Disco’s 15 Minutes

Future Past
Disco  Link

By the late 1970s a lot of people had gotten pretty tired of what had been left of the American pop music scene after the British Rock invasion in the mid-1960s. Rockers were a dime a dozen by 1977 even though their music was still very popular with the beer-drinking and pot-smoking counterculture that had spawned on the heels of head-banging American rock-and-roll. Southern Boogie bands and Heavy Metal bands and even Glitter Rock were about to be upstaged by a pop music phenomenon that had less to do with rebellion and more to do with celebration.

Disco had arrived.

Disco music was much more than just another wave of night crawlers who had come out of the American nocturnal woodwork to act up, act out and carry on until three in the morning. It meant people could now dress up again when they went out. It mean that there were more musical instruments in the world than the electric guitar, harmonica and drums. There were brass horns, electronic keyboards, electronic percussion instruments now. Violins and flutes were making a comeback, only they weren’t playing stiff-necked, watered-down versions of old worn-out rock songs for elevators or mood music for a new generation of Beatniks or Hippies with no place to go as 1980 rapidly approached. Disco bands played upbeat dance music for couples to dance to while touching one another once again.

It wasn’t Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey but Disco was certainly something to celebrate in its own right. It’s just too damn bad that the new counterculture that invariably attached itself to Disco music eventually turned out to be twice as socially rebellious, drug-related and lascivious as the previous rock-and-roll and just plain rock culture. Beer and pot were quickly replaced by cocktails, cocaine and an unflagging desire to be bad when the world so desperately needed people to start being good again.

By 1980, all the counterculture freaks had arrived, as they always do whenever creative minds give the world something new and wonderful, and by 1982 Disco's death rattle was heard around the world. And, yes, Disco may have “died”, as its retractors are always fond of saying, but the Punk Rock, New Wave, “Grunge” Rock and other flash-in-the-pan musical fads that eventually replaced it unfortunately played host to the same counterculture of predictable moral decay and wanton behavior, just like a mutating virus that simply moves on once its host is sucked dry and all washed up.