Once he said "I ain't gonna play Sun City," now he says "Disco Sucks!"

"You know that age group - 35 to 65 - that nobody in sales seems to care about?

THAT'S WHERE ALL THE FUCKING MONEY IS!

(laughter, applause)

I mean ALL the fucking money.

35 to 65."

Um, and he wonders why the "content" guys aren't in charge.

no disco at the Bing? (rimshot)

this is funny but totally unsurprising: Springteen Sideman In Display of Hidebound Taste Shocker.

though the JACK really is the worst radio format of all time, judging from what I've heard.

Yes, he really does dress like that all the time.

the bleeping in this sentence is pretty illogical. Also,

What appeals more to kids, Gene Vincent's black leather attitude, Eddie Cochran's teenage frustration, Little Richard's cry of liberation, and Dion's total Soprano's coolness - or the Eagles?

Um, The Eagles.

He is OTM about context and the loss of the 50's in oldies radio is a scandal BUT the loss of the 70's would be just as ridiculous. If he means the whole 50 years, it should be the whole 50 years. (Actually I'd argue closer on 80 years, but that's just me)

And classic rock radio should be playing new music again (but Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews new? Not in my world).

I know its a cliche, but there is only two kinds of music - good and bad and the year of manufacture or the pigeon hole you wish to put it in doesn't matter one iota.

Whilst the context stuff is important (probably more to us anal musos who inhabit this board than the general public), knowing that Joey Ramone based his vocal style on Ronnie Spector (leaving the argument as to whether he did aside for a moment) does not alter our reaction to the music; you either get it or you don't, love it or hate it.

And Little Steven is wrong; music is not a business but radio definitely is. And that is what calls the tune - nothing else.

Of course, the internet is changing this slowly but surely, but I'm afraid that what will happen is that music will become/is becoming more niche driven (be it style or time) not less.

Woohoo!

I love this. I wonder how much he actually knows about Sid and Nancy, and Ghostface and Ol' Dirty that he came to this conclusion.

I mean, it's one thing to be nicknamed the Killer. It's another to actually be involved in a murder/suicide.

I've heard rumors that some of Jerry Lee's ex-wives died of not-so-natural causes, but nothing was ever proven.

In 1971, he married his fourth wife, a 29-year-old Memphis woman named Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate. They separated after only two weeks and spent more time apart than together during their stormy marriage. Jaren filed for divorce at least three times, charging him with “cruel and inhuman treatment, adultery, habitual drunkenness, and habitual use of drugs.” Shortly before the divorce settlement in 1982, she drowned in a swimming pool under mysterious circumstances.

In 1983, about a year after his fourth wife drowned in the swimming pool, Jerry Lee married his fifth wife, 25-year-old Shawn Michelle Stephens. Less than three months after their wedding she was found dead in their home. After a superficial investigation, the death was ruled a suicide by overdose of methadone pills and Lewis was not charged with foul play, though Shawn Michelle was found lying in their bed in a bruised condition with blood on her body and under her fingernails. There were also “the permeation of fresh, small bloodstains around Lewis’ Mississippi home.”

xpost:
And Matt I guess.

Aren't there some people around here who actually listen to his radio show to defend him? Or is that what sexyDancer's post means?

the other thing is, disco is fun to listen to too, cred battles are nowhere

on the other hand, rockists need love too

And this is relevant to whether and to what degree I enjoy their music in what way, Silvio?

But let me not interrupt the piling on, go right ahead, kick that convenient target who just kicked that other convenient target

More seriously, I'd be absolutely *embarrassed* to be giving that speech. I can't imagine any context in which it makes sense beyond it being 'there's nothing good on the radio,' at which my heart bleeds not at all in the era of Sirius and iPods and etc. etc.

Now, of course LSVS is not complaining about isolation from new and interesting or exciting music, or even that there's nothing good on the radio, really. He's bitching about the fact that the niche he likes isn't bigger.

well then, Shirley, let me say that I think that there is an important place on regular commercial non-subscription FREE radio for oldies, and that iPod-ism is only available to those what can afford it, I think he makes a good case inside his rabble-rousing rockism for the radio as a collective populist experience, there are a lot of great songs that should not be penalized for coming out in the 1950s and early 1960s, play 'em all! and, Shirley, it is completely within someone's rights to prefer that music to whatever is replacing it, be it disco or whatever, even if you, Shirley, prefer the other, and have no problem telling someone to eat shit and die for disagreeing with you.

by the way, does that make Dan the Laverne? OUCH.

yeah but Ned you have not made your reputation and living for decades as a scholar of James Branch Cabell

Tempting thought, actually.

