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-   -   What's wrong with disco? (https://www.musicbanter.com/general-music/77778-whats-wrong-disco.html)

Aichuk 06-29-2014 01:34 AM

What's wrong with disco?
 
I've been listening to some Chic, and they're awesome. Funky and talented, with great basslines. I also like some other disco artists as well, such as the Beegees. So what's with the disco backlash? I can understand a post-grunge backlash or a gangsta-rap backlash, but a lot of disco sounds genuinely fun to listen to.

Dylstew 06-29-2014 04:47 AM

All I know is that my dad loves funk, but he also loves Disco. So you're not alone. I've never really listened to Disco.

dwill123 06-29-2014 05:33 AM

What's wrong with disco?

Absolutely nothing.

Mr. Charlie 06-29-2014 01:18 PM

I thought it was a rhetorical question but I guess not. Nowt wrong with disco in my opinion. It's feel-good music.

gandhara 06-29-2014 11:17 PM

Nothing at all. I havent listened to disco or funk for a couple years but im gettin back into it again. Love me some Chic, Taste of Honey, George Duke, Sister Sledge, BB&Q Band...to name a few favorites

Janszoon 06-29-2014 11:22 PM

The only disco backlash I'm aware of happened back in the early 80s when disco was dying. I wasn't aware there was any backlash against it today.

ladyislingering 06-29-2014 11:24 PM

Some people just can't appreciate a sick bass groove and electric funk. and those are people I stay far, far away from.

Frownland 06-29-2014 11:45 PM

It's cheesy and it killed all the good music man. It's neither groovy nor trippy.

Janszoon 06-29-2014 11:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frownland (Post 1464948)
It's cheesy and it killed all the good music man. It's neither groovy nor trippy.

I think this song is both groovy and trippy:


Paul Smeenus 06-29-2014 11:53 PM

The complaint with disco in the late 1970's was that it was devoid of emotion, that it was just studio production with no heart. It had nothing to do with disliking bass groove. Parliment/Funkidelic, Bootsy's Rubber Band, Ohio Players, Earth Wind and Fire were all well accepted. KC & the Sunshine Band and The Village People, not so much.

gandhara 06-29-2014 11:56 PM

Some disco was cheesy, but there some awesome tunes too

gandhara 06-29-2014 11:57 PM

KC and Village People were a joke i agree lol

Norg 06-30-2014 12:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dwill123 (Post 1464740)
What's wrong with disco?

Absolutely nothing.


/ thread

Mr. Charlie 06-30-2014 11:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gandhara (Post 1464957)
KC and Village People were a joke i agree lol

Oi. Thems my favourite groups of all time.

Plankton 06-30-2014 12:01 PM

Any one remember the Disco Sucks era?

Disco Demolition Night - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I was a bit young around that time, but I did witness it. Most of todays 'Pop' is likely derived from the Disco era, and it's marketing appeal.

BootsAndPants

Paul Smeenus 06-30-2014 12:02 PM

^ worst promo ever.


Plankton 06-30-2014 12:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul Smeenus (Post 1465076)
^ laziest ****er ever.


fixd

Mr. Charlie 06-30-2014 12:14 PM

Haha. It's queer that anyone should harbour such resentment towards a musical genre. An amusing spectacle though.

The Sane Psycho 06-30-2014 03:23 PM

I think it's pathetic, actually. And they bought the albums just to destroy them, so the artists got another sale from these idiots.

Dark Horse 06-30-2014 03:56 PM


FRED HALE SR. 06-30-2014 04:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gandhara (Post 1464957)
KC and Village People were a joke i agree lol

KC and the Sunshine band were the ****. :dj:

Psy-Fi 06-30-2014 05:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FRED HALE SR. (Post 1465159)
KC and the Sunshine band were the ****. :dj:


KC and the Sunshine Band - Get down tonight - YouTube

Lord Larehip 06-30-2014 05:17 PM


Freakazoid-Midnight Star - YouTube


Tom Tom Club - Wordy Rappinghood (with lyrics) - YouTube


William Bootsy Collins - Shine-O-Mite (Rag Popping) - YouTube


Johnnie Taylor - Disco Lady (Long Version) - YouTube


Cameo - Just Be Yourself (Slayd5000) - YouTube


Andre Cymone Kelly's Eyes - YouTube

Rjinn 07-02-2014 06:05 AM

I love disco. Simple, feel-good, fun, body-swaying music that's perfect to get into while boozing.

neardeathexperience 07-03-2014 07:54 PM

Musically it is a very solid form of music. Unfortunatly the era it represts people are more inclined to want to forget about..............

Rexx Shredd 07-04-2014 07:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Larehip (Post 1465169)
videos


Freakazoid, Shine-O-Mite, and Just Be Yourself are NOT disco :)

just sayin'.............

