The current Woke vs. MAGA divide social and political impasse in the US can seem insurmountable. However, as is always the case in such situations, a better understanding of history would be an enormous step in the right direction.
Often, the roots of conflict are not what we think. Sometimes, real and perceived threats are met with fear and miscommunication. Then, over time, mistrust accrues. Then, disagreements can start to be perceived as personal attacks. And then comes the hate. Unfortunately, humans can very easily lose sight of the true interests and motivations of others, even though we all want mostly the same things in life.
The Disco vs. Rock divide of the 1970s is not only a prime illustration of such problems, but it is very much a story at the root of how we got to where we are today and what could be called the Woke vs. MAGA divide. This is a story of how politics and culture can get muddled, how narratives become disconnected from the truth, and how difficult issues get ignored. Of course, if we can unravel this bit of music history, we can better understand the real concerns and fears faced by the proverbial “other”, in 2024. We could possibly even find common ground between the Woke vs. Maga (yes, it exists) and better focus on our most pressing problems.
Music, in general, has some special qualities that can afford remarkable insights into society at any given moment in time. Music can reflect societal factors, such as economics or politics, while also reflecting peoples’ innermost feelings. This is seen in the stories of most major music phenomena. The blues, for example, began at a very specific time and place for a reason (Mississippi, 1890s), as did punk rock (New York, 1970s), as did rap (the Bronx, 1970s), and so on.
The stories of disco and ’70s hard rock are no different. Here, many critical aspects of American life, including class, race, economics, and music, all come together in a particular and illuminating way. What it exposes are the understandable concerns of both the straight, white male rock crowd and a minority-based disco crowd of being dominated by the other. From there, it will be seen how those fears got distorted and, ultimately, how they can be reconciled.
Music Happens for a Reason
The brief backstory is rock ’n’ roll’s ascension from the American South in the ’50s, crashing racial and class boundaries and upending the country’s cultural mainstream. In the ’60s, new musical subgenres quickly took root. Due to various cultural, commercial, and racial factors, however, what would come to be known as just rock, as spearheaded by the British Invasion, would come to be understood as a “white” genre, while R&B, soul, and funk would largely be seen as “Black” ones.
What else was happening? In the decades after World War II, the US dominated the world economy while much of the rest of the world dug out of the rubble and worked to reestablish their industries. Then, US military power would fall short in the drawn-out and divisive Vietnam War. Socially, great progress was made in women’s and civil rights. Into the ’70s, women and racial minorities continued to break into workplaces that had long been the sole domain of white males, in part via anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action. Also, the first stirrings of a gay rights movement were happening.
Economically, competing foreign economies were regaining their footing by the ’70s. Then, vast numbers of US manufacturing jobs were sent overseas to cheaper locales; unions were weakened; an OPEC oil embargo shook the economy; the US took the dollar off the gold standard, causing its value to drop significantly; and worker productivity began to outstrip pay, and it would for decades to come. These factors, plus the enormous bill for the Vietnam War, and despite the US being the wealthiest nation in history, led to a severe recession in the mid-’70s, especially felt across all working– and middle-class demographics. (Economic Policy Institute, n.d.)
American society was thus shifting in myriad, unexpected ways. Working—and middle-class white males were seeing their established domestic and societal roles and economic futures called into question. That is not to say that this demographic had it worse than everyone else, but many felt pressure from multiple directions.
The Rise of Arena Rock
Musically, these same factors helped set the stage for certain rock artists of the ’70s. These were talented, mostly all-white, blues-based artists with sonic power, bold sexuality, and an epic sound that could fill stadiums. Where straight white males were experiencing serious social instability, this hard rock filled a void and empowered millions, e.g., Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Van Halen, and others. The genre was further characterized by swaggering, “sex god”-type lead male singers (e.g., Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, the Stones’ Mick Jagger), who were more accessible to their fans than were Black soul singers (e.g., Al Green, Barry White), along with guitar gods playing powerful riffs and virtuoso solos (e.g., Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, Van Halen’s Eddie Van Halen).
