Vinyl Maelstrom

"Disco Sucks!" Could a "Disco Demolition Night" now happen again?

• Ian Forth

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In July 1979 Steve Dahl organised a Disco Demolition Night at a baseball game in Comiskey Park, Chicago. Infuriated by disco music and its chart dominance it was the latest in a growing nationwide "Disco Sucks!" campaign. That night ended in a riot. But some have argued it also ended disco as a genre.

But now, is the distrust between a liberal elite and an embittered midwest back to where it was almost half a century ago? On this episode we look at the weird and unpleasant "Disco Sucks!" campaign and ask: "Could it happen again?"

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“This is now officially the world's largest anti-disco rally! Now listen—we took all the disco records you brought tonight, we got 'em in a giant box, and we're gonna blow 'em up reeeeeeal goooood.”

Not my words but those of Steve Dahl on July 12th 1979. Looked at from 2025 as we record this podcast, you would hope that the idea of an anti-disco rally might not attract too many attendees. But, as we shall discuss, you might be wrong there.

So, let's take a closer look at Disco Demolition Night 1979. What was the background ,what was the context, what was the motivation and what was the aftermath? Let's start with a medium sized dive.

Medium sized dive

What exactly defined disco? Its roots were in African-American and Latin-American music and in gay culture. It started off in NYC nightclubs but eventually became mainstream. T crossover moment was Saturday Night Fever in 1977 where heterosexual stars John Travolta and Bee Gees popularised disco in the United states and elsewhere around the world. Other white stars with broadly black sympathies such as The Rolling Stones with Miss You Blondie with Heart of Glass weren't far behind.

Unlike most musical genres disco was divisive from the outset Time magazine, always keen to put a contrarian right winger as their Man of the Year, described it as “a diabolical thump and shriek”. What they heard sounded too machine-based or mechanical - they couldn't cope with what they regarded as impure music. Some hated the flamboyance and style of dres. Others were angered by its roots in gay culture, including journals such as Rolling Stone famously slow to recognise a progressive trend. By 1979 disco albums and singles were dominating the charts and even the Grammys.

In Chicago meanwhile 24 year-old Steve Dahl was a DJ for WDAI when he was fired on Christmas Eve 1978 as the station, like many others around the country, switched from rock to disco. Hired by rival album rock station WLUP Dahl nurtured a desire for vengeance. Together with his sidekick Gary Meier, he organised an anti-disco army of listeners with the powerful tagline: Disco Sucks. Reactionaries nearly always have the best taglines.

In the first half of 1979 Dahl and his followers provoked a number of incidents, some of which required police intervention. He wasn't alone. In Seattle hundreds of rock fans attacked a mobile dance floor. In Portland a DJ destroyed a stack of disco records with a chainsaw as thousands cheered. 

Comiskey Park in Chicago is home to the Chicago White Sox. It had previously hosted a Salute to Disco with dancers on the field. The management team had the brainwave of a night for people who hated disco. 98 cent tickets were offered to anyone who brought along a disco record for Dahl and Meier to ceremonially detonate between games during a doubleheader game against the Detroit Tigers.

The gimmick was far more successful than the organisers had anticipated. On the night the stadium was not just filled to capacity, there were thousands more people fighting to get in . The dumpster designated for the disco vinyl soon overflowed so many of the excess records were repurposed as aerial missiles. The first of the two games unfolded to a ceaseless chance of Disco Sucks! then Dahl and Meier circled the field in a Jeep wearing military fatigues and revving up the crowd through megaphones.

The explosives were triggered sending shards of shattered vinyl 200 feet into the air. More than 5000 fans saw this as their cue to storm the field, tearing up the grass, kindling bonfires and stealing the bases, until they were dispersed by riot police. The second game of the evening never happened. The mayhem was all televised, making it an international scandal. 

Was disco demolition night a weird historical anomaly? Or something else? Is it symbolic open American demographic the periodically gets ignored but goes away regroups and as we can see in 2025 has returned stronger than ever.

Let’s have an entirely reasonable debate.

Theme One: The Loss of Transcendent Culture

There may be one reason why we wouldn't have a disco demolition night in 2025. And sadly that's not because America has become inherently or subconsciously even less racist. 

