The Staple Singers were quite popular in the 70s. There was no need to tout them as disco to sell them. It doesn't do any good to argue that this wasn't disco when it was being touted AS a form of disco during the disco era. It proves that a rigid definition of disco is untenable and unsupportable. ANY black American dance music of this time period was disco.
Whites of the rock scene in that era fell victim to the media depiction of disco because few of them had any direct contact with that scene. I was one of them. We tended to like Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players because they were played on rock FM stations so, of course, they couldn't be disco. When I stopped listening to rock around '79 and listened only to the funk stations and went to the discos with my black shipmates in the early 80s I heard all the stuff whites insist is funk played side by side with the stuff they contemptuously wrote off as disco. I realized there was no real difference. It was the same stuff. ALL black American dance music of that era was disco. That is the ONLY definition of disco--black American dance music that proliferated during the most of the 70s and early 80s. In the discos, I never once heard the BeeGees, for example. But I heard Cameo, Midnight Star and James Brown endlessly.
If someone was to write a song that alternated between being "funk" and "disco" not one of you who insist there is a difference would be able to agree on where in the song that the transitions take place. It's a silly, pretentious argument.
If disco and funk differ fundamentally then tell me what the very first disco recording was. Should be a piece of cake.
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