Hardcore for Nerds

Punks in the strobelight.

andrewtsks:

screwrocknroll:

becausegoodbye:

An example: in the 70’s and early 80’s, disco was contentious on a scale that any music today would stuggle to be. The hatred that punks held for disco, it really seems, flew like a national flag. Liking both punk and disco would have been incomprehensible in 1980, but nowadays, seeing that kind of discrepancy on an iPod doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. In recent years, the combative push-and-shove of music cultures seems to have mostly given way to the floating-cloud model of anchorless mp3’s. Rebelling, to other kinds of situating. Which is not to say, of course, that there isn’t still an awful lot of reacting going on; just that the anti-establishment narrative (once entirely fitting) feels pretty dated now, in terms of describing what’s actually going on.

It’s important that this rewriting of history never takes hold. Punk and disco were never the enemies they’ve been retconned to be. Punk and prog — sure; punk and classic rock — absolutely; but punk imagined itself to occupy the same downtown space as other marginalized social groups, such as gays and blacks, who were responsible for disco. Liking punk and disco wasn’t incomprehensible in 1980; the two forms abutted one another on the same album. See, The Clash’s “The Magnificent Seven” (Sandinista!, 1980) and Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” (Parallel Lines, 1978) for a couple of the more obvious examples.

Disco backlash, exemplified by Disco Demolition Night, was about reasserting white, male control over pop music and — I’ll just throw this out there — it might have been so resonant among people because it was the first time baby boomers saw the rock ‘n’ roll music that had been awarded to them in their youth slipping away from dominance.

Rock took longer than that to die, and when it absorbed punk into its hegemony, I suppose some of the old stories about disco became attributed to punks as well, because, you know, punk was about real music, and everyone knows that rock ‘n’ roll is real, just like everyone knows disco was not real.

Another quick anecdote—the early 80s DC hardcore kids all loved go-go. There’s a great story on one of Henry Rollins’ more recent spoken word albums about he, Ian MacKaye, Brian Baker, and several other DC hardcore luminaries showing up at a Trouble Funk gig in their neighborhood in 1981, and being the only white kids there.

So yes, the idea that there was some rivalry between punk rock and disco back in 1980 is absolutely a retcon, on so many levels. That’s the perfect term for it.

I don’t think that ‘retcon’ is a good term at all, because history isn’t a consistent, plotted narrative like one is meant to find in a TV show - it’s only consistent to the extent that it’s real and is known to be real, it’s certainly not plotted out like ‘this is where punk is going’, and is basically surrounded by all the interpretations and misunderstandings that make it interesting. 

“It’s important that this rewriting of history never takes hold.” Perhaps it’s inaccurate, and accuracy is important - but opposing it with yet another rewrite is just as bad. Additionally, it makes history into an instrument to support a particular view, rather than evidence in a discussion. Evidence has to be accurate but what’s truly important is the argument made with it, and how that stands up.

And if the argument being made here is that there was no antithesis whatsoever between punk and disco, then I’m suspicious. The Clash were no ordinary punk band, especially not in 1980 and with Sandinista!, while Blondie were not classically punk to the extent that they took on other sounds, like disco. And just like ‘punk’ doesn’t stand for all forms and opinions of the movement as if they were one homogeneous mass, neither does ‘disco’ represent all forms of dance music at the time. I’m not saying that there wasn’t an affinity, even at times a striking affinity, between the two forms, but that that doesn’t exclude an enmity at other times and between other parts. 

On the characterization that “punk imagined itself to occupy the same downtown space as other marginalized social groups, such as gays and blacks”, on the one hand, and that “Disco backlash… was about reasserting white, male control over pop music” on the other, it assumes a rather uniform and progressive outlook on a series of complex social scenes which draws more from the present than the past. Of course there were many that were progressive, but others that weren’t (or misunderstood the significance of their particular imagined spaces). Hypothetically, what I imagine could have happened is that the music coming out of a shared downtown environment could appear so radically different to audiences further along the line (punk with its noisy, basic guitars and aggressive fashion statements, as opposed to a disco associated with white consumerism and recreational consumption) that an enmity could establish itself, and here’s the shocking part, in contravention of the original sociological facts. 

But I don’t really care whether there is, or was, or was meant be an enmity between punk and disco. I know that it’s an idea, one with a certain currency, and one with certain obvious contradictions (the Clash and Blondie, in the broader context). There’s a Rancid song - ‘Spirit of ‘87’ on their last-but-one album, the excellent Indestructible, which the sleeve notes describe as

“an anti-violence song and definitely not an anti-disco song. Lord knows we have spent and continue to spend time in the discos across the planet. Usually after some show like in Italy or some shit and we hang out all night. This song goes out to all the places that had balls enough to put on punk shit.”

The rockist fallacy about punk/rock’n’roll being real music is a good point, but one that rather undermines the rest of the argument because it is exactly something punks would have themselves said (guitars vs. synthesisers). But perhaps not real punks? Of course I’d rather there be a punk rock where, as various responses to this thread have pointed out, it wasn’t just about rebelling against something, but being positive in creating new music. That doesn’t mean denying previous misguided rebellions, or creating a positive history of punk rock where it constantly embraced all its cultural and social competitors. The original argument wasn’t even particularly predicated on a punk/disco enmity, merely using it as an example of how tastes have fragmented from when music was more tribal and the clash of counter-culture/establishment was sharper. Which - if true, as I think the argument relies a bit too much on postmodernist theories - would be exactly why an antithesis between punk and disco could have emerged rather than resolving itself as the different expressions of a fragmented and marginalized society.