Necromancer 07-04-2014 08:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Psy-Fi (Post 1465165)

This is a disco anthem.

Lord Larehip 07-05-2014 01:12 PM

If people were alive during this era, as I was, and visited at least a couple of hundred discos around the world as I did (I was in the service), you'll know that the stuff I posted here was the stuff they played. I seriously doubt anybody in those places gave a f-uck whether anyone thought it was "disco" or "funk." Me least of all. The whole argument is specious and tenuous at best. It boils to one person making himself the arbiter of what constitutes each and his reasoning is based on if he likes it then it's funk and if he doesn't then it's disco. If you bothered to go into the discos, it is clear that people didn't care. And I think they were right.

Lord Larehip 07-05-2014 01:44 PM

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Stax-...elease/3026040

In the above link Rufus Thomas, the Staple Singers and Booker T are all classified as purveyors of "southern disco" on the Stax label. The album was released in '75 when disco was at its peak. The genre is classified as "funk/soul."

Rexx Shredd 07-05-2014 08:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Larehip (Post 1466687)
http://www.discogs.com/Various-Stax-...elease/3026040

In the above link Rufus Thomas, the Staple Singers and Booker T are all classified as purveyors of "southern disco" on the Stax label. The album was released in '75 when disco was at its peak. The genre is classified as "funk/soul."


Much in the same way a discog or anthology site may put Rock/Metal in one category for their own listing purposes....that still doesnt make them the same genre

Rufus Thomas is most certainly R&B and is (IMO) one of the earliest examples of funk

Lord Larehip 07-06-2014 11:01 AM

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.

PANICGAL 07-20-2014 09:59 PM

Disco is fun stuff.

Screen13 07-21-2014 04:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rostasi (Post 1466799)
Yeah, also consider that Stax was pretty much desperately trying to stay solvent in '75 and so jumped on
any kind of bandwagon that might pull them thru the doldrums. Witness their disco version of the Star Trek Theme
from that period and the above mentioned album if you need proof (or read Rob Bowman's work).
Saying that many of these gospel and/or R&B performers were disco stars would be like saying that Andy Griffith was
a prominent folk or blues singer because he emoted a version of House of the Rising Sun and did an album with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. It's not what they brought at all to the community.

Plus Motown got into the act with packaging their classic older Soul songs under the Disc-O-Tech banner. Not to be confused with the legendary Early 70's UK-released Motown Disco Classics series, the US division had a couple of these collections right around the same time as the Stax collection.


http://www.discogs.com/Various-Disc-...elease/1413725

For Stax, sadly they lost one of the masters of Disco in Isaac Hayes, who was headed that way by the Mid 70's but went to ABC for some credible dance records peppered with his trademark ballads. "Chocolate Chip" was a major hit.

To my ears, the Warp Nine version of Star Trek was more in line with Eletropop as if someone just got a Kraftwrek record and thought that it would be easy to get a hit out of something like that following up on the US success of Autobahn, and leave it to the legendary Terry Manning to do it, but I can see where the Disco connection is. It was released on Privilege in 1975, one of the many Stax Distributed labels and fully connected to the label's dying days as you can tell in the article linked (it also had a re-issue of Big Star's "September Gurls" as a promo copy after the band folded).

A history of that label here...

Untitled Document



Now you want a Disco Star Trek, although a very low budget one, I found one for you!



...sadly, I don't see Grace Lee Whitney's Disco Treckin' anywhere, yet.

Screen13 07-21-2014 05:05 PM

Not to get too edit crazy in the last post, here's Rufus Thomas' re-vision of his classic "Jump Back" as "Jump Back '75" which kind of had a slight Disco flavor to it. Although they lost one of their kings to another label, Stax still had the legendary Clown Prince of Funk who could adapt, although sadly with diminishing returns.



On Polydor, James Brown sadly decided that he wanted to create an album that tried to keep up with the trends with some re-visions of his classics, including "Sex Machine '75". Still, what sounded flat on vinyl sounded cool live in ugly 70's clothes and telling the audience to "get on up!" as he knew he was the man with the plan.





I have nothing wrong with good Disco, it was only the 78-80 era that seen many artists try to ride on the train. Soul legends climbing aboard was alright as they already had built the base, but when you see someone like Ethel Merman, however, that was the time to say stop. Casablanca Records had a lot of good dance music, especially that of Giorgio Moroder's productions, but by '79 (and Kiss' "I Was Made for Loving You"), it got to a point when the label was releasing singles like diarrhea because they were cheap to produce with not a lot of focus on the quality - too many awards at Studio 54 warped them I guess.

TK Records in Florida, home of KC and the Sunshine Band, thankfully knew when to slow down. I have a double platter released through one of their sub-labels that actually gets me on my feet simply called Disco Party.

Still, as for trendy followers, I have a guilty pleasure for the MCA released Ann Marget Disco album produced by Paul Sabu!


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