When a DJ called on listeners to destroy disco records in a Chicago stadium, things turned nasty – and 40 years on, the ugly attitudes behind the event ring out loud and clear
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People weren’t just turning up with disco records, but anything made by a black artist. “I said to my boss: ‘Hey, a lot of these records they’re bringing in aren’t disco – they’re R&B, they’re funk. Should I make them go home and get a real disco record?’ He said no: if they brought a record, take it, they get a ticket.” He laughs. “I want to say maybe the person bringing the record just made a mistake. But given the amount of mistakes I witnessed, why weren’t there any Air Supply or Cheap Trick records in the bins? No Carpenters records – they weren’t rock’n’roll, right? It was just disco records and black records in the dumpster.”
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Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone suggested that there was something distinctly ugly about the vast crowd of white men publicly destroying music predominantly made by black artists, dominated by female stars and with a core audience that was, at least initially, largely gay. “White males, 18 to 34, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and … to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.”
Nichols says that disco’s dominance was, for some of the haters, inseparable from issues such as busing and affirmative action, initiatives designed to reduce racial segregation in US schools and colleges. Fear of disco, she says, was partly “the fear that American identity was no longer synonymous with whiteness. DJs in Detroit formed a disco vigilante group called the Disco Dux Klan. Originally, their efforts were going to involve wearing white sheets and robes – they got rid of that part of it. And then there were people like Steve Dahl, for whom disco represented a sort of emasculation: you couldn’t wear a scruffy T-shirt and jeans, you had to get dressed up and, worst of all, your girlfriend or wife expected you to humiliate yourself by fucking dancing. Some of the push back against disco also had to do with feminism.”
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