We get it. You like disco. You're progressive. People who like rock are bad, and most likely KKK members.

Yes, precisely. I was only listening to Trad Gras och Stenar today because I loathe electric guitars so much.

Yeah, but when was the last time you cranked some Speedwagon?

I mean the umms and the uhhhs make me wanna kill myself, no question, but I really like feeling like the person playing records is doing something other that HIS JOB which I guess makes me some horrid authenticist or something but ummm uhhhh ummm whatever

You want wild? Put together the Sex Pistols, Audioslave, and the Wu-Tang Clan - they aren't as wild as Jerry Lee Lewis in his prime.

At last, America has an Alan Partridge we can call our own.

you would THINK that little steven would know that ...

... and speaking about U2, i saw little steven and his band when they opened for U2 in '97. they sucked BIGTIME. and the only group that could outdo them wr2 far-lefty posturing and sloganeering would be (the equally sucky and unlistenable) rage against the machine, from whence audioslave came.

Of all the stupid things Miami Steve said, dissing the JACK was not among them.

THIS IS ABSOLUTE TRUTH. Last week I was in New York and listened exclusively to a dance station and it was fucking awesome.

Welcome back Chicago's Oldies station WJMK, and your favorite DJ's to the Chicago airwaves!

Oh, and they bill themselves as "The greatest hits of the 60s and 70s". No 50s.

BTW, I'm a touch surprised Dan at least hasn't invoked this yet since I'm sure he must have seen it -- but if not:

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail.html

Scroll down to the 'radio' episode, and make sure you have the volume on. It says so much -- and is all true.

When ‘Disco Sucks!’ echoed around the world

30 years ago, a ‘Demolition Night’ riot marked the end of an era

By Tony Sclafani

msnbc.com contributor

updated 6:53 a.m. PT, Fri., July 10, 2009

“Disco sucks!”

It was a catchphrase you couldn’t avoid hearing three decades ago when a backlash started to develop against the ’70s dance music genre that dominated Top 40 radio stations. The resentment culminated in an unexpected riot July 12, 1979 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. It was there fans charged onto the field during a promotional event called “Disco Demolition Night,” after Chicago DJ Steve Dahl blew up a box of disco records.

Smashing up disco records was a stunt Dahl did at area bars, but he got to bring his shtick to a wider audience when White Sox management started arranging publicity stunts to boost attendance. Over the years, the event has come to signify something larger in the culture — a point at which the implicit musical divide between whites and African-Americans became uncomfortably explicit. It also helped kill disco as a viable genre.

The hostility towards disco came to a head less than two years after the movie “Saturday Night Fever” was released, mostly because radio listeners grew tired of how dominating disco had become. Additionally, the music got associated with the lifestyle of the rich and famous because of its connection with New York’s swanky disco Studio 54. That’s ironic, because disco was forged much the way rock music was — by people who were considered outsiders.

“Disco was gay, black and Latin in spite of the fact that probably many of the people who made it happen in a very big way were white,” says Vince Aletti, the first music critic to write about disco. “Many, many people perceived it as a kind of undermining force, like rock ’n’ roll was, in a way.”

The music evolved in New York clubs (“disco” being an abbreviation of the word discothèque), where DJs would get crowds moving with exotic import records. When early club hits like Manu Debango’s “Soul Makossa” crossed over to the pop charts, a trend began to emerge. Before long American artists picked up on it and crafted music to fit the new market. One such artist was Gloria Gaynor, who had two of the first disco hits with “Honey Bee” and “Never Can Say Goodbye.”

“(Those records) were a conscious decision to supply the up-and-coming disco market,” explains Gaynor. “I was working in clubs up and down the East Coast and Midwest, and I was seeing these cabarets being turned into discothèques.”

Studio 54 fever

Soon, white artists picked up on the music. The underground rose to the mainstream when artists like KC and the Sunshine Band and the Bee Gees got Middle America to put on its boogie shoes. Even the sedate Barry Manilow was shaking it at the “Copacabana.”

“When black people dance, that’s regarded as normal, when white people dance it’s regarded as a phenomenon,” explains rock critic Dave Marsh. “Disco isn’t listening music. Disco is active dancer music. That’s what it’s for.”

