Recently, a friend and I were driving when a song came on the radio by Katy Perry.
Or Ke$ha. Or Rihanna. One of those.
Anyway, he made the comment that this music was our generations disco. It made sense, though I didn’t give it much thought until one day while I was having lunch at a popular establishment here in Tuscaloosa. Sitting there, conversing about football and work and all other manner of things, I suddenly realized I had been listening to the same bass line over the course of four songs. It was only then that I realized just how right my friend had been.
A brief history of disco, per Wikipedia (don’t worry, the article is thoroughly-cited): disco came about in the late sixties and early seventies as a reaction to the rock-dominated music scene of the time (think Beatles, Rolling Stones, early Zeppelin, etc.) by various racial and cultural minorities.
In terms of musical similarities with today’s pop music, disco essentially coined that thumping baseline one hears. You know, that thump-thump-thump-thump throughout the entire song; it’s this trait that makes two songs indistinguishable if you aren’t paying attention.
Disco declined and eventually died following “Disco Demolition Night” at a Chicago White Sox double-header. The event came to be known as the breaking point for the wave of anti-disco sentiment among rock fans, especially those of the punk variety (see Dead Kennedys’ “Saturday Night Holocaust”).
Allow me to go on a tangent for a moment: In the last ten years or so I, as a rock n’ roll music fan, feel the way disco fans felt when the scene began in the late sixties. That is, I am tired of the pop music. What passed for rock n’ roll in the Aughts was a mash-up of many different bands of varying styles attempting to resurrect some other style from the last fifty years. Am I really expected to list Chevelle, Mudvayne, and Shinedown alongside The Beatles, Zeppelin, Springsteen, and Nirvana as the best (re: most likely to be remembered) of a decade? If anything, in twenty years our children will be jamming to Nickelback and Creed the same way we rock out to Poison and Slaughter: with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
But back to disco; by September 1979 – two months after Disco Demolition Night – no disco records were in the top 10 and the punk, new wave, and glam rock/hair metal movements were beginning to sweep the nation (whether this was a good thing is up to the reader). It is my sincerest hope that in the coming years this nation will experience a similar musical conflagration – one that leaves in its wake a scorched earth ripe for new and original rock artists to make their mark with a sound that refuses to be derivative; a sound made in garages and basements, not on a computer.
