Many commentators have often given punk rock full credit for sweeping away the cobwebs that had collected on the popular music industry during the early 1970s. However, disco reached a much wider audience, and was also a far greater commercial success. Its insistent, light and lively rhythms freshened up the music scene in the late 1970s to a greater extent than punk’s self-destructive minimalism ever did. Any artist wanting to be regarded as alert to new ideas during this time made a disco-influenced record, including Blondie with “Heart of Glass,” the ROLLING STONES with “Miss You,” ABBA with “Voulez Vous” and “Dancing Queen,” and Rod Stewart with “Hot Legs” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” These were among the best disco records, which explode the myth that disco was an unsophisticated musical genre.
The centrepiece of disco’s success was Saturday Night Fever, the soundtrack album from the 1977 film of the same name, starring John Travolta. It remained at the top of the U.S. charts for 24 weeks between January and July 1978, and became the biggest-selling soundtrack album ever. Two decades after its release, it had sold 40 million copies worldwide.
The group that made the biggest contribution to Saturday Night Fever was the Bee Gees, three Australian brothers who had previously enjoyed success in the 1960s with BEATLES-style ballads. They decided to change direction in the mid-1970s, resulting in their 1975 single “Jive Talkin’.” The song appeared on the Saturday Night Fever album along with their “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever,” and “More Than a Woman,” classic disco numbers. Fellow artists on the album included K. C. & The Sunshine Band, Tavares, and Kool & The Gang. Donna Summer and Chic were other prime exponents of disco.
Discotheques—from which the music acquired its name—had existed since the 1960s. These were dancehalls where young people could move around to music without having to worry about such passé ideas as learning formal dance steps. The film Saturday Night Fever celebrated the American—and more specifically, the New York—weekly ritual of going to the discotheque. However, it did more than that, it gave the young of the late 1970s a new music, designed for the discotheque environment which might be anything from the local community hall to the celebrity-packed Studio 54 in New York. Usually, live bands were dispensed with, and the popularity of a discotheque depended largely on the quality of the records played by the disc jockey.
In disco music, the guitar—the prime instrument in most 1970s rock bands—was relegated to the lesser role of a rhythmic device. Fluid bass lines became prominent, as did pounding, repetitive drumbeats. Disco songs were written to a specific number of beats per minute, so that DJs could seamlessly merge one record into another without interrupting the dancers. In Europe, this trend toward loud, pulsating dance music resulted in a different type of disco music. It featured almost entirely synthetic studio productions (using electronic percussion, strings, and keyboards) that resulted in a mesmerising, repetitive, almost frenzied, hi-tech sound. The work of the German band Kraftwerk produced several albums that epitomised this minimalist style.
By 1980, the disco craze was over. However, it had opened the ear of the public to dance music. As a result, artists such as PRINCE and MADONNA were able to exploit the music’s potential. They did so during the 1980s, making great dance music with clever lyrics and instrumentation. It also paved the way for the more intense and extremely diverse forms of dance music of the 1990s.
Graham McColl
SEE ALSO:
DANCE MUSIC; FUNK; JUNGLE; POP MUSIC; RAP.
Fleming, Jonathan. What Kind of House Party Is This?
(Slough: Mind In You Publishing, 1995);
Haa, Erikka. Boogie Nights: The Disco Age
(New York: Friedman/Fairfax, 1994).
Saturday Night Fever (soundtrack);
Chic: C’est Chic; Donna Summer: On the Radio.