Damn Right, T-Funk!!
'88's Doin' Da Butt has always been my [[un)official end of the Funk era song before rap just completely dominated everything.
I thought the show was pretty much dead on except for some of the minor details that have been listed here on the forum. Some things I'd like to add:
In one of my very early posts on SDF, I mentioned that I thought Disco started with the PIR records of the early 70's. Bobby Eli schooled me that what MFSB was doing was Philly Soul.
I got the impression from him and some of the other musicians involved with Gamble & Huff's productions, that they felt music was co-opted and repackaged and marketed to the mainstream public as Disco.
That kind of blends with what I remember George Clinton saying about Disco at the time. Quotes like, " Disco will get on your last nerve" was his way of saying Disco was prepackaged music with out a personality. The music had no soul. I think the musicians at PIR were trying to say the same thing.
In many ways I've always thought of the Saturday Night Fever phenomenum as being late to the party; the two minute warning before the end. From time to time I still hear rumblings about the Disco Demolition stunt at Cominsky Park in the summer of '79. Both Steve Dahl and Gerry Meier are still on the radio [[different formats, different stations) but that day really did change things. As for whether or not there was a racial component to Disco Demolition, of course there was, it was just one of a handful of reasons.
For those of you who were not there, the Unsung piece was right when it says that Disco was everywhere in 78/79. It was all over the radio, commercials, TV shows, fashion. So, if you were a red-blooded lover of KISS, Rush, Aerosmith, ELO, YES, etc. you absolutely HATED Disco with a passion. These also tended to be the same people who couldn't dance if you put a gun to their heads, so just had no use for it. Add to this base, the homophobes, the racists and the sexists youths of the time and you have 70 thousand mostly white folks ready to blow up anything that reminded them of these outside groups. The fact that not just Disco records, but Motown, PIR and JB records were all thrown into the box that night is a testament to how wide-spread the hatred was.
The funny thing was is that the music itself never died, but the marketing sure did. The very night of the demolition, Frankie Knuckles was already throwin' down some heavy duty parties at The Warehouse. In New York, rap had been on the streets for almost 3 years and
Rapper's Delight was about month away from its release.
Disco just morphed into House. Here in Chicago the Hot Mix 5, Micky "Mixin'" Oliver, Scott Seals, Kenny "Jamin'" Jayson, Farley "Funkin'" Keith and Ralphie "Rockin'" Rosario were playing House grooves on the WBMX every Saturday Night until the early 90's. They still pop up air occasionally. Over time, the beats at The Warehouse and later The Muzic Box got faster and faster and so Disco still lives to this day. It's just going by a variety of aliases.
Bookmarks