ESSENTIAL QUESTION
How did Disco relate to the sentiments and social movements of the 1970s?
OVERVIEW
The rise of Disco in the 1970s had an enormous cultural impact on the American audience. It was the music they heard on the radio, the music they danced to. It affected fashion. It affected club culture. It even affected film.
Disco's roots were multiple. It had connections to R&B and Funk, but it was also born out of the urban gay culture in New York City. But no matter its roots, it quickly moved into the mainstream with a string of best-selling hits by artists from Donna Summer to the Village People. The phenomenally successful 1977 film Saturday Night Fevertook Disco's commercial popularity to surprising heights. The film’s soundtrack produced numerous Top 10 hits and the album sold over 15 million copies.
The vibrant sound and energetic dance moves of Disco provided young people with an escape from what film critic Roger Ebert called “the general depression and drabness of the political and musical atmosphere of the seventies.” The economic prosperity and countercultural exuberance of the 1960s had faded. By the mid-1970s, crime rates soared and the combined “Misery Index” of unemployment and inflation reached new highs.
With that as the backdrop, the lure of Disco proved particularly powerful for working-class youth. AsThe New Yorker’s Pauline Kael noted in her 1977 review of Saturday Night Fever, the film and Disco itself centered on “something deeply romantic: the need to move, to dance, and the need to be who you’d like to be. Nirvana is the dance; when the music stops, you return to being ordinary.”
But almost as powerful as the embrace of Disco was the backlash against it. For those who grew up with three-minute songs, bands playing instruments, and the raw aesthetic of early Rock and Roll, Disco was part of a new problem. Ultimately, Disco's rise helped to foster the fragmentation of the 1970s and changed the shape of popular music culture.
PROCEDURE:
- What is Newsweek? What does the title of the magazine suggest about what it covers?
- What does this cover suggest about the popularity of Disco? Was it perhaps more than just a style of music? How would you describe the mood of the cover?
2. Read the following quote:
Everyone here knows that 1979 will go down in history as the year Disco became the biggest thing in pop since Beatlemania and possibly since the birth of rock & roll.”
-- Music critic Stephen Holden, quoted in Ralph Giordano, Social Dancing in America, 2007
3. Based on the quote, and what you know about music, as well as history, answer the questions that follow:
- What is a discotheque? What do people do at a discotheque?
- Why might a particular style of music come to be known as “Disco”? What does the name imply about the purpose of the music?
- What does the quote say about how popular Disco was in 1979?
- Under what kinds of historical circumstances do you think people would be drawn to music that makes them want to dance? Times of prosperity? Times of economic hardship?
4. Please view the following videos of songs that were major Disco hits in the 1970s: Peaches and Herb, "Shake Your Groove Thing"; Sylvester, "Mighty Real"; and Donna Summer, "Love to Love You Baby." Answer the questions below, in your notebooks.
- How would you describe the music? Is it fast or slow? What instruments are used? What kind of beat does it have?
- How does these performers look different from, for instance, the Beatles performing "She Loves You"?
- How are the performers dressed? What words would you use to describe their appearance?
- Who are the performers? Describe them in terms of gender, ethnicity, etc.
- What are the people listening to the music doing? What kind of mood do they seem to be in? How would you describe the style of dancing they are doing?
- Why do you think many of these people have come to the disco to hear the music and dance? How might this music provide them with an escape from the issues that they face in their daily lives?
