When a loudmouthed DJ tried to kill disco, the homophobic and racist implications were impossible to ignore
It was black music. It was gay music. And the “disco sucks” movement said, “burn, baby, burn”
Steve Dahl had his dream job as a boisterous disc jockey at Chicago’s WDAI, the city’s longtime rock station. But as midnight struck on New Year’s Day 1979, the station abruptly changed its format to disco. Dahl claims he was fired. When he resurfaced at WLUP that spring, he declared war on the music that had rendered him unemployed.
Every day at his new gig, Dahl began playing snippets of disco records, dragging the needle across the vinyl, and cueing the sound of an explosion. Listeners loved it. Soon he was printing “kill disco” membership cards and destroying more records at “death to disco” rallies. But the night Dahl made history was July 12, 1979, when he promoted the “Disco Demolition” at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Fans who brought a disco record could attend a doubleheader between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers for just 98 cents. The park expected a few thousand extra attendees; 59,000 showed up. After the first game, Dahl, wearing a military uniform and driving a Jeep, drove onto the field, where thousands of records had been rigged with dynamite. He blew them to smithereens, leading the crowd in a chant of “Disco sucks!”
Dahl thought that would be the end of it. But his fans, who’d indulged heavily in beer and marijuana, had brought extra records. They swarmed the field and threw them on the heap, creating a huge bonfire. The field was ruined, forcing the White Sox to forfeit the second game.
Dahl thought he’d be fired. He woke up a celebrity. The story had gone national, and not in disco’s favor. Michael Clarke Duncan, future star of the film The Green Mile and a disco fan, was at the game. “Nobody wanted to wear the platform shoes in the following weeks,” Duncan told Steve Knopper, author of Appetite for Self-Destruction. “Nobody wanted to wear the bell-bottoms. People were like, ‘Ah, that’s getting kind of old now.’”
Duncan wasn’t kidding. “Disco” was suddenly a bad word, and the record industry reacted swiftly. In just over eight weeks, the number of disco songs on the Billboard Top 10 went from six to zero. Nile Rodgers, the guitarist for the hit disco band Chic, found himself blacklisted. “People weren’t answering our phone calls,” Rodgers recounts in Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died, by Dahl, author Dave Hoekstra, and photographer Paul Natkin. “And then the ‘disco sucks’ thing became very real. It was scary.”
To a lot of people, it was also racist and homophobic.
Disco was created by black and Latino musicians in the early seventies and popularized by mostly gay DJs for a mostly gay crowd celebrating new freedoms earned by the gay rights movement. With its funky bass lines, four-on-the-floor drum grooves, and glossy production, disco drove people to the dance floor. In Turn the Beat Around, author Peter Shapiro called disco “the embodiment of the vision of peace that the 60s yearned for.” Disco accepted everyone. Rodgers concurs: “People were transgender and everybody felt comfortable. This was the world I wanted to live in, where everybody was cool with everyone … That was because of the music.”
Then, in 1977, came the film Saturday Night Fever. Its plot, revolving around straight white working-class Brooklyn kids, was a fiction, as was the portrayal of disco dancing, with John Travolta, as Tony Manero, showboating and puffing out his chest. “Disco dancing was fundamentally communal,” writes Shapiro, “not the grandstanding displayed by Manero.” The polished soundtrack, by Australian pop rockers the Bee Gees, wasn’t the best representation of the genre, either. “[It] had most of the hallmarks of disco,” Shapiro writes — “the bouncy bass lines, the cod-Latin percussion, unmacho male singers, etc. — but it was really the kind of pure pop that works in any era given a rhinestone spit shine.”
Nevertheless, Travolta’s charisma and the perfectly crafted soundtrack redefined disco for the mainstream. By 1979, there were 20,000 discos across America. Disco crowded rock out of the Top 40. Record labels flooded the market with subpar, watered-down tunes from the likes of Donald Duck and aging Broadway singer Ethel Merman. Like any cultural juggernaut, discomania invited criticism. While the attacks on the genre were allegedly about the music, there was a lot more happening beneath the surface.
Not everyone saw the war on disco as racist or homophobic. In the intro to The Night Disco Died, actor and comedian Bob Odenkirk says that Dahl, the rock DJ who started the whole thing, was merely lampooning seventies culture as a whole, and that disco was the easiest target. “Was [Disco Demolition] a ‘homophobic event’ at its core?” Odenkirk asks. “No.”
