What The CleanTech Industry Can Learn From The Fall & Revival Of Disco

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I was born a few years after disco went out of style. By the time I did anything other than listen to my parent’s music, it had kind of become a joke. By the time I was in high school (the time when most people are really forming their musical tastes), we had scenes in movies like this one, where it wasn’t just a joke, it was the joke:

While Mystery Men was a fantastic campy film that itself parodies the excesses of the superhero genre (excesses that have only become more wild since the film came out in 1999), the Disco Boys (a group of villains in the film) did teach me that there’s more to disco than just the music. What I didn’t realize in high school was that it was more than music, dance styles, and clothing. Like the man says, to some people it was LIFE.

Recently, I learned a lot more about not only disco culture, but how it fell. Unlike, say, the decline of techno music or the end of emo, disco had a somewhat violent and controversial end as the 1970s drew to a close. The complex and often bigoted reasons for the end of disco, as well as its recent revival, can tell us a lot about what happens when tradition clashes with the new. It can also tell us a lot about how politics can rear its ugly head, and even technological advances can be imbued with meanings that baffle logic.

Most importantly, there are some interesting parallels between today and when disco died out that can teach us how to avoid a dark age for clean technologies.

Disco Demolition Night

You can’t discuss the end of disco without talking about Disco Demolition Night. Today, there aren’t any events like it when a musical genre slips into obscurity. Even when physical media like CDs and tapes were still around, there was no night where thousands of people gathered to make a big pile of them and literally destroy the pile with explosives. Old music just kind of goes away without so much as a whimper.

But disco’s decline arrived with explosives, vandalism, and a riot on July 12, 1979, in Chicago. Between two games in a baseball double-header, over 50,000 people gathered to watch Steve Dahl, a rock DJ who lost his job when his station went disco, destroy a big pile of disco records people had brought to the stadium. After the explosion, thousands of fans poured out onto the baseball field and began destroying things. People who remained in the stands sent records that hadn’t made it into the pile flying like frisbees. After almost 40 minutes of vandalism and even fire, police arrived and dispersed the riot after arresting 39.

By the time all was said and done, the field was too destroyed for the second game to be played. Careers were ruined. This marked the beginning of the end for the disco genre. It quickly declined in popularity as more people realized that hating disco was socially acceptable. But we’re left with an important question: Why was disco so disliked by some people that it led to such a violent event?

Why Disco’s Demise Was Different

While it’s easy to look at the event and the riot as a silly thing about musical tastes gone wrong, many people didn’t see it that way, even in 1979. Dave Marsh at Rolling Stone pointed out that it was a lot more than just a sudden shift in the music industry. Disco hadn’t produced the kind of profitable superstars that rock had produced in earlier years, even if it was successful as a genre. So, the record companies really felt a need to do something to appeal to the 18–34 white male crowd that had propelled hits like Hotel California into orbit.

”The antidisco movement, which has been publicized by such FM personalities as notorious Chicago DJ Steve Dahl, is simply another programming device. White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium,” he said.

Dahl, the organizer of the Disco Demolition Night, denies that bigotry had anything to do with the event, but Marsh was far from the only person pointing out that the anti-disco movement had a bigotry problem. Nile Rogers from the band Chic said it was like a Nazi book burning. University of East London professor Tim Lawrence said that he thought the music executives were to blame. Political journalist Mark W. Anderson said that it was a chance for conservatives to push back in a cultural and demographic war. Historian Joshua M. Zeitz pointed out that the event coincided with the abandonment of the political center and a shift right toward Ronald Reagan.

What these commentators were aware of at the time was that disco represented something more than just a musical style. It was a cultural phenomenon that rejected traditional social and sexual norms. While there were many straight, white people into disco, the clubs that played it were more inclusive than other clubs. People of all races and sexualities would participate in the dancing, and then move off to the sides and margins of the club for public sex that didn’t always follow the rules society imposed outside of the club.

In fact, discotheques (clubs that played records instead of hosting live bands) were among the first clubs that allowed same-sex dancing in the 1960s as they imported the idea into the United States from Europe. The connection between inclusivity and disco culture was well-known throughout the 1970s even as it went mainstream. It was also known as a spiritual successor to the hippie movement.

Conservative society didn’t like the idea that disco was letting all of these people into the mainstream, and they felt a compelling need to put a stop to it. In this sense, we could look at the Disco Demolition Night as a sort of equal but opposite reaction to the Stonewall Riot after a decade of insecurity with cultural change. After disco and its associated culture was suppressed, the LGBT community was suppressed in the 1980s and even more in the 1990s, a trend that today’s far-right conservatives are desperately trying to bring back.

Since disco fell out of mainstream favor, other successor music movements picked up the mission to represent minority interests. Rap and hip hop, music-mixing DJs, techno/EDM, and even pop music picked up a lot from disco’s ashes.

Today, disco is coming back as mainstream society continues to reject suppressing minorities and the LGBT community, and clashes over more mainstream sexual issues like abortion gain prominence in the electoral realm. The conflict that disco served as a proxy war for is far from over, and the violence is both present and in danger of rising.

What Clean Technologies Can Learn From This

Today, the idea that hating something as a proxy for something else is familiar. The idea of a “liberal latte” is a good example. There’s nothing inherently political about grabbing a drink at the local Starbucks, but we’re seeing cultural battle lines bring politics and division into places it has never been before.

We’ve seen this happen and then happen again with EVs. Conservative culture, fueled by fossil fuel political donations at the top, has long attempted to cast the rejection of fossil fuels as “gay” or effeminate. More recently, Elon Musk siding with sexually and racially repressive conservatives has led to Tesla’s vehicles becoming a conservative choice. This has led to a backlash from progressive culture, with open derision and hostility to the owners of the Cybertruck in some cases.

It doesn’t really make sense until you consider that overt attacks on people are still seen as mean-spirited in mainstream society. To avoid consequences, haters of all kinds try to use proxies to attack each other. Everything from EVs to Espressos bear the brunt of it.

The most obvious thing a clean technology company can do to avoid problems is try to stay out of the culture war. This can work if a company has been truly neutral and focused on technology in the past, but when a company shifts from supporting one side to neutrality, it’s hard to get out without being seen as shifting to support the other side.

Really, it’s hard to stay out of politics when politics can’t stay out of your business. Politicians like Trump don’t allow neutrality. If you’re making things better for them, you’ll be OK. If you’re hurting their interests with clean technology, they’ll find a way to hurt you. Project 2025 (which really is a Trump-backed plan) is chock full of ways that the far right wants to gut clean technologies.

I’d argue that 2024, like 1979, is not a time for neutrality. Clean technology companies should still try to focus on the their missions, of course. They also shouldn’t be expected to toe every Democratic Party line on every issue that doesn’t affect the company. But, clean technology companies should at least be aware that the same cultural movement that suppressed something as seemingly trivial as a flavor of music to hurt its enemies wouldn’t hesitate to squash them like a bug if it suited them.

Featured image: a screenshot from the original broadcast of Disco Demolition Night (Fair Use).