Under the current critical consensus, disco was a tide of musical innovation and cultural liberation. But Kastner's thesis didn't come from nowhere. The filmmaker doesn't really think a radical cabal cooked up the world of mirror balls and hi-hat beats.
In this telling, "beneath disco's carefully vapid veneer, its true aim the mass liberation of gays, blacks, and women from the clutches of a conservative, rock-dominated world." The narrator informs us that "a revolution of this scale required revolutionary masterminds," though "we can only speculate as to their actual identity." Today, by contrast, we get Jamie Kastner's The Secret Disco Revolution, a documentary/mockumentary hybrid from 2012. It wouldn't have taken too much work to turn that sort of rhetoric into a full-fledged Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario.
DISCO CULTURE AMP MOVIE
Steve Dahl-the Chicago DJ behind the infamous Disco Demolition Night of 1979, when disco-hating rockers blew up a bunch of dance records in a baseball stadium-called disco a "disease" whose victims "walk around like zombies." In " Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," a largely fabricated report in New York magazine that was the basis for the movie Saturday Night Fever, Nick Cohn described disco as an "automaton chugging" while "impassive" dancers went through the required motions. Most likely, they'd attack it as a plot against rock's gritty authenticity, a kind of mind control at work on the dance floor.
Ruling class….Music not exactly designed to promote community or kindle the passion for social change." They might denounce it as a scheme to undermine black radio, à la the critic Greg Tate's angry joke that disco could be called DisCOINTELPRO. If you asked the grumblers to come up with a conspiracy theory to explain the music's rise, they might say its secret agenda was to stifle people's political consciousness, a version of Abbie Hoffman's complaint that disco was "Elegant. And the stuff was all over the radio, sometimes replacing other formats entirely and sometimes subverting them insidiously, as rock bands added disco sounds to their songs and as white singers invaded the playlists of black stations. Disco culture was said to be consumerist and celebrity-obsessed: a milieu where fashionably dressed somebodies could carouse inside a club while the nobodies were stuck behind the velvet rope outside. People called the music mindless and shallow, a bunch of imbecilic boogie-oogie-oogies over a monotonous, robotic beat. In 1979 there seemed to be an endless supply of disco-and an endless supply of disgruntled grumblings about disco.
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