to us.
But Echols says that the specific focus on female pleasure was something new.
The female orgasm became a central theme in a lot of songs,
as well as its own sort of instrument - as it was in “Love to Love You Baby.”
It was its own rebuff to the sort of hypermasculinity of rock music
that focused on male pleasure.
♪ I’m gonna give you my love. Want a whole lotta love ♪
But the explosion of female pleasure, didn’t really sit well with all the critics.
I think the biggest backlash that we received was “Lady Marmalade”
because it was everywhere.
And I think some people who were, I guess,
much more conservative in their musical tastes or their outlook on life
took exception with the song.
Part of the exception to the music was part of a bigger exception
to the spread of disco culture - and what it represented.
Gay nightlife was becoming increasingly cool among celebrities and trendsetters.
In a column in 1975, Aletti estimated that 2,000 discos had sprung up
across the United States, with two or three hundred in New York alone.
And that was even before the symbol of disco debauchery, “Studio 54,”
opened its doors, and “Saturday Night Fever”
broke box office records.
Gay clubs, I think, really changed the whole way people went out dancing.
And they did represent a kind of freedom
to the gay people that went there.
And a lot of straight people enjoyed
going there for the experience
of sort of taking part in this liberation.
Part of it has to do with the
ability to express yourself,
and if you can be in a community
where you can express yourself truly
then I think people are gonna look for it and go to it and
want to be there.
The spread of disco didn’t just
bring with it music and dancing,
it also brought the evolution of
sexual expression and fashion for both gay and straight men.
It’s especially interesting to look at how disco transformed or at least
tried to transform what it meant to be a man in the 1970s.
In the sense that you should be wearing clothes that were much more fitted
to the body, much more revealing of the body,
that you should be in shape,
and it also assumed that you should know how to dance.
This became part of what
Dennis Altman dubbed in his 1982 book, “The Homosexualization of America.”
With the greatest example of this being the mainstreaming of these guys:
♪♪
♪ It’s fun to stay at the YMCA ♪
By the way, they weren’t even marketed as a gay group.
Their own label, Casablanca Records, made it clear that they were for
clueless straight Americans.
Navy officials were so oblivious that they actually allowed the video for
“In The Navy” to be filmed on one of their warships
and they even used it in one of their recruiting videos.
But despite mainstream America’s embrace of the Village People,
not everyone was down with how disco was changing
and challenging American masculinity.
If you compare this to the way that other musical genres in the ‘70s
presented masculinity - so the rock masculinity or country music masculinity -
those that were coming out of the disco scene really stood in stark relief.
A lot of people resented exactly that impact.
The sense that gay culture was sneaking out into
the mainstream and taking over on some level.
And this really came to a head in 1979.
That’s when Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl organized
Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, not long after being fired when
the station he worked for switched to a disco format.
Dahl had this to say when he was asked by news outlets what he had against disco.
Well, the first thing I have against it is that I can never find a white three-piece
suit that fits me off the rack.
So ... I hate the taste of piña coladas,
I don’t - I’m allergic to gold jewlery, so there’s nothing there for me.
You can see now in hindsight a real concerted effort by journalists,
radio personalities and so on to vilify disco ahead of this crash.
The disco backlash wasn’t just one thing. It was a lot of things coming together.
Notably there was a crash in disco sales, in the sale of disco recordings -
the bubble popped, so to speak.
But in addition to the backlash and dropping record sales, there was also
the impact of the AIDS epidemic, especially on the gay community
and the gay community that was going to the clubs.
I think the impact that AIDS had on the key audience
for a lot of clubs was devastating.
You can’t keep going when a lot of your audience is dying.
A lot of the people who were involved in opening up society, we lost
a lot of those people.
But disco’s legacy lives on.
Not just through its impact on dance music and club culture,
but in the ways that it redefined what it meant to be gay,
what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to be a man,
and what sex in America was all about.
Disco never really died. Disco lived on and went underground
back into the queer and especially Black and Latinx communities
from which it arose. And it turned into things like
garage in New York. It turned into house in Chicago.
Disco turned into synth-pop and Eurodisco and all sorts of other things in Europe.
Disco had an afterlife in many other parts of the world, even after it
was supposedly dead.
Madonna came up right after this whole death of disco.
And if Madonna wasn’t disco, I don’t know what is.
OK, I can’t be the only one who
really wants to dance right now,
right?
Let us know what your favorite songs
are from the era and don’t forget to
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and while you’re at it let us know
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