This post is part of a month-long Friday series promoting the Radical 80s Prom on 12/3. If you’re in New York on December 3rd, please come by the Bowery Poetry Club from 10PM-2AM and dance to some great 80s tunes, for a good cause. If you are coming, I’d love to get an RSVP from you on Facebook.
When people think of the culture wars, they think of abortion, gay rights, guns, or Sarah Palin shoving cookies on innocent children. But they don’t often think of what I think of as one of the most interesting cultural happenings in the past 40 years, the disco riot of 1979, which was a culmination of the baffling Disco Sucks movement of the late 70s. Not baffling in the sense that people were tired of disco, which dominated the airwaves, but baffling in how angry it was, how semi-organized. Enough, apparently, to kick off a riot. Cultural critics with more heft that I have analyzed the entire thing, looking over the way that Disco Sucks movement channeled of lot of straight white male resentment at women, people of color, and GLBT people—-groups that culturally dominated and defined disco, especially in its early days. Disco Sucks was supposed to be straight white men reclaiming the radio dial that was rightfully theirs.
If you think this reading is overwrought, I refer you to Roy Edroso, who discovered that culture warriors are still angry about disco flooding the airwaves with singing divas carefully elevated by gay DJs. In a rant that also implied that Roots is a horrible stain (presumably for overruling decades of post-Confederate propaganda suggesting slavery wasn’t so bad), Ed Driscoll flipped out on, of all things, Saturday Night Fever.
A minor example, also from the mid-1970s, was Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever. It was sold to the public as being an adaptation of a magazine article on the real-life exploits of disaffected Brooklyn youth, when it reality, it was basically Quadrophenia with better dance moves, updated clothes, and cockney accents replaced with Brooklynese:
His larger point seemed to be that the cultural touchstones of liberalism from the 70s were all lies—-lies I tell you!—-leading people down the wrong path towards thinking badly of Watergate and slavery, and thinking that even straight white dudes from Brooklyn could enjoy disco.
If that doesn’t convince you, think about this: how many of the anti-disco rioters grew older and crabbier, moved to the suburbs, and now consider themselves members or fans of the Tea Party? See what I mean?