Disco for Kids

All Around This World classes teach lessons about disco for kids to children and their families. First, we DANCE! Then, if big kids and grown-ups want to learn more about disco, we start here.

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.

Disco particularly developed in east coast cities like New York and Philadelphia where there were communities of African-Americans and Latinos that were not included in the “mainstream” of the ’60s counterculture. These communities mixed with forming movement composed of “out” homosexuals and “liberated” women all of whom met in “discotheques” where they danced exuberantly all night. [Visit DiscoMusic.com for “A Complete History of Disco.”]

P.S. The term “discothèque” first appeared in France in the years before World War II, at first referring to a library of records, or “discs”–think of the French word for library, “bibliothèque,” but for records–then to clubs where records replaced live music. When the German army occupied France during World War II the Nazis banned “decadent American” bebop and swing music; French youth flocked to underground “discothèques” where they would defy their occupiers and dance.

Learn about THE RISE OF DISCO.

Learn about THE FALL OF DISCO.

Learn how DISCO HAS RISEN AGAIN.

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