Dancing had been integral to rock ‘n’ roll’s origins. For various reasons, however, the practice faded out of not only ’70s rock but with white men in general. As a result, white males became associated with a certain stiffness on the dance floor. Reasons for this vary, though one theory is that as white males were more dominant in society, not dancing reflected a cautionary state meant to avoid public embarrassment and thus maintain their status. (Cosby at 220-221)
Non-white, non-heterosexual men and women often had very different life and cultural experiences. Many liked rock well enough, but they also found music that better fit them, often including dance music. In short, as minorities lacked the same social capital that white males enjoyed, dancing had long been a traditional way of liberating what they could control: their bodies. (Echols)
The Rise of Disco
In the early ’70s, strong Black and Latino dance club cultures took root in Philadelphia and New York, set to dance-oriented funk, soul, and R&B. Around the same time, underground, gay dance clubs took hold in New York. Those were deejay-centered venues with similar soul- and R&B-based dance music. For the gay community, these clubs were even more essential as communal spaces for reasons of basic physical safety. These scenes overlapped and came together in a new genre called disco (taken from discotheque, the French word for dance clubs).
In the early and mid-1970s, disco was strongly associated with the Philly Soul sounds of Black artists at Philadelphia International Records and songs like the O’Jay’s “Love Train” and MFSB’s (Mother Father Sister Brother) “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)”. The latter is the main theme song for the then-popular, Black-oriented, dance/variety TV program Soul Train.
The most important aspects of dance music were, of course, the beat and how it sounded on the dance floor, as opposed to on records or the radio. Disco thus relied on repetition, synthesizers instead of power-guitar chords, and vocals were often more buried in the mix. Also, while women singers were rare in ’70s hard rock, they were strongly represented in disco. Finally, minority groups continued to look forward to better futures—outside the mainstream—which also translated into futuristic styles and characteristics like synthesizers. By the mid-’70s, disco had become very popular in the mainstream. (Echols at 10)
The Disco vs. Rock Friction
Of course, disco sounded very different from rock, and most rock fans would not like or even “get” disco at all. Nonetheless, each genre allowed its respective fanbase outlets to express themselves, have fun, and otherwise have a voice in the world. To make a long story short, rockers of the ’70s had Led Zeppelin and songs like “Whole Lotta Love” and Van Halen with “Everybody Wants Some!!,” while the disco crowd had the Trampp’s “Disco Inferno” and Gloria Gaynor with “I Will Survive.” All was well in music land, more or less.
Then came the blockbuster John Badham’s disco-themed movie Saturday Night Fever (1977). John Travolta is the film’s ultra-suave, disco-dancing star. Travolta’s character—straight and white—is decked out in an iconic and flamboyant, all-white suit and became something of a model of cool from 1977 to 1980. Saturday Night Fever did not reflect the actual world of discos particularly accurately, including making the dance scenes less about partners and more about Travolta’s character taking over the spotlight as the disco-dancing champion. Nonetheless, the film elevated disco to a full-blown pop culture phenomenon. Disco songs dominated the pop charts even more, especially hits from the movie’s smash soundtrack from the British group the Bee Gees, including “Stayin’ Alive” and “You Should Be Dancing”.
Disco continued to be commercially exploited to the hilt. Discotheques popped up by the thousands in shopping centers across the US, though these scenes more reflected the Saturday Night Fever-version of discos. The bizarro-novelty hit “Disco Duck” went to number one on the charts. Even venerable rockers like the Rolling Stones (“Miss You“) and the Grateful Dead (“Shakedown Street“) recorded disco songs. In the mainstream view, however, disco was associated with either the new, diluted disco scene or the overwrought, celebrity glitz of the famed New York City nightclub Studio 54, while on the radio, it was acts like the Bee Gees with synthesizers, string sections, and falsetto vocals.
This disco surge hit a nerve for many suburban white male rock fans. Not only did they not like the music, but they also lacked an appreciation of how disco came to be and why many assumed it had no cultural significance—it was just more corporatized, mainstream fluff. Rock was certainly many things (e.g., extremely male-centric, aggressive) that disco was not (e.g., not male-centric, loose). In the eyes of rock fans, rock was what good music was—and disco was not rock.
Far more problematic, though, disco’s overwhelming presence further contributed to the rock crowd’s sense of social instability. Would rock be squeezed out as the defining cultural force in America? What would be left?