With the release of “Saturday Night Fever” in late 1977, the trend became a craze. About the same time, Studio 54 became a tabloid fixture when it became the playground of celebrities like Jerry Hall and Andy Warhol and also barred non-beautiful people from entering. Disco was now being associated with social climbing and posh fashion — not exactly the qualities that brought smiles to the faces of metal heads or punk rockers.

According to Paul Natkin, who was assigned to photograph Dahl on Disco Demolition Night, disco became “a lifestyle thing — guys in white suits with their gold chains around their necks. Rock 'n' roll was kind of T-shirts and jeans.”

But Dahl (who did not respond to interview requests for this article) also had a personal stake in the matter, Natkin and Marsh note. He had been fired from his previous DJ job at a rock station when it changed to a disco format. “Here he was out on the street on Christmas Eve,” Natkin explains. “That’s the reason he hated disco as much as he did.”

In other words, one guy with a grudge changed the face of pop music in one night. And yet, radio stations that went disco were just pleasing the public. The “Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack” album sold 11 million copies and the Bee Gees scored four number one hits from it.

Shakedown, 1979
By the summer of 1979, disco was being supplanted as the music of choice among younger listeners by heavy metal, punk rock and new wave. The year started with disco hits by Gloria Gaynor, Rod Stewart, Blondie and Donna Summer holding the top spots — and it seems significant now that the Bee Gees scored their last-ever number one on June 9, 1979, with “Love You Inside Out.” Around this time, radio stations started advertising “Bee Gees-free weekends.” Discontent was in the air(waves).

A changing of the guard seemed to happen in late August when new wavers the Knack took “My Sharona” to number one for six weeks. It also became the top song of the year. Heralding this change was Dahl, who Natkin says used to hold promotional events in bars where he’d dress in a mock Army uniform and break disco records over his head.

The reason for the Disco Demolition Night promotion, Natkin says, is that the two worst teams in the American League were playing a doubleheader and stadium owner Bill Veeck wanted to attract more than the usual 6,000-person crowd. He got his wish. “We pulled up and there were lines around the block,” says Natkin.

After the first game, Natkin says, Dahl went onto the field, “gave his little speech” and offered a box of disco records to be blown to bits. After the explosion, “the whole place went nuts,” Natkin remembers. Fans charged out from the stands, wrecking the field and causing the cancellation of the second game (the first time a game was canceled due to a factor other than weather). Eventually, police were called in.

Dahl, says Natkin, thought the event might make the front page of the local papers the next day, but Disco Demolition Night ended up national news — and controversial news at that. Dahl’s intent might have been to mock the “disco lifestyle,” but his stunt was perceived as having racist overtones. Chic’s Nile Rodgers (who would go on to produce Madonna) later likened the event to “Nazi book-burning.”

“I was appalled,” remembers Marsh. “It was your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead. It was everything you had feared come to life. Dahl didn’t come from Top 40 radio, he came from album rock radio, which was fighting to heighten its profile.”

Gaynor, whose “I Will Survive” had become a disco anthem earlier in the year, agrees: “I’ve always believed it was an economic decision — an idea created by someone whose economic bottom line was being adversely affected by the popularity of disco music. So they got a mob mentality going.”

Disco’s decline was steep. Aletti remembers working at a record label around that time, and his entire department getting renamed: “We became the dance music department. Disco became a dirty word.”

Renaming disco didn’t kill it, of course. Donna Summer still had hits, as did Michael Jackson, Lipps, Inc. and others. But an era had ended. By July 1981, the new wave magazine Trouser Press noticed disco had caught on amongst the English bands that would soon dominate the newly-created MTV. “I hate to break the news, but disco isn’t dead yet,” wrote Robert Payes in a Spandau Ballet review. “It’s just changed owners.”

These days, disco’s echoes can be heard in the work of artists like Lady Gaga, Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head and countless songs. It’s also referenced in seminal works of art such as the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” and the films “Boogie Nights” and “The Last Days of Disco.” As for the music itself, Gaynor says one reason people still take to disco is that it delivered on the egalitarian ideals that early rock ’n’ roll only promised.

“Disco never got credit for being the first and only music ever to transcend all nationalities, race, creed, color, and age groups,” Gaynor observes. “It was common ground for everyone.”

disco not sucking much last night on the dancefloor i was on!

artists like Lady Gaga, Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head and countless songs

ok this suxxx tho

I always looked to radio to play 50s and 60s and 70s because once I was alive and buying music, most of the stuff I really liked was never played there. MTV covered the current and recent shit to an extent before "Parental Advisory" became common on so many records. I always get fucked up when radio/MTV edits of say tracks from "The Chronic" come on because I don't know the words at all. That's when record shops became my friends and I started listening to primarily underground and indie shit that was never ever played on the radio anyway.

