Forty years on, Disco Demolition Night remains one of the most controversial events in pop history. Last month, when the White Sox commemorated its anniversary, it attracted widespread criticism from Billboard to Vice and the Economist, of a kind that was absent in 1979. Then, only Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone suggested that there was something distinctly ugly about the vast crowd of white men publicly destroying music predominantly made by black artists, dominated by female stars and with a core audience that was, at least initially, largely gay. “White males, 18 to 34, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and … to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.”
Dahl remains defiant. He didn’t respond to a request for an interview for this feature, but made his position clear in the 2016 book Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died. “I’m worn out from defending myself as a racist homophobe,” he wrote. “The event was not anti-racist, not anti-gay … we were just kids pissing on a musical genre.” Moreover, he was defending “the Chicago rock’n’roll lifestyle” from an unwanted musical invasion. The rise of disco to mainstream success on the back of Saturday Night Fever’s unexpected success was “a repudiation of all things rough – like rock’n’roll and bar nights” and “demean[ed] the ordinary life that kids inhabited”.
To understand Disco Demolition Night, you have to understand how commercially dominant disco had become in the US at the time. Of the 16 singles that made the top of the US chart in the first half of 1979, only three were not disco tracks. The previous year, disco singles had been No 1 for 37 weeks out of 52. “In any big city in America, you could turn the radio dial and catch disco on as many as five or more stations,” says Alice Echols, cultural historian, academic and author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. “It had pushed AOR not to the margins precisely, but classic rock didn’t have the dominance on radio that it once had. Live music venues were increasingly switching over to disco.”
This didn’t please everyone. “Even though record labels were making a lot of money off disco, they were holding their nose,” she says. “They were worried about it crashing, but they wanted it to crash so they could go back to classic rock. There was also a grassroots anti-disco movement, a national effort on the part of people involved with AOR. There were people who thought it threatened their livelihoods, because of its gobbling up of live venues; there were people who just thought it sounded plastic and synthetic and commercial; there were people who were just nakedly racist and homophobic.”