They turned against the guys in the silk suits on TV, and they had themselves a sloppy-ass party about it. The kids doing it just didn’t have a real obvious target anymore. So there was a playbook for getting fucked up and attacking the powers that be. The kids on that field in Chicago were mostly too young to have taken part in any sort of ’60s anti-war movement, but they were old enough to watch it on TV. I tend to think of Disco Demolition Night less as a conscious re-marginalization move and more of a sort of chaotic drunken mob-rule episode. I don’t know if Dahl even knew anything about that. The Bee Gees and John Travolta, the most visible avatars of disco, had nothing to do with disco’s gay underground roots. This is just the kind of bad-faith caricaturing of other subcultures that just about everyone does - the 1979 equivalent of Kid Rock and Eminem snarling about boy bands. When Steve Dahl made fun of disco, he tended to characterize it as rich-cokehead music - yuppie music, though people weren’t using the term “yuppie” yet. I can see how some people would’ve gotten sick of that. It’s just as possible, I think, that people were just kind of assholishly huffing about pop music, something we’ve all done.įor the three or four years before Disco Demolition Night, disco really had taken over the charts, to the point where music that wasn’t at least disco-adjacent had a hell of a time selling records in America. It’s possible that people were mad about the idea that their music was being pushed to the side. By the time of Disco Demolition Night, disco was a sweeping, overwhelming, hegemonic cultural force. I wasn’t there, wasn’t born yet, so I don’t actually know what the tenor of the disco-sucks movement was. When people like Chic’s Nile Rodgers describe Disco Demolition Night as a fascist rally, that’s what they’re talking about. From a music-history standpoint, it’s possible to see disco as a great democratizing force, a push to turn pop music into something fun and silly and cheap and glamorous. It upended social norms, changed fashion and drugs, and moved the balance of music-business power away from the petty-aristocrat California singer-songwriters who’d been running things up until then. Disco was a form of underground music that had improbably risen up out of New York’s black and gay clubs to conquer the pop charts. In the decades since, there has been a great deal written about Chicago’s Disco Demolition Night. Eventually, police had to clear the field, and the White Sox had to forfeit the second game, since there was still debris strewn everywhere. They ignored any and all pleading to return to their seats. By some estimates, it was the biggest crowd in White Sox history - though, since so many of them crashed the gate, it’s hard to be sure.ĭahl, wearing some kind of mock army uniform, exploded a vast crate of records in between games, and the drunk and rowdy crowd erupted out of the stands immediately afterwards. If fans brought in a disco album to be blown up, they’d only have to pay 98 cents to get in. White Sox owner Bill Veeck had a reputation for running wild promotions to get people to buy tickets to the games, and that night, his son Mike had gotten together with a Chicago rock-radio DJ named Steve Dahl to plan a big show that would go down in between the games: Disco Demolition Night. That night, the Chicago White Sox were scheduled to play a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park. One night in the middle of July 1979, a baseball game turned into a drunken anti-disco clusterfuck riot. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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