Dahl himself writes: “I’m worn out from defending myself as a racist homophobe for fronting Disco Demolition.” He maintains that his own grudge was over the loss of his job and his beloved rock station, WDAI.
And what about his fans? Dahl and Hoekstra point out that they were mostly blue-collar teenage males from Chicago’s South Side. Mainstream disco’s glamorous New York image didn’t resonate with fans hobbled by a bad economy, high inflation, and the loss of many Rust Belt industrial jobs. “Dress up? No. Dance lessons? Hell, no. Cover charge? No,” writes Dahl. “There was a lot of intimidation and disenfranchisement, especially if you were a male.”
Rolling Stone journalist Dave Marsh looked at it differently. In his 1979 year-end review, he wrote, “White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist.”
Journalist and music writer Philip Cornwel-Smith echoes that notion, telling Timeline that the sense of disenfranchisement was “a strand of purist white pathology” that “projects the notion of others taking over, and invasion, when the minority in question gets a modicum of freedom.” After all, he says, “disco is the music of the emergence of gay pride identity going public. No mistaking that.”
Dismissing such sentiments, Dahl blames VH1’s 1996 documentary The Seventies for amplifying what he calls the “the racist and homophobic tones of Disco Demolition.” (He missed his appointment to be interviewed for the program.) Even if that is true, Dahl’s LP destruction wasn’t an isolated phenomenon. Nine months before his big stunt, San Jose DJ Dennis “Erectus” Netto, of KOME, had scratched disco records to the sounds of toilets flushing. L.A.’s alternative station KROQ had buried records at a “funeral for disco.” A Portland disc jock had cut up disco records with a chainsaw. And New York’s WPIX, which had hosted the first disco radio show, switched to all rock in 1979 and began breaking disco records on the air. Ads for “Death to Disco” and “Shoot the Bee Gees” shirts ran in Rolling Stone. Detroit Rockers Engaged in the Abolition of Disco (DREAD) issued membership cards to those who pledged not to wear platform shoes, zodiac T-shirts, or three-piece suits. Politicians even piled on; J.B. Bennett ran for state senate in Oklahoma on an anti-disco platform, calling it a “corrupting influence on our young citizens.”
But the most conspicuous evidence of the bigotry that drove the movement revealed itself by way of Twisted Sister, the New Jersey hair band, which smashed records with a sledgehammer for concert crowds.
Guitarist Jay Jay French claims it wasn’t a race thing. “To me, it seemed like a Brooklyn John Travolta cliché versus guys wearing jeans and T-shirts and sneakers,” he says in the documentary We Are Twisted F**ing Sister! Many find this hard to accept, noting that at a show in upstate New York, the band hanged an effigy of Barry White.
As frontman Dee Snider writes in his memoir Shut Up and Give Me the Mic, “The people there were screaming, ‘Kill the nigger!’” As proof that the band’s intentions weren’t racist, Snider pointed out that, “we had a Puerto Rican guitarist in the band and one of our former drummers was African-American.” According to Snider, the band quickly explained to the club owner that the hanging was just a critique of disco as an art form. As Snider tells it, the owner replied, “You hung a nigger. People around here love that.” (French says he was “disgusted by it.”) Needless to say, writes Snider, “it was the last night for that.” The band stopped hanging Barry White, built an electric chair, and “fried” white disco singer Andrea True instead.
The anti-disco movement, not surprisingly, died out with the death of disco. Many who didn’t come face-to-face with that kind of ugliness look back on “Disco Sucks” with fondness. “I’ve often thought that the intentions of Dahl and those who attended Disco Demolition are in the eye of the beholder,” writes Tal Rosenberg in a Chicago Reader book review. “Most of the participants, in retrospect, view the event as mere horseplay. [But] those who saw it from the outside, or were disco fans, tend to interpret it as a frightening and dumb display of prejudicial anger.”
Or, as the record producer Simon Napier-Bell tells Timeline: “The ‘Disco Sucks’ movement was totally anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-gay, anti-everything else that didn’t subscribe to the right-wing rednecks’ idea of what America should be. The people who joined it were the Trump voters of the moment.”
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