Punk vs. Disco???

NO ELVIS, BEATLES, OR ROLLING STONES IN 1977!

Traditionally the enemy for punk was not disco but prog rock.

Actually I've already heard all the stuff that suggests punks liked disco. This thread should only be about punks who thought Gloria Gaynor was only marginally better than Gentle Giant.

“Because in the morning I might find I went with the one that wears flares.”

They were all Quo fans.

and people kept saying over and over that in the london scene they were immersed in (what, glam?), coolness=fashionably vague gayness.

so to differentiate themselves from both this world and from mainstream het. culture, punks assumed an attitude of vaguely het. asexuality.
i see disco and punk both trying to banish -earnestness- from sexuality; disco renders sex powerless and transparent with the blow job-handshake, while punk just sort of pretends it doesn't exist.
and both in agreement about its artificiality

a definite shift away from campy fun by some punks lead them away from the disco/punk alliance and into oi and metal(where sex also does not exist).

there was a quote from a gay punker around '77: punk stopped being fun (and started to get political-in the serious trad. sense), so he grew a moustache and started going to roller discos.

btw, i'm don't understand glam, or how it relates to disco, so i'm just conflating them into one big sparkly.

Plus disco sadly came to life again from the late 80s onwards and the "spirit" of disco is still alive today.

Madonna's biggest legacy will be In Bed With Madonna / Truth Or Dare. For unconscious self-parody it out-Pepys Samuel Pepys.

And isn't Mojo great? First a free collection of the finest reggae singles from the last 40 years, and now a compilation of punk tracks! X Ray Spex even - too, too cool for school. Historical compilation CDs on the front of magazines rock.

James: ....That was about the time I got signed to ZE, as the Contortions, as well as being asked to put out a disco record. He just said, “Do a disco album. Here’s the money.” So I got more serious.

Pitchfork: Were you familiar with the disco movement?

James: Of course, you couldn’t help but be familiar with it. It was so huge, it was everywhere. That was the height of disco, you couldn’t not hear it. I went to the Paradise Garage a couple of times. Actually, we played as the Contortions once, we did a show with Richard Hell, Contortions, and Teenage Jesus. We had this huge confrontation with the owners. They didn’t want to pay us because no one showed up. They brought all these menacing black muscle bouncer guys, and at one point they were closing in on me. So I broke a beer bottle and slashed my face with it cuz I wanted them to think I was so crazy that they would leave me alone. Which they did. A lot of rock people had a knee-jerk hatred of disco, which I never really shared. There were things I liked about it, although there was a lot that I hated too. It was so bleached out and whitened, but I could see that it was taking the real funk rhythms and really straightening them out, submitting them to this tyrannical beat. I liked the idea of this hypnotic music that would literally put people into a trance. I thought that was cool.

Wait, what about the PROG-ROCK in *Metal Box*'s song structures??

I have some opinions about this thread that I'll keep to myself. I am curious, though, about whether people think Guns N'Roses' *Appetite For Destruction* is more a punk album or a disco album. (I kind of think it's both, myself.) (Though when I told Neil Tennant that once, he pretended he didn't know what I was talking about. What a liar!)

Plus, don't people often decide whether something is "punk" (as much they do "disco") on how many beats per minute it's got?

Actually, this strikes me as fairly odd, come to think of it -- If you listen to most any late '70s disco compilation (or to, say, most any Donna Summer or Chic album), I suspect that you'll find a fairly WIDE range of BPMS. There were slow disco songs AND fast ones!

Not to mention Grace Jones. And so on.

Ok, I'll stop. (Unless I don't.)

More punk, too (but you knew I was gonna say that, right?)

He also says he's got a very early (c. 1975) disco compilation that includes songs by Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Kiss amidst all the Gloria Gaynor and BT Express and Silver Convention or whoever!

And Michael Freedberg says that, in mid '70s gay discos, deejays would regularly mix in rock stuff like Gary Glitter and Babe Ruth.

And where does "Jet Boy Jet Girl" fit into the equation, hmmm??

(And when you get the whole wide world, you get punk rock with it.)

I think that's what I was thinking when I entered this thread (the second part anyway).

I'm sorry, I'm being glib, I just have nothing to add to a discussion I am liking and I am now very sad over it.

When I saw them live a couple weeks ago, I thought they sounded totally like Foreigner ("Urgent"-era, though for some reason they didn't bring a saxophone player!) But now I'm thinking they might be more like Toto's best album, *Hydra*. Though Aldo Nova, Michael Sembello, and Falco also fit prominently into the equation, of course.

Blondie, Crass, Suburbs

Except Blondie's biggest "disco" song ("Call Me") actually gets its beat from "Children of the Grave" by Black Sabbath! Explain THAT...

Plus, don't people often decide whether something is "punk" (as much they do "disco") on how many beats per minute it's got?

I guess in the sense that people used to believe that all punk was "fast" (an idea I thought got discredited pretty quickly, but maybe not). The point is, in talking about dance floors, disco DJs GENERALLY only play stuff that adheres to a fairly narrow range in this regard; or anyway, it was narrow before Soul II Soul slowed it down 20 BPMs. Prior to that, the range (to my knowledge) was something like 117 - 135 BPM. (Someone correct me if this it wrong, generally speaking. And yes, there are lots of exceptions.) Punk on the other hand didn't have to prescribe to anything like this because mixing songs together and making them overlap and match beats was never a crucial facet of punk.