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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 We pointed out to him
to explain why they hated that a lot of reggae
disco? No one particularly had really political
*liked* disco. They wanted lyrics, and he kind of
to dance, and they liked The stoners had went "all right, all
the sex and drugs, but they killed the rock right, maybe I've let
only tolerated the music: scene-- no one my prejudices get the
the records didn't sell. danced to rock in better of me on this
the mid-1970s. one".
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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