Straight white male snowflakes! (Naturally!) Disco was before my time, but I had always been intrigued by the brevity of the genre. Why was it so popular one minute and then seemingly extinct the next? Was the music really that bad all of a sudden? Well, PBS answered my curiosity in the American Experience documentary, “The War on Disco.” I had no idea that Disco had roots in the civil rights movement — Black, women, and gay. I certainly had no idea that the backlash to it was yet another example of the culture wars and white straight male fragility. But I guess I should have expected nothing less from America, as usual. I don’t know what it is about humanity that constantly fears the invisible, the irrational, and perhaps the inevitable. Have humans learned absolutely nothing in our many, many millennia of existence? You can’t fight change. So, why not just embrace it? But, no! Humanity is far less enlightened than we like to give ourselves credit for and far more benighted than we want to admit.
In the case of Disco, it would appear that white straight male snowflakes were aggrieved because the Disco genre of music was so popular — and apparently, these indigent men were being strapped down to chairs and forced to wear headphones as a means of torture or indoctrination or both. And because the music was considered elitist. Poor, poor snowflakes! Straight white working-class men couldn’t get into the cool night clubs — e.g., Studio 54 — to dance with people and to music they hated. The oxymorons write themselves! It was the music of the “oppressors” (read, Dicso) versus the “oppressed” (read, Rock’n Roll). Once again, white straight snowflakes were afraid and felt put upon because minority groups like Blacks, women, and the gays had a niche in music that the mainstream liked. Evidently, too many radio stations switched programming from the “less popular” Rock’n Roll to the more demanded Disco! Oh, my! Clutching of the pearls moment! It’s not like Rock’n Roll was falling out of favor or hard to find because Disco was crowding out the market. Hardly! God forbid people should have to muster the energy to tune the radio knob to another station! Only the whites can’t be bothered to literally change the station. Of course! Of course! Of course! Can’t have that. Oh, no! Got to keep those “others” in their place. Can’t have this sub-culture “infecting” the white, straight, cis civilization. God forbid!
In fact, The Loop radio station (all Rock’n Roll all the time) was born out of the Disco backlash, and the name and format live on (via streaming). (The actual frequency is now Christian music programming — vomit!) Thankfully, House music — my favorite — was also born from the death of Disco. One could say everyone won, but it remains a disgusting fact that the only reason Disco died is because racists, misogynists, and homophobes couldn’t handle the truth, namely that minorities co-existed with them and deserved freedom, too, which Disco represented. Indeed, the singular event that killed Disco occurred at Comiskey Park whereby white straight snowflakes, led by the disgruntled D.J. Steve Dahl, felt the need to release their inner caveman by rioting on the baseball field to blow up Disco records. (Imagine that! They hated something so much that they had to “kill it” by blowing it up. Sound familiar?) It is laughable to hear Steve Dahl defend his anti-Disco stance (contemporaneously and many years later) as nothing but a hatred of the music itself (that got him fired) and not a backlash to the counterculture movement. Of course, it was. (As an aside, Steve Dahl benefitted from getting fired because he was immediately hired by The Loop, no doubt, making more money than before and working for a station that would become the most popular frequency in Chicago for decades.) To be sure, the Disco backlash was always understood to have the simmering undertones of hatred against the “other.” Disco was the embodiment of a minority movement. To hate Disco was to hate everything it stood for and represented; there was no separating between hating the beats and the people who danced to it!
Fast forward 50 years, and not a single f***ing thing has changed! Humanity is exactly the same. Only the year and the background have changed. White straight men and women are still aggrieved by everything. They’re still all snowflakes. Sadly, this documentary only reaffirmed my theory that nothing has really changed. For as much as snowflakes fret an evolving world, they definitely have not. They still hate just as much now as they did then. They hate all the minorities just the same. They are close-minded just the same. The only difference is we call them MAGA morons and RepubliKKKlans today. Welcome to stupid America. The year may be different, but the hate is unchanged! I expected nothing less!