Quote:
Originally Posted by barbarella
Ok, so it's not cool to admit that you like Disco, but it's Ok if you like Funk. I don't always get what the difference is. Flashlight by Parliament is revered as Great Funk and Brick House by the Commodores has been called a Great Disco Record but is it Funk or Disco ?
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Disco oddly enough is one of the only genres to go from underground to corporate and still retain an element of decency in its music. I put this down to the fact that the general publics standard for musichanship was higher back then. Today music is marketed to 14 year olds who can't tell the difference between $hit and good music.
Anyhow funk licks started out largely in the undergound soul movement of the late 60 & 70's, of course being popularized by people like James Brown & Curtis Mayfield
In the gay community disco was becoming more popular in the clubs. Disco is usually thought of as the first real multicultural musical movement in western society, as it was often a crossover of black, white and latin music, so by the mid 70's there was a shift especially with the popularity of KC and the Sunshine Band,
which of course let to a lot of soul bands shifting to disco by the mid late 70's
Now a lot of people think that disco was funk that got white washed but this is nonesonse. If the demographics of North America at the time was close to 90% Caucasian at the time than this was inevitable...damn good I may add.
Disco continued to keep its African, and same sex roots, but the real reason disco became unpopular in my opinion is that it began to represent shallow corporate materialism to a lot of displaced people and thus faced a backlash by sadly a rather bigoted group of rock fans...and the rest is history.