The best-selling disco album of all time
Nowhere on Earth was as culturally vibrant as late-1970s New York City.
A generation of kids nostalgic for rock and roll’s former fire turned their backs on the stadium monsters of the day and sowed the seeds for punk’s takeover of Manhattan’s CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. Alongside this, the many block parties smattering the South Bronx projects with the emerging hip-hop turntablism would stand as some of the most celebrated of American art forms.
Concurrent with punk and hip-hop’s explosion was the disco scoring the dance floors of clubs and bars frequented by the city’s Latino and African-American communities. Ballooning in popularity as a counter to the overly earnest rock primacy that commanded all critical attention a few years prior, disco rejected rock’s aversion to busting moves and throwing shapes and joyfully deep-dived into a mirrorballed world of ostentatious fashion, eager cocaine use, and an unabashed embrace of liberated sexuality across all persuasions.
At its peak, disco pulled in everybody from Motown to Kiss to embrace its shimmering strut, and the Studio 54 club entered the stuff of musical legend as to the rumours of its orgiastic hedonism.
Yet, cultural reactionaries harbouring resentment to disco’s seeming superficiality—and finding a surreptitious vehicle to express latent racism and homophobia toward the scene—began to look up to a figurehead in WLUP radio host and committed anti-disco crusader Steve Dahl. This culminated in the infamous 1979 Disco Demolition Night in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, where a crate of disco records was blown up as entertainment between a White Sox and Tigers baseball game.
‘Post-disco’ would score the 1980s pop charts from some of the decade’s biggest names, with Michael Jackson’s Thriller the biggest-selling album of all time and Madonna, Prince, and Grace Jones, all taking disco’s beat but coating it with a thick new-wave lacquer. Despite disco’s commercial success, the Billboard Hot 100 records leaned to the campier end of the genre, Carl Douglas’ ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ selling 1 1million and Village People’s ‘YMCA’, standing as the disco single top seller with an extra million.
So, what is the best-selling disco album?
No disco album touches the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. A cultural totem scoring John Travolta’s 1977 iconic feature, the compilation’s boasting of acclaimed cuts from Kool & The Gang, KC and the Sunshine Band and The Trammps is dwarfed by the Bee Gees‘ immortal disco archetypes with ‘Stayin’ Alive’, ‘Night Fever’ and ‘More Than a Woman’.
Bee Gees’ involvement wasn’t assured until post-production, with Travolta dancing on set to Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs. Having shifted toward a disco sound with 1975’s American number one, ‘Jive Talkin’, the world was introduced to Barry Gibb’s shrieking falsetto, a penchant for open-chested satin shirts, and immaculately coiffed barnets. Topping the charts again the following year with ‘You Should Be Dancing’, Bee Gees accepted Saturday Night Fever producer Robert Stigwood’s offer to pen part of its soundtrack.
It was a monster. As the movie smashed the 1977 box office, the Saturday Night Fever double LP was the biggest-selling album of all time until Thriller came along, and still stands as tenth in global records at 40million reported sales. While disco’s most commercial behemoth, 1992’s The Bodyguard soundtrack, surpassed Saturday Night Fever in the various artists movie compilation category, reporting a staggering 50million in sales and sitting comfortably as the third biggest-selling LP of all time.
