Turn The Beat Around
This week is the 30th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park on Chicago's South Side.

The Chicago Reader recognizes it with a story on a new exhibit of photos taken by someone who was a teen in the bleachers. Her camera ran out of film before things turned violent. This turns out to be significant, for while the article details some historical and class context, it doesn't mention questions about racism and homophobia, even though they were raised at the time. It comes up in the comments, resulting in some strong denials centering on the assertion conscious intent is all that counts.

The best response is by John Dugan, who also wrote an essay about Disco Demolition nostalgia for Time Out Chicago. Excerpts from his comment:

It is easy to dismiss DDD as a bunch of kids goofing off, getting high and having fun—because certainly, that’s mainly what it was. That’s obvious. I'm cool with that...I’m not saying the teens at the ballpark were conscious about race, just that the disco sucks backlash carried a lot of baggage about race and culture with it. It says a lot about American culture at the time...The Reader article has the focus of a visual arts story and therefore leaves itself open to criticism for ignoring a larger story about what Disco Demolition meant to fans of disco or minorities that called that music their own.

Had disco's boom gone on too long? Probably, but the DDD wasn't about embracing new music, it was about rejecting it for hard rock...which had been around for ten years already and was still packing stadiums and radio playlists. If there was a point being made at DDD, and I'm not sure there was, it was that we prefer male oriented monoculture to a pluralistic culture. Decadent individualism but not for everyone.

...disco was an easy target in its novelty, but I hardly think that music fans had forgotten it was something of a black genre...KC might been white but his Sunshine Band wasn't. Disco was obviously multi-racial. Did this make white kids in the suburbs uncomfortable? For some it didn’t matter...they bought the records in droves.

Disco, however crappy it became, was as much about a liberating experience as the hard rock my long-haired older, stoner buddies in Virginia and family in Cleveland worshiped. But arbiters of culture/self-promoters such as Dahl completely missed that and as a result we got DDD. It wasn’t a Nazi rally, it was a bunch of kids smashing up records. Is that cultural significant? It’s gotta be-we're still talking about it.

That Chicago with its own history of racial divide has such an episode in its distant history isn't shocking to me. What's shocking is that no major paper or media outlet has chosen this anniversary to check in on Disco Demolition’s uglier side or its cultural significance.

Costello’s article is fine on its own terms but for disco fans, anyone left out of DDD or anyone who takes American culture seriously it doesn't pass muster.

There's also a link to this interesting discussion of the disco backlash.

And here's a long excerpt from Dugan's Time Out Essay.

What sucks more than disco? Cute nostalgic stories about Disco Demolition Day...publications that should be in the business of unpacking the cultural relevancy of such a heated moment chose instead to deliver straightforward rock and sports nostalgia pieces. While covering Chicago dance music for several years, I learned that in many minds in Chicago, Disco Demolition left scars...Chicago’s black community and its gay community—not to mention its DJ community—has a different memory of Disco Demolition Day. For many, Disco Demolition Day was an ugly effort to stomp out a misunderstood culture. But on its 30th anniversary, DDD has been tidied up, well, a bit too much.

...Dahl takes the line that he was reacting to his FM station’s embrace of a disco format, a music he hated—and against disco clubs that were supposedly inaccessible for regular guys. That may have been true.

But in effect, Disco Demolition looked like a chance for some powerful members of the local media and business community to gather followers to blow up records and vent their hate for a music and culture that just happened to be a commercially potent outgrowth of black and gay culture...Disco had been so popular in part because it was interactive and social—not because it was class exclusive...I’m sure DDD was a wonderful little night of partying amid simmering violence and destruction and a little baseball...I’d have preferred some column inches to explore different viewpoints.

There are numerous stories online less naive, many alluding to period critics’ charges of racism and homophobia around Disco Demolition but no stories I see that properly refute those charges. Why not interrogate them?

...It’s also worth noting that the stadium was trashed again a month later at a Foghat/Beach Boys concert—which suggests that punters’ beef wasn’t so much with disco as with popular music or just being treated like cattle at stadiums.

...If I have any sympathies with DDD, it’s that disco eventually turned into a very silly marketing term attached to all kinds of bullshit, so it was easy for one to be ignorant of its roots...From Rod Stewart to punk rockers, disco had a dramatic effect on music from the ground up....The Talking Heads and New York’s arty punk scene would have gone nowhere without disco.

So, in musical terms, disco had already done just about all it was going to do by mid-1979. The sophisticated rhythms of disco went on to be the building blocks of the careers of Michael Jackson and a fair portion of the electronic-aided acts of the ’80s. ’80s hard rock, on the other hand, eventually slipped into a dire rut that was more shamelessly commercial and blatantly cheesy than disco had ever thought to be—hello, Whitesnake.

The folks memorialized in Costello's article as "south-side rock ’n’ roll youth culture of 1979 on the verge of pandemonium" put on a somewhat different display when Harold Washington took his campaign to white neighborhoods a few years later.

I have some experience with Disco Demolition culture of Chicago. When I did exit polling on the white south side during Harold Washington's second mayoral run, their racial resentment was open and normalized. After he won again, I overheard more than one conversation in restaurants bemoaning this with barely concealed racism. When he died, I sat next to some guys at an all night diner who declared it was the last time a n***** would be elected mayor. And so far, they were right.

I'm not saying there's a direct connection between these two things, but there's something. And all these years later, you'd think essays in the alternative press would be willing to explore that.