In the 1970s in the United States, depending very much on who you asked, the new genre of urban dance music known as “disco” was either a stunning musical embodiment of recently emergent liberation movements for women, African-Americans, Latino and homosexual men or a kind of music so flagrantly apolitical it required a violent response. The late ’60s in America had been an intense and exhausting time of social and cultural change. By the early ’70s enough people were tired of politics, tired of interracial violence, tired of war, that they welcomed a kind of music whose stated goal was to make them dance. This week we’re going to meet some of our favorite disco icons and land squarely on the side of disco being AWESOME. Disco fever!
