The Great Disco Conspiracy

I have an article
in The New Inquiry today about disco, conspiracies—you
know, stuff like that. Here’s an excerpt:

If you asked the grumblers to come up with
a conspiracy theory to explain the music’s rise, they might say its
secret agenda was to stifle people’s political consciousness, a
version of Abbie Hoffman’s
complaint that disco was “Elegant. Ruling class…Music not
exactly designed to promote community or kindle the passion for
social change.” They might denounce it as a scheme to undermine
black radio, à la the critic Greg Tate’s angry joke that disco
could be called
DisCOINTELPRO.

Most likely, they’d attack it as a plot against rock’s gritty
authenticity, a kind of mind control at work on the dance floor.
Steve Dahl—the Chicago DJ behind the infamous Disco
Demolition Night of 1979, when disco-hating rockers blew up a
bunch of dance records in a baseball stadium—called disco a
“disease” whose victims “walk around like zombies.” In “Tribal Rites of the
New Saturday Night,” a largely fabricated report in New
York magazine that was the basis for the movie Saturday
Night Fever, Nick Cohn described disco as an “automaton
chugging” while “impassive” dancers went through the required
motions. It wouldn’t have taken too much work to turn that sort of
rhetoric into a full-fledged
Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario.

Today, by contrast, we get Jamie Kastner’s The Secret Disco
Revolution, a documentary/mockumentary hybrid from 2012. In
this telling, “beneath disco’s carefully vapid veneer, its
true aim [was] the mass liberation of gays, blacks, and women from
the clutches of a conservative, rock-dominated world.” The narrator
informs us that “a revolution of this scale required revolutionary
masterminds,” though “we can only speculate as to their actual
identity.”

You can read the rest here.