Death to Disco.

Music has always interested me. It started with my dad handing me Donna summer and Bee-Gees cassettes telling me to listen to them. When I was younger, I played the violin all of middle school and high school. In my group of friends, it was always me pushing to go to concerts and it wasn’t until I was in college that I went to my first rave. It was at that rave that I knew that my long journey with music had finally reached its destination.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about trance music and where it stands in the greater scope of both electric dance music and music overall. Researching trance made me want to go deeper to watch more documentaries and read more articles about EDM. So, with this post I want to go back to the very beginning of electric dance music and that is house music.

Music is a reflection of the culture.

In the early 1970’s rock was the popular music at the time but that started to switch towards the second half of the decade. Disco started gaining popularity and after being featured in hit films like “Saturday Night Fever”, it was solidifying its place in pop culture. This did not bode well for rock fans as they saw the music as tarnishing American values since this was a genre that stemmed from “homosexuals, blacks, and latins”.(How awkward for me because I am both latin...and a homosexual ) This all came to a head in what ended up being called “Disco Demolition Night.”

On July 12, 1979, 50,000 people showed up to a Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tiger baseball game to burn disco records. The White Sox were forced to forfeit the game as a riot broke out in the field with many people injured and intensive damages done to the stadium. Soon after that popularity of disco declined, and record labels were even forced to re-label disco music as dance music. Disco had literally been wiped out of American culture and forced to retreat to the underground. Deep into the underground. And it was there where disco transformed.

It was in the warehouses where disco was taken apart and remixed. With the creation of the synthesizer, technology started being applied to music. Beats and rhythms were elongated, and different sounds were even applied to the songs. It wouldn’t be unusual to hear pioneer DJ Frankie Knuckles play a set with disco beats infused along with sounds effects of a train getting louder and louder. After his sets, he’d pass out cassettes of his mixes to everyone. Before you knew it, his music had reached thousands of people. The style of music travelled from Detroit to London and just like that…a new genre had been born.

Fast forward to today, where is house music now? Check out the clip below

DJ: Claptone Venue: It'll Do Club Song ID: Talk to Me - Cloonee