Rock deejays and fans were so unhappy that the phrases “Disco Sucks” and even “Death to Disco” became popular and appeared on hats, T-shirts, and bumper stickers. The most infamous expression of rocker outrage came in 1979 when Chicago rock deejay Steve Dahl, the vocal leader of the movement, organized a “Disco Demolition Night” promotion for the Chicago White Sox baseball team. Rock fans brought vinyl disco records to Comiskey Park, and between games of a doubleheader, Dahl blew the records up on the field. The event got out of hand, and the charged-up rockers stormed the field, causing significant damage.
In a 2016 interview, Dahl asserted, as he and the rock crowd had in 1979, that the outraged response was not about race or homophobia. Said Dahl, “We didn’t blow up Jimi Hendrix records, we didn’t blow up the Chi-Lites [a Black soul group], we didn’t blow up David Bowie [a rocker who had publicly identified as bisexual]. It was really just about the music.” Dahl further explained that the suburban white male rock fans were simply afraid of having their “rock-and-roll identity stripped” from them. That is, mainstream society would expect the rock crowd to conform to this new status quo, i.e., the suave, disco dancer-type, or otherwise be entirely marginalized. Dahl and his fans, and the millions like them across the nation, however, did not believe that they would ever be able to fully assimilate and be accepted into such a society. They thus saw the intensely angry disco backlash as a rational response to an immense, almost existential, threat. (McNearney, 2022)
Dahl’s explanation certainly seemed sincere enough, and it wasn’t hard to see the rock crowd’s basic concerns. However, under even a little scrutiny, Dahl’s explanation is shown to very much be the sort of cultural disconnect as today’s Woke vs. MAGA disconnect. Regardless of what one thought of disco music then, Disco Demolition exemplified a confused mixing of culture with certain social, economic, and political realities.
First, it was hard to say who was “threatening” the rock crowd. In 1977, mainstream music fans wanted a fresh, new sound and to dance. Nobody was stopping the rock crowd from continuing to listen to and love whatever music they wanted. Of course, it was also very well understood at that time that disco was strongly associated with the Black, Latino, female, and gay communities. As an example, a writer for the seminal rock magazine Rolling Stone noted at that time that “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 the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.” (Marsh, 2018)
Notably, one usher at Comiskey Park on the night of Disco Demolition was African-American Vince Lawrence, later a pioneering deejay in house music, a direct descendant of disco. Lawrence noted that many rock fans did not, or could not, make a very basic distinction in the records they brought to destroy: “A lot of the records were not disco records but BLACK records – Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder.””(Meares, n.d.) Nile Rodgers of the disco/funk group Chic later recalled, “It felt to us like Nazi book-burning, this is America, the home of jazz and rock, and people were now afraid even to say the word ‘disco.'” (Greene, 2019)
Yet the implications of the Disco vs. Rock divide go further still. Consciously or not, Dahl’s stated view was oblivious to how disco came to be and how vital it was to so much of its fanbase. Dahl saw a dire threat in which a rock fan’s very “identity” was being threatened. Conversely, attacks on disco and sentiments like “Death to Disco” were not to be taken personally by disco fans: “It was just about the music.” It was a remarkable double standard. Clearly, things went beyond just what music people chose to listen to. (One could scarcely imagine how a “Death to Rock” movement would have been received.)
Still, another issue was the fear that rock fans would be outside of a dominant cultural trend—and be permanently marginalized. That sort of exclusion was essentially the problem non-suburban white males had always dealt with. Exclusion was precisely why and how the dance/disco culture had come to be in the first place. Now, for the first time, the rock crowd saw what even unintended structural discrimination could look like. It was unsettling.
The Disco vs. Rock dilemma was thus a traditional, heterosexual white male perspective of how they wanted society to be, as opposed to the perspectives of most other demographics. But does one group ever need to dominate the other entirely, either in music or society, as if it were a zero-sum game? Certainly, disco and its core fanbase never set out to take over rock.
