The Daily Swarm

Chicago Reader

“To me, it wasn’t about the disco records being blown up,” White says. “It was everything leading up to it, which is what a lot of these pictures are.” It’s the kids themselves, “blue collar kids, kids whose parents were Sox fans. We were still churning out products in this town. You could still get a job at the steel mill.

“These kids wanted to be part of this experience,” she says. “They wanted to be part of something fun.”

Time Out Chicago

Disco Demolition Day has never been forgotten—especially not by the music’s fans. And there’s actually a nice bookend to DDD. Primarily black Chicago producers never forgot it as they laid the foundation for a whole new genre of music a few years later called house. Note to Steve Dahl: It’s a lot easier to blow up a record than to make one to which people will dance. It’s also worth noting that the stadium was trashed again a month later at a Foghat/Beach Boys concert—which suggests that punters’ beef wasn’t so much with disco as with popular music or just being treated like cattle at stadiums.

The irony of course is that by 1979, disco as a musical form had already run its course, changed rock and proved immensely popular with white audiences. If I have any sympathies with DDD, it’s that disco eventually turned into a very silly marketing term attached to all kinds of bullshit, so it was easy for one to be ignorant of its roots. But rock’s embrace of disco wasn’t simply a matter of crass commercialism. Rock acts were hanging out in New York clubs and picking up the rhythms—and writing about downtown club culture’s polysexual and multi-racial social context. From Rod Stewart to punk rockers, disco had a dramatic effect on music from the ground up. Some still feel that disco actually produced some of the best music Queen and the Clash ever made—it forced those acts to challenge themselves rhythmically and turned on an audience that couldn’t take heavy doses of either’s guitar-driven bombast. The Talking Heads and New York’s arty punk scene would have gone nowhere without disco.