Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group Macho Man · Village People The Best Of Village People ℗ 1978 The Island Def Jam Music Group Released on: 1994-01...
you're not just gonna both sides the debate about disco music's sudden and total implosion... there are reasons that the genre as a pop cultural cornerstone bottomed out, and same with punk music I would argue, and part of that is because it wasn't something that big labels and corporations merely acquired and opportunistically latched onto, these entities literally invented and tailored it for consumption.
rap and hip hop on the other hand have always been an organic bottom-up artistic tradition that, while largely commercialized and subsumed within corporate consumerist tastemaking, can't functionally ever be rid of its very real & genuine connection to Black experience. disco never had anything to do with real life experience, or like... anything?
Let’s just look at the names of some of the most famous disco songs and think about how well these things “sell you shit.”
We Are Family
It’s Raining Men
Boogie Wonderland
It’s Your Thing
Workin Day and Night
Last Dance
Shake Your Groove Thing
Stomp!
I Love Music
Disco Inferno
It’s pure dance music. Does that also make it easier to commercialize it, yes? Remember the song “For the Love of Money” by the O’Jays? The opening to the apprentice. What does that song actually say? All the shitty things people do for greed. “The root of all evil.” Kinda ironic huh? What about another O’Jays song “Love Train” telling people to start a love train all around the world. Then used by capitalists to sell us a shitty beer. But let’s blame the artists for their music being bastardized by capitalists?
For the Love of Money is soul/funk and so is Love Train
It's Your Thing is funk
Stomp! is decidedly after disco, and It's Raining Men is mostly after disco too...
And I Love Music is very much a funk song, and imo sounds like some 1960s showtune with the string part. I am being real here, but there's a reason that the disco backlash was so major across genres.
Michael Jackson is the artist who pretty much single-handedly brought America out of the dreary times and replaced disco
All of those songs played at discotheques across the world throughout the 70s early 80s. If you want to create your own idea of what fits in a genre that’s fine, but it doesn’t fit the lived reality to the music people were calling disco at the time nor what what people call disco today.
So we’re gonna totally forget the origins of hip hop were disco tracks? This music had nothing to do with the experience of black people, but the genres that were birthed from it were?
Hip hop has not always been about the experience of black people nor is it now. One could argue it’s a tool for capitalists to paint a vivid picture of black culture that is inherently not palatable to white people in order to embolden racism. But once again it’s a whole genre of music. Painting it with wide strokes to encapsulate all the different fine strokes of the genre will never give a full understanding.
If you look at most the hip hop songs people listen to today it’s telling you to buy something so others will like you or take some drugs to make yourself feel better. And they’re even “killing” hip hop as we speak by making it a fusion genre. So eventually hip hop will die as well and something else will become the popular music. This is how genres work.
Lil Jon is amazing, John Travolta kinda sucks lol
Part of the genre is commercialized therefore the whole thing is commercialized.
you're not just gonna both sides the debate about disco music's sudden and total implosion... there are reasons that the genre as a pop cultural cornerstone bottomed out, and same with punk music I would argue, and part of that is because it wasn't something that big labels and corporations merely acquired and opportunistically latched onto, these entities literally invented and tailored it for consumption.
rap and hip hop on the other hand have always been an organic bottom-up artistic tradition that, while largely commercialized and subsumed within corporate consumerist tastemaking, can't functionally ever be rid of its very real & genuine connection to Black experience. disco never had anything to do with real life experience, or like... anything?
Let’s just look at the names of some of the most famous disco songs and think about how well these things “sell you shit.”
It’s pure dance music. Does that also make it easier to commercialize it, yes? Remember the song “For the Love of Money” by the O’Jays? The opening to the apprentice. What does that song actually say? All the shitty things people do for greed. “The root of all evil.” Kinda ironic huh? What about another O’Jays song “Love Train” telling people to start a love train all around the world. Then used by capitalists to sell us a shitty beer. But let’s blame the artists for their music being bastardized by capitalists?
For the Love of Money is soul/funk and so is Love Train
It's Your Thing is funk
Stomp! is decidedly after disco, and It's Raining Men is mostly after disco too...
And I Love Music is very much a funk song, and imo sounds like some 1960s showtune with the string part. I am being real here, but there's a reason that the disco backlash was so major across genres.
Michael Jackson is the artist who pretty much single-handedly brought America out of the dreary times and replaced disco
All of those songs played at discotheques across the world throughout the 70s early 80s. If you want to create your own idea of what fits in a genre that’s fine, but it doesn’t fit the lived reality to the music people were calling disco at the time nor what what people call disco today.
It's Your Thing was around before anyone was calling anything "disco music"
Let me point out this one song on your list that isn’t quite disco. Okay...
No I made the point about like 5 of the songs lol
So we’re gonna totally forget the origins of hip hop were disco tracks? This music had nothing to do with the experience of black people, but the genres that were birthed from it were?
Hip hop has not always been about the experience of black people nor is it now. One could argue it’s a tool for capitalists to paint a vivid picture of black culture that is inherently not palatable to white people in order to embolden racism. But once again it’s a whole genre of music. Painting it with wide strokes to encapsulate all the different fine strokes of the genre will never give a full understanding.
If you look at most the hip hop songs people listen to today it’s telling you to buy something so others will like you or take some drugs to make yourself feel better. And they’re even “killing” hip hop as we speak by making it a fusion genre. So eventually hip hop will die as well and something else will become the popular music. This is how genres work.
r&b & funk & a lot of jazz tracks too