The Disco vs. Rock Divide | The Woke vs. Maga Divide
At the heart of today’s core conflict of Woke vs. MAGA are the same dynamics of the Disco vs. Rock divide carried forward since the ’70s. A strong disco influence is seen through the ’80s in, for example, artists like superstars Michael Jackson and Madonna; even the rocker Prince, to some degree; many early, disco-sampling hip-hop artists; and post-disco acts like New Order, while in hard rock there would be major artists like Van Halen, Aerosmith, and Guns N’ Roses. These acts’ fan demographics and these same basic conflicts then continued through the so-called “culture wars” of the Reagan administration ’80s, the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama years, right up to the current Woke vs. MAGA divide.
So, here we are—and with a million-dollar question still needing an adequate answer: What was the intensely hostile, anti-disco response all about? We’ve discussed five reasons for the divide thus far: 1. American society was no doubt expecting too much change from white males all at once; 2. Many rockers only saw the Travolta/mainstream version of disco; 3. Disco tapped into understandable insecurities of American white males (e.g., economic concerns, an uptightness/”stiffness”); 4. Many white American males had never experienced and thus did not appreciate how devastating institutionalized discrimination could be; and 5. Consciously or not, white males may well have wanted to best ensure that their interests would at least stay above those of minorities.
These cultural issues are significant, though they are not the core issues. Also, and thankfully, they can be worked through and resolved.
No one wants to ever be marginalized or stripped of their identity. Thus, moving forward from the current Woke vs. MAGA divide must include working to reconcile matters and adjust attitudes. It can be the bold, individual rocker and the communal vibe of disco. In the ’70s, that would mean accepting both the hyper-masculinity of Kiss’ “Love Gun” and the Weather Girls’ anthem, “It’s Raining Men“. Ideally, it is also looking for the best of both worlds whenever possible, like a melding of the swagger of rockers Aerosmith on “Walk This Way” with disco star George McRae’s sensual and soulful “Rock Your Baby“.
As to those differences in the Woke vs. Maga divide that are not as easily resolved? People can worry about their own business and, otherwise, live and let live.
This leads to what does seem to be the core issue: economic factors. Again, disco’s core demographics were not responsible for the decisions that most hurt the middle- and working classes: the shipping out of manufacturing jobs, a weakening of unions, over-relying on foreign oil, weakening the dollar, and allowing productivity to outstrip wages. Nonetheless, disco’s core demographic was negated and even scapegoated for reasons beyond just music. It would, thus, seem that, to a large degree, disco was a more convenient and more tangible target than the identified problems with the powerful, overarching economic system.
At least since Saturday Night Fever, understandings of these cultural and economic issues have been plagued by miscommunication and misinformation in America’s national discourse, politics, and media. Things have only worsened, almost exponentially, with the immense problems wrought by the internet and social media. Today, the true motives of the proverbial “others” have become further misunderstood. It has become more difficult for people to understand how the “others” amongst them could have come to see the world as they do. This has led to immense mistrust, and differences come to be seen as personal attacks when this happens. And then comes the hate.
How did groups of middle—and working-class Americans become so hostile to one another? It seems that today’s Americans need to listen to some ’70s disco, like O’Jays’ “Love Train” (“People all over the world . . . Start a love train”), and rock, like Led Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven” (“When all are one, and one is all, yeah, To be a rock and not to roll”). Maybe then we can focus on more important issues.
Works Cited
Cosby, James. Rock Music, Authority and Western Culture, 1964-1980. McFarland & Company. February 2024.
Echols, Alice. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. W.W. Norton. March 2011
Greene, Andy. “Flashback: Watch ‘Disco Demolition Night’ Devolve into Fiery Riot“. Rolling Stone. 12 July 2019.
Mishel, Lawrence. “Growing Inequalities, Reflecting Growing Employer Power, Have Generated a Productivity–Pay Gap since 1979: Productivity Has Grown 3.5 Times as Much as Pay for the Typical Worker”. Economic Policy Institute. 2 September 2021.
Marsh, Dave. “The Flip Sides of 1979“. Rolling Stone. 25 June 2018.
McNearney, Allison. “The Night Rock Fans Rioted to Kill Disco-at a Chicago Baseball Game“. The Daily Beast. 10 October 2022.
Meares, Hadley. “The Night When Straight White Males Tried to Kill Disco“. Aeon. (nd) Accessed June 24, 2024.