I don't have much radio nostalgia because of that and because I only listen to sporting events on the radio now. That said, it makes me a little sick inside when my mom is playing the "oldies" station and they're playing "Caribbean Queen" (a song I love!) but never any Buddy Holly or Fats Domino.

Not to mention that the three most successful/best selling disco acts (Abba, Boney M and Modern Talking) were not even American.

This is utter conspiracy theory bullshit. Disco had died a natural death by by 1979, and Dahl had nothing to do with it. Dance music goes on forever.

Disco had died a natural death by by 1979

Is that how it worked.

No, it wasn't.

Hey, I disliked 'disco' because it supplanted some fine dance musics that were being made around then,

As it says, people like Rod Stewart, BarbStreisand, JMathis, etc, and the BeeGees yup, made 'sort of dance music' that became the crummy mass movement that 'disco' is now remembered as.

The 'oldies' stations are purely about the 'feel-nice' nostalgia that is invoked by hearing "carribean Queen".

Yeah, I'd like to hear some Fats along with the Britney. The Fire along with the Eagles and the BeeGees. But that's never going to happen.

There's something called an iPod, see.

disco sucks

lock thread

I always get fucked up when radio/MTV edits of say tracks from "The Chronic" come on because I don't know the words at all.

sportscenter did a long report last night also marking the 30th anniversary -- more from the "they ruined a baseball field" perspective, naturally. didn't even touch on the race/gender issues. but the video of the riot was pretty funny. one obvious thing is that most of the people on the field had nothing to do with disco sucking or not sucking. it was just a chance to run wild. lots of people running the bases, sliding, i saw a couple of guys pantomiming a player arguing with an ump.

the anti-disco racism and hetero-anger were definitely encoded in the event, but it also just looks like another instance of crazy malaise-y '70s breakdown, the absence of authority, urban decay, all of that. it's sort of poignant to see bill veeck down on the field with a microphone pleading with people to please return to their seats. he seems like a man completely out of his element and his era.

I was 9 and living in Chicago when Disco Demolition happened. One of the most hilarious things I have ever seen. It was awesome. I remember Harry Caray's futile attempts to get people off the field.

"Chic’s Nile Rodgers (who would go on to produce Madonna) later likened the event to 'Nazi book-burning.'"

Gimme a break.

""Chic’s Nile Rodgers (who would go on to produce Madonna) later likened the event to 'Nazi book-burning.'"

Gimme a break.

― Bill Magill"

i kind of hate you

That's a compliment coming from a douchebag like you.

http://www.angelismarriti.it/images/WhenWorldsCollide.jpg

fite!

an unstoppable force meets an immoveable object

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Vq-4bHkxu00/SKRGpaGj7FI/AAAAAAAAANw/vjd84xO8mTw/s400-R/deNiroHeat.jpg

More like

http://dpkgi.free.fr/files/fight.jpg

L-R: McGill, Pipecock

http://slam.canoe.ca/WrestlingImages/wm5.jpg

I don't think "disco sucks" is racist but there were probably a good number of people who participated in this rally for racist/culturally divisive reasons

These days, disco’s echoes can be heard in the work of artists like Lady Gaga, Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head and countless songs. It’s also referenced in seminal works of art such as the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” and the films “Boogie Nights” and “The Last Days of Disco.” As for the music itself, Gaynor says one reason people still take to disco is that it delivered on the egalitarian ideals that early rock ’n’ roll only promised.

So disco was referenced in a hip hop album from 20 years ago... it must be good then.

I'm sure the writer means well, but I hate this kind of "praise." Disco is classic because it's classic, because the people making it did a great job & made fantastic records that still sound great today. Not because Lady GaGa or Whit Stillman like it.

Imagine someone saying "The Beatles' echoes can be heard in the work of [fill in the blank with new indie band] & they are also referenced in seminal works of art such as the Broadway show Beatlemania and [er...] the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique."

http://www.dawhitephotography.com/disco-demolition/slideshow

wow cool

amazing

It's funny how dated that Little Stevens rant is, and it was only five years ago.

shakin little stevens

That Disco Demolition slideshow is unreal. I was 9 and living in Chicago. I remember watching it on tv, it seems like yesterday. Harry Caray went batshit pleading with the crowd to get off the field.