It’s to do with the utter fragmentation of popular culture. No more 73m people watching Ed Sullivan, no more, If you're British, chart knowledge gained from Top of the Pops or the Radio 1 countdown, no more finding new music and new styles on the radio. In short, like water cooler conversations of last night TV have also gone out the window, there's no more shared, communal experience of pop culture.

Jon Savage in his book ‘England’s Dreaming’ identified the end of the 70s in the UK as the moment at which music became forever pluralistic and postmodern. In other words, the time when a transcendent culture ceased operating. What we can see in Chicago in July 1979 is a snapshot from a previous world when there was still a fight on for who owned musical culture. That hasn't entirely gone away but the idea of there being one winner and one loser feels redundant – in music, if not in the wider world of politics.

Theme Two: The Success of DDN

Would it be too much to see the Anti-Disco War as a key inspiration of today's identity politics and culture wars?

Well, I think anyone who studied the phenomenon will arrive at the conclusion that when threatened, white young mid-western Americans band are very good at organising a resistance movement. The architects of MAGA were no doubt taking notes. And the proof of this comes in what happened to disco in the aftermath.

In the short term, this disco backlash seemed to work. Donna Summer's  ‘Bad Girls’ led an all-disco top three in the Billboard Hot 100 that week, remained at number one for five weeks and was succeeded by Chic’s ‘Good Times’.   But that was ironically the end of the good times. The last gasp of disco's chart supremacy after two years during which it accounted for three in four chart-toppers. Across the land, radio stations who had not long ago switched from rock to disco hastily U-turned, while thousands of discotheques closed their doors. Records sales bolstered by disco's glory days of 1974 to the Saturday Night Fever-fuelled high of 1978 fell by 11% in 1979, and the major US record labels began to look elsewhere for cash cows: to hard rock, new wave and power-pop – in short, white music.

But did DDN really kill disco? Many would argue not at all.

Theme Three: Disco Lives!

Those who are experts in the field point out that Neanderthals haven't disappeared at all. Not only do we have a few percentage of Neanderthal DNA in nearly all of our systems, it may well be that it provided much needed resistance to the COVID pandemic just passed.

People talk about Latin as a dead language, but not only does it provide the logic and grammatical framework for those who study it, even for those who don't Spanish Portuguese Romanian Italian and French are direct descendants of the Latin language. Latin Lives!

In a similar way disco lives on today. It's the antecedent of hip-hop, house music and electropop, to call out its most obvious descendants. Disco has evolved to survive and done so brilliantly well.

Theme Four: The Voice of Progress

What all of those musical genres encapsulate is the voice of the city. And, consequently, the voice of progress.  And the voice as a consequence of multiculturalism, of feminism, of minority rights, and of pro-gay culture. So, you could, if you wish, see disco as an incredibly important bus stop on the journey from blues music to the music we have today.

Typically in America the inhabitants of the mostly rural Midwest are not interested in progress. To be reductionist they're more interested in making America great again which, let's not beat around the bush, means a return to white male straight isolationist values. Other countries didn’t have a Disco Sucks movement because although there are undoubtedly reactionary racist demographics in other countries, none of them perceived disco to be the direct assault on their values as Midwest America did.

The antipathy to disco, seen through this prism, is indistinguishable from the chequered history of America. And whenever you think that America has moved and buried its racist past, along comes a George Wallace or a Donald Trump to revive their very own Disco Demolition Night.

“Could you envisage such a thing happening today? Could you imagine thousands of knuckle-headed Nickelback fans protesting Madonna's latest album?

Thankfully not. In an era when all music is just a click away, when gay culture is embedded in the mainstream and America has a black president, it would be nice to think minds have expanded. Thirty years on, the "Disco sucks!" campaign was clearly a resolute failure. But for a while it had an industry quaking in its Cuban heels.”

Those words were taken from a 2009 article written by Ben Myers. Its title is Why disco sucks sucked and the subheading is The Disco Sucks campaign in 1979 had racist and homophobic undertones and 30 years on has proven to be a resolute failure.

If only we could be so optimistic in 2025. It's hard not to see the origins of the Proud Boys and the worst excesses of the MAGA demographic and indeed specifically the storming of the Capitol in 2021 as having their origins in the Disco Sucks campaign. 

Perhaps the most hopeful aspect of all of this is that the pendulum does eventually swing back.