Disco Demolition Night: Rock’s darkest hour
Despite basically never using social media, I seem to have a (very) slightly higher opinion of it than most other folks I know. It’s not that I can’t see the divisions ripping society apart to the point of damaging our very democracy and the role that social media plays in it. As a queer person, I can’t really ignore it. However, blaming social media for it is, I believe, shooting the messenger. Humanity has always had a particular need to whip up firestorms of outrage against people, forms of art and, in one memorable case, Disco. The internet is just the latest way of weaponising that need.
Need proof? Look no further than an event that would be absolutely hilarious if it didn’t actually happen: Chicago’s Disco Demolition Night of July 12th, 1979. A little bit of context first: for all the hype the 1970s get as arguably the best decade for music ever, the pop charts of that decade speak a little differently. For every What’s Going On and London Calling, there are several dozen absolutely sorry scraps of steaming garbage clogging up the charts, and at the time, people were having absolutely none of it.
In the grand scheme of things, not a lot of these records were actual disco records. The genre didn’t go mainstream until the release of Saturday Night Fever in 1977. However, its popularity skyrocketing coincided with the heyday of hard rock as a chart-topping concern coming to a close. The genre’s white, straight male fanbase suddenly saw their beloved heavy metal go from the undisputed most popular form of music to… still basically the most popular form of music in the world, but now it had to share radio time with Black and gay people.
For some reason, this revolted them. Can’t imagine why. All this stewing and seething resentment needed was a lightning rod to unite them. One was found in the form of Chicago-based radio DJ and a man so profoundly crass that he was a key influence on Howard Stern, Steve Dahl. Dahl was in a mard because the rock radio station that he worked for was rebranded as a disco station and he was fired.
To Dahl, this couldn’t have been because he was 24 years old, and his show’s ratings were freefalling faster than a literal lead zeppelin. It was that pesky disco music running him out of a job! Like a man truly being silenced by the tastes of the day, he waltzed into another job at an album rock radio station within months of his sacking and immediately started tugging his bollocks on air about how disco was killing music. He said, in between hundreds of thousands of people listening to him play Humble Pie album tracks on live radio.
Again, like a man being silenced by the tastes of the day, this skyrocketed his show’s ratings. He even decided to get involved himself, parodying Rod Stewart’s admittedly execrable ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’, with the comfortably worse ‘Do Ya Think I’m Disco’. Wildean wit there, I’m sure you’ll agree. This is when things start getting weird. Dahl made a plan and some of the higher-ups of the Chicago White Sox baseball team to organise a cross-promotional event to, as all grifters do, make a quick buck out of manufactured discontent.
This event would become the Disco Demolition Night. A truly revolting act of knuckle-dragging, nigh-on inbred stupidity where 50’000 people descended on Comiskey Park stadium, disco records in hand, to throw them onto the field for a good old-fashioned Nazi-style book burning, but with slightly more Bee-Gees. The organisers had expected just over half the number of people to turn up, and a lot of people were hurt in the crush. Something one should be overjoyed about, except a bunch of people were families just there to see the White Sox face the visiting Detroit Tigers that night.
The fuckwits there for the record burning stormed the field in their orgiastic, bigoted fury. That, combined with Dahl himself riding across the field in a jeep-like Barron Trump doing a Call of Duty LARP, meant that the match had to be called off before it started. If it sounds like I’m being a bit harsh on all this stupidity, let me tell you how I know this had precisely dick-all to do with actual disco music. The violent thugs who all came with disco records weren’t coming with their own albums. After all, why would they listen to what they claim to hate? No, instead, they were all being bought that night.
The receipts from record stores that night don’t show a massive spike in the sales of Bee-Gees records or Rod The Mod’s disco catastrophe, though. It shows a massive spike in sales of records by black artists. Because ‘Disco Sucks’ was never about Disco Music. It was always about white people showing their visceral hatred of Blackness. The music. The culture. The people.
Think about that the next time you hear some dickhead sniping about how Beyoncé “isn’t a real country artist” despite releasing the country album of the year. It’s never just about the art. Never.
