In re-releasing Disco Demolition Night IPA, Left Field declares that the event in question, perhaps one of baseball's more ill-conceived promotions, was "homophobic, racist and sexist". This comes directly from wikipedia, which until 2019 had credited Barbara Amiel with one more husband than she actually had, according to her autobiography. But what would she know? It took several decades to think this one up. No one was saying anything of the sort at the time.
While I was not in Chicago on the 12th of July, 1979, I was very much alive and the issue people had with disco had nothing to do with anyone's demographic. For starters we did not know what most disco performers looked like. Believe it or don't, no one had access to the internet in 1979 and music videos were a rare commodity, largely restricted to Don Kirshner's television show if you could stay up that late. Many albums did not feature photographs of the performers and we did not have much of an idea as to what people in the music industry got up to in private, nor were we interested.
Disco was the purple loosestrife of music, an invasive species which squeezed out more meritous music from rock, pop, jazz, classical radio and beyond. Its pinnacle was the wealth-ridden emptiness of Studio 54.
The accompanying Spotify playlist does a better job than I can of highlighting how very shallow, lacking and inadequate disco music was. Expressed as gently as I am able, it does not reward repeated listening.
It is such a shame that people believe they can fool others into thinking better of themselves by denigrating other people from several decades earlier for what they fantasize they were thinking at the time.
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