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DISCO_SUCKS

                                              November 15, 2005

If you cried "Disco Sucks!"
did that make you a
racist homophobe?


My personal experience
(Long Island, suburbs of
New York in the mid-70s):

(1) I was a disco-hater and my friends
    were all disco-haters, and I
    remember being *really* suprised
    about hearing a friend-of-a-friend
    dismiss it as "nigger music"

    (Huh? As opposed to rock-n-roll?
    As opposed to the jazz-rock "fusion"
    that this guy liked?)                     So yeah, among the
                                              anti-disco people, there
(2) A friend of mine (who later came          were some who were racist,
    out of the closet, by the way)            and there were some who were
    made some joke once about keeping         anti-gay, and while the
    people from "descending into a            percentage would be hard to
    life of homosexuality and disco",         figure my personal
    and a bunch of people I knew              experience was that there
    jumped down his throat about it,          wasn't a lot of either: it
    and called him on the                     didn't seem like the main
    homophobia... though none of them         thing going on.
    wanted to defend disco.
                                              But then, maybe I
                                              just don't hang
                                              out with racists.

                                                  Though there was one
What did I have against disco? Well,              guy I knew in college,
I didn't like the music, and I didn't             who was a really good
like the lyrics, and I didn't like                friend of mine, who was
the expensive clothes -- I was a                  also racist, and it
lower middle-class teenager, and I                definitely influenced his
didn't appreciate being told I had to             musical opinions.
drop huge (to me) sums of money just
to play the game.                                 E.g. as a joke once he
                                                  arranged musical genre's on
And it was being shoved down our                  a linear scale in order of
throats.  Imagine tuning into the TV              "intelligence", and he had
news every night and seeing yet                   reggae ranked down at the
another fluff piece on "How to Do the             bottom, right below country
Hustle".                                          music.

Why would anyone even need to explain             We pointed out to him that
why they hated disco?  No one                     a lot of reggae had really
particularly *liked* disco.  They                 political lyrics, and he
wanted to dance (and for some reason              kind of went "all right,
the rock crowd had stopped dancing by             all right, maybe I've let
the mid-70s), and they liked the sex              my prejudices get the
and drugs, but they only tolerated                better of me on this one".
the music: the records didn't sell.
                                                  (This was his standard
                                                  response, if you challenged
                                                  him on his racism: you
                                                  could get him to back down
                                                  on a particular point, but
                                                  not on the general issue.)



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