I am building playlists of bad novelty disco lately. This stuff was omnipresent. Disco was a force for good until the white straight dudes got involved.

I don't think there was anything wrong with straight white men getting involved in with disco music. The problem was when straight white men decided that they had to destroy disco.

You’re wrong, and I’ll just use the name “Darryl Dragon” as my rebuttal. Nevertheless you will always be my favorite.

Dragon isn't really known for Disco. I didn't see anything in his wikipedia about Disco. Was Captain and Tanniel disco? What about the Bee Gees? They made great contributions to disco.

It just occurred to me that hip hop is disco's revenge.

How about Disco Toilet, Left Me Cookie At The Disco from Sesame Street, and any song from MAD's Disco Album, such as Disco Clap and Disco Suicide.

There are many disco novelties, you could ad Chassidisco Fever, there are several songs with titles like Disco Dog, the disco version of Mah-Na-Mah-Nah, by I think it's Lipstique, on Tom And Jerry records.

I'll stop now, otherwise I'll sit here for too long thinking about it!

Boomer

I'd call Captain and Tennille disco era pop, but they did one album I'd consider their disco album, Make The Move, with Happy Together, which is disco in all its fullness.

You Never Done It Like That could be considered a slow disco-rocker.

Disney did a disco album with the song Macho Duck.

Disco was initially the expression of the female, the queer, the ethnic minority, and the European 2nd World. If the straight white man was invited in, it was at Studio 54, and it was after submitting to very specific rules of expectation established at the door.

Once Saturday Night Fever happened though, the point of the exercise was lost. The movie is about a guy dealing with his own fears about sexual inadequacy, the uneasy interplay between fashion trends and expectations of masculinity, and the rules of sexual pursuit in a post-Feminist, post-Summer of Love America. It's a very serious movie but unfortunately it also had a really great soundtrack, and that pushed this very niche urban subculture into broader Americana, and that led to the typically gross cheapening that brings about.

Novelty was, at the time, a really serious part of the record business. It wasn't really until Weird Al Yankovic that it was pushed into the nerdy reputation it has now. Novelty still has a major place in British and Japanese music cultures, but in America, novelty is strictly an outre deal.

The disco era was really the last gasp of a mainstream novelty culture in the United States. Rick Dees and Dr. Demento killed it.

I guess it could also be argued that SNF and the mainstream attention it gave disco was the very thing that led to straight white males wanting it destroyed.

I don't know if hip hop can be considered the true successor for disco. Sure disco records were sampled for some of hip hop's earliest hits, but hip hop was never really a genre that gave female and queer voices much room.

Disco diffused. Post-Punk absorbed most of the loss in the New York scene and the crash against Disco wasn’t nearly as brutal in Europe, so Disco there mutated into either New Wave/Darkwave synthpop and early Goth. In some places it never even died, like Italy and Germany. Hip-hop definitely absorbed the more obviously African-American aspects of Disco.

Losing Disco was the last time novelty had any playtime outside of exclusively the career of Weird Al, and that’s because listening to Weird Al is just listening to the original song with slightly different lyrics. MTV had a very strong reaction against the vaudeville tendencies of network music shows, so the performative aspect got lost.

Disco was the last time that women, queer and black were unified as one cultural movement. Burning disco records in the baseball field was a huge chaos magick ritual that ushered for the era of Reagan. We still suffer from that one tribal exorcism to this day.

Wow. I could read a book on your thoughts about this.

Disco didn't die, it became hi-nrg which became house (and a bunch of other things but mostly house) which is once again the most popular music in the world for like the third or fourth time since I hit puberty in the late 80s.

That said, the latest revival did peak a few years ago.

Depends on who is considered the bigger puppet.