The Dialectics of Disco

While researching Disco; The Times; The Music; The Era the realisation began to dawn on me that the formalist objection and resistance to the music and movement which spawned the true Disco experience, essentially came from frightened, conservative stooges of the fundamentalist rock music hegemony.  Because disco originated among gay, Hispanic communities and expanded to include people of all races and sexual orientation, it was the very epitome of a dialectic materialism, as defined by VI Lenin; 'it insists on the absence of absolute boundaries…on the transformation of moving matter from one state into another, that from our point of view [may be] apparently irreconcilable with it, and so forth.' Vladamir Ilyich could rock a mean downbeat, too. 

What the fundamentalist rock absolutists who comprised the odious 'Death to Disco' movement failed to understand, was that they were witnesses to, and complicit in, the end of their times. The predominantly white, male, homophobic and racist mob who invaded Comiskey Park field on the night of July 12, 1979 did so in objection—they thought—to the fact that Disco music had usurped their beloved 'rock' music on America's airwaves. In fact they were reacting impulsively and negatively to the natural process of the mature free market capitalist state which had birthed, exploited and enslaved them. They were outmoded, of no use to an emerging orthodoxy which would inevitably make them and their mistaken teleology extinct.

For that reason, the regrettable events at Comiskey Park resemble nothing as much as a Klan meeting, only without the hoods.  
In much the same way that the current Tea Party Republicans are waving their replica muskets at an inevitable development of materialism in a manner which resembles a congregation of turkeys demanding that everyone eat turkey for Thanksgiving, so invading hordes of 'rock' fans burned vinyl demanding that freedom of speech, sexuality, racial tolerance and artistic expression be banned. 
What would Elvis have thought, one wonders? Where would 'rock' music have been if those hordes of 'rock and roll has got to go' idiots who trashed vinyl and exhibited the same level of reasoned opinion as the Death to Disco advocates had in the mid-1950s?

Of course, after the release of Saturday Night Fever the Disco movement engulfed vast swathes of the suburban first world, from Pomona to Queens, from Basildon to Boulogne and from Vancouver to Rio. As it did so the nature of the movement altered, organically, materially and significantly. Disco flowered from subcultural roots to become the dominant international pop cultural orthodoxy. Previously anti-disco record companies bought into the music-altering skills of people like Tom Moulton and encouraged rock stars and mainstream entertainers  to record unfortunate disco numbers. Any recording which featured a dance beat, strings and electronic drums was considered 'disco' and the general public bought into the idea that Disco began in 1978 and ended in 1985.

In the true nature of dialectics though, there is no beginning or end to disco. And as long as we have Lady Gaga, Disco will continue to exist in a cycle which, 'Is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of being conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation' (Frederich Engels).

The dialectics of Gaga though—in which even heavy metal thunder is transposed onto Disco—is a whole other blog.