1979
144 videos • 486,945 views • by DJDiscoCat I could feel something in the air in late 1979, some kind of change of the force. I had been weaned on disco and it kept on getting bigger and bigger and BIGGER until that summer when Steve Dahl used that economic malaise to burn the disco out. It ended with a big bang (literally, since the vinyl Farenheit 451 event did just that with pyrotechnics on the ball field) on July 12, 1979. The crowd then exploded onto the field, running amok and venting their dissatisfaction by starting more fires, damaging the venue and having sex. Dahl had every reason to want to crush disco since he had lost his job at a radio station that switched formats to disco. At the time, the US was taking hits on many sides, all time lows for US currency and they had become too dependant on foriegn oil so "inflation" was something you heard a lot of. Then, in November of 1979, President Jimmy Carter announced that terrorists had taken control of the US Embassy in Tehran. A gallon of gas was 0.86, a new Mercury Cougar went for $6400 and you could own a home for about $14,000. People were fleeing to the movies to forget their troubles and saw films like "Alien", "Apocolypse Now", "Kramer VS Kramer", "The China Syndrome" and "The Amityville Horror". TV diversions inlcuded "Mork & Mindy", "Happy Days", "M*A*S*H", "Three's Company" and "The Love Boat". Disco was at its absolute flaming peak and the heat was fuelling an anti-disco sentiment that radio programmers had been informed would be a lucrative opportunity. A study of 15 - 25 year old Canadians had been completed by John Parikhal, who reported the complaints that disco was seen as being "superficial, boring, repetitive and short on 'balls'" and used this to advance his agenda to spear the anti disco movement by influencing radio programmers to discard the format. For me, disco brought us all together, and very tightly I might add. I cannot tell you the number of times I was body to body in the hottest clubs and no one cared, hell anyone who got elbowed always got an apology. The way it joined all segments of society by enveloping elements of R&B, Soul, Jazz and then Rock was impressive. Chubby Checker's "The Twist" was a #1 in 1960, fell off the charts only to reappear and top the chart a second time in January of 1962 is first example of this enveloping phenomenon. It happened because the song was discovered by the kids of the era in 1960, who danced it all year long in the clubs and this alerted their parents who began to go out to dance the Twist and buy the record to drive the song to the top of the chart again in January of 1962. In 1979, the kids danced, the clubs played and radio joined them so the adults became aware of this new music at almost the same time. Unfortunately, this is why disco splintered into a million shards of radio formats, because the very definition of disco included this embracing element of genres that could be put to the beat. The second issue was the glut of garbage "disco" issued by record labels, substandard singles that should have never been released. Even through that muck, "Hot Stuff", "YMCA", "I Will Survive" and "Bad Girls" continue to make everlasting impressions on radio listeners ears today.