Some time ago I referred in these pages to a topic on which I now want to focus: the Disco Demolition Night. The night of Thursday July 12, 1979 in the Comiskey Park baseball stadium in Chicago ended with serious disturbances and was then picked up by critics and a large part of the specialized press as the closing of a cycle referring to what is called the disco music in the United States.
The genre in question, which had direct precedents of Soul and R&B of the 60s, translated into almost a commercial decade of extraordinary splendor starting from 1974 and up to approximately 1982, saw its finale even when many of its stars they enjoyed creative vitality and indisputable popularity.
Among the best known were Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, Los Jackson 5, Barry White, Kool & the Gang, Los Bee Gees, Village People, Boney M, Earth, Wind and Fire and ABBA, among many others.
Such was the push from producers, from record companies with the logical profits that disco music procured that various artists who were aesthetically and conceptually distant from the genre approached this in a sporadic form, but also leaving a sound record of such incursions.
Thus themes like /Miss you / (Rolling Stones) and /Copacabana/ (Barry Manilow) were both recorded in 1978, or /I was made for lovin’ you/ (Kiss) in 1979.
So if we go back to the main exponents and initiators of the style, we will notice a strong one
racial component which included many African North Americans who, with the
musical heritage already mentioned consolidated one of the most influential contributions of North American culture.
We also need to highlight the profound liturgical element and struggles that were already reasserting themselves in the aesthetics and in the segregated – sometimes undetainable – Negro presence of that classist society
Nomi come Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Billie Holiday o Ella Fitzgerald,
While they shone from yazz and other sonic perspectives, they undoubtedly paved various avenues of experimentation for other generations of African-American artists.
But still the malicious pendulum of brutal racism in a fragmented society was weighing in with actions focused on hate speech, including the sexual theme as a complement to those attacks.
And all of that was a summation of accumulated grievances, xenophobic resentments and unchecked intolerance that erupted from the moment DJs Steve Dahl and Garry Meier led a strong anti-disco movement promoted by radio stations in 1979
Chicago, which were based on the Insane Coho Lips organization, created by Dahl: a kind of extremist fraternity formed by his listeners to prosecute and mistreat those who consumed that music.
After months of incidents and radicalism with total impunity, on the night of July 12 they summoned thousands of them to make a bonfire of LPs in the purest style of satanic savagery, and put forward the thesis that the Disco Demolition Night was not an isolated event nor
spontaneous: it constituted the consummation of a practice of siege promoted and permitted by a dominant hegemonic system against a genuine form of cultural expression. (GM- Granma Int.)
