Racism, exclusion, and oppression during America’s 1970s anti-disco movement
Lucy Warm
The painful truth of the human condition is that we are more comfortable with similarity than we are with difference. Our survival mechanisms instinctively deter us from anything that appears different, whether we consciously recognise it or not. Seeking strength in homogeneity has created a dangerous binary between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, which has served as the foundation behind many systems of institutionalised racial segregation.
Unconscious racial bias and institutional racism are inherently ingrained within the fabric of our social and economic systems, and continue to cause detrimental damage. It is these forms of covert racism that have allowed significant racial attacks to go not only unsanctioned, but also unnoticed.
However, we do not need to look at the complexities of our socioeconomic systems to understand these issues. Dissecting certain movements of popular culture, for example, allows us to see how something seemingly so innocent and trivial can foster hatred and violence without even being recognised as such decades later.
Art: © Mira Tulaar (@miyaa_)
America’s ‘Rock vs Disco war’ is regarded as the cornerstone of popular culture. However, this ‘war’ is a compelling example of the ways in which unconscious racial biases can feed into socially sanctioned expressions of racism. John Rockwell published a New York Times opinion article in 1990. This was a pivotal moment in the music landscape, as he concluded that the reasons behind the ‘war’ were ‘surely racial and social’. However, in using the analogy of ‘war’ to describe this movement, Rockwell inaccurately suggests that both sides were equally engaged in the conflict. Because the world of rock was so exclusionary in nature, this ‘war’ was very much one-sided.
Better described, perhaps, as the anti-disco movement.
America’s Rock vs. Disco ‘war’ has been collectively remembered as a trivial rivalry, a memory which has subsequently filtered into iconic representations of this era. Even the most famous representations of the disco craze, cult-classic Saturday Night Fever, erases the historical challenges faced by disco-lovers and focuses more upon disco’s glamorous aesthetic and lifestyle. Rock ‘n’ rollers have also used gimmicks or costumes to undermine the severity of their attacks, claiming that this war was ‘just kids pissing on a musical genre’.
The hateful violence that ensued during this era has been somewhat lost in historical popular memory. Ethnographic research has shown that with regard to the history of disco, the two most heavily referenced cultural artefacts are Saturday Night Fever and Studio 54. These rather inaccurate representations of disco have distorted the history of a complex cultural phenomenon.
Disco culture presents a paradox; a social synthesis of the most oppressed minority groups. Discotheques created a space in which African Americans, Latin-Americans, and members of the LGBTQ+ community could socialise freely without fear of discrimination on account of their class, race, sexuality or gender. The unifying quality of each of these social groups is their experience of rejection and social marginalisation; to be different in solidarity with each other was precisely why disco culture was so important to minority groups. Discotheques played a significant role in the social emancipation of black and queer people in particular who were often turned away from mainstream clubs on account of their colour or sexuality.
This was rightfully acknowledged by David Mancuso, who was the first person to run a private discotheque in the loft of his Manhattan apartment in 1970. In an interview with Tim Lawrence, Mancuso prided himself on the fact that “there was no one checking your sexuality or racial identity at the door” of his club. Social and racial barriers did not exist within the four walls of his discotheque.
Disco culture presents a paradox; a social synthesis of the most oppressed minority groups.
The emergence of disco culture coincided with the beginnings of the Gay Liberation Movement and significant waves of the Black Power Movement. Whilst this was an exciting time of revolutionary social and political change for many, it was considered a time of great social unrest for those who saw the empowerment of these social groups as a threat to their own pre-existing culture and identity. The disco community subverted the natural order of society, creating a space in which the white, heterosexual man did not have unrivalled social and economic power. Disco was therefore a threat to white people.
Rock ‘n’ roll, whose fanbase was “overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, male and suburban”, offered the threatened white classes means through which they could express their racist and homophobic ideologies. These sentiments were reframed as hatred for disco, but as John Rockwell insightfully noted in his op-ed, “it's not always clear when whites profess a dislike of disco as to whether they dislike the music or whether they dislike those who like it”.
The pioneers of the anti-disco movement have consistently cited hedonism, elitism and extravagance as a justification for their attacks, claiming it was the “white three-piece suits” and “gold jewellery” that stimulated their hatred for disco and persistently denied any racist or homophobic sentiments.
Steve Dahl, a former rock DJ who was perhaps the most significant leader of the movement, is one of these people. In 1979, he was commissioned to promote the White-Sox double-header in an attempt to draw more people to the stadium. Dahl asked game-goers to bring disco records to add to a sacrificial pile that was violently destroyed with explosives on the field at half-time. Riots ensued as thousands of crowd-members savagely stormed and destroyed the field resulting in several arrests and casualties.
This event has been likened to a “Nazi-burning” and has been described as‘‘too reminiscent for comfort of Lumpenproletariat Fascism”. To this day, Dahl not only denies any racist or homophobic sentiments but has failed to understand how it has been perceived that way at all. In his book Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died published in 2016, Dahl professes to be “worn out” from defending himself as “a racist homophobe”, as he believes he is not either of those things.
Dahl is not the only one to have so blatantly denied this kind of attack. Former rock DJs George Baier and Jim Johnson also established their own anti-disco group. With astonishing flippancy, they named their group the ‘Disco Ducks Klan’. Despite the attempt to excuse this as innocent word play inspired by the song “Disco Duck” by Ricky Dees, there is an insidiously overt connection to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
In 1979, the DDK had also planned to invade a discotheque which was soon to be shut down. They wore white sheets over their heads and staged virtual electrocutions of disco fans whose names and phone numbers were provided by members of anti-disco groups. Unbelievably, Baier and Johnson also claimed to be innocent of racial hatred. In the book Love Saves the Day, Baier claimed he named the group “without thinking too deeply”. What degree of unconscious racial bias must be involved to unintentionally align oneself with the KKK? Regardless of whether this alignment with the KKK was a conscious or unconscious association, this act of violence can only be understood as being inherently racist.
The Rock vs. Disco ‘war’ was not the cultural phenomenon that we’ve come to remember, but rather a time of oppression, fear, and exclusion for racial minorities and those of the LGBTQ+ community alike. In observing the course of the anti-disco movement retrospectively, we can see how expressions of racial violence, previously erased from our collective memory, have been revealed.
So, a conscious condemnation of racism is not enough. It is vital we continue to dissect past cultural movements through a critical lens in order for us to truly move away from the ideologies that have sought to exclude, oppress and inflict violence on those who we perceive as ‘different’.
The art accompanying this piece is courtesy of © Mira Tulaar (@miyaa_).