Sucking in the 70s

Disco still sucks, but awful as it was it may also have been the best thing ever to happen to rock and roll. Two things happened. First, it gave further impetus to the emerging punk movement, which was powered by its blatant rejection not only of disco but also of the bloated, radio-ready behemoths of sound that would ultimately be boxed up and sold as "classic rock." The second thing that happened, though, was in a way a more curious triumph: rock music co-opted elements of disco and added these features to the existing mix. Rock was already a polyglot musical style, a mixed-up bastard of older, more traditional sound styles and new innovations such that the more obvious influences on the genre (country, blues) only served to obscure the less obvious ones (pop ballads and the range of genre-defying novelty songs that seemed to be ubiquitous in the middle decades of the twentieth century). Disco entered something new into the equation.

Sometimes these two phenomena overlapped: consider the end of The Clash's "Stay Free" (1978), when Mick Jones' slashing guitar lines build up an anthemic instrumental coda in the wake of Paul Simonon's bouncing disco bass line. But the second effect of disco on rock music is also clear in the best mainstream rock of the period: to wit, numerous tracks by The Rolling Stones and Blondie. In the case of Blondie, we have a band that married a disco beat to the attitude of punk rock, not just here and there but rather as a defining quality of their sound. The guitars don't rend and tear like they do in The Clash or The Buzzcocks, but the idea of punk is still there, and it was clearly with the band when it first formed. With the Stones, you hear disco in "Miss You" and other tracks from the Some Girls era. In this case, the disco synthesis helped to extend the relevance of a band that could by all means have descended into the formulaic shadow-of-their-former-selves that other 60s bands that were still around had relegated themselves to. The Rolling Stones were among the very few commercially successful rock artists of the 1960s who were really able to maintain their sense of vitality--and that was because they did not merely follow the changes going on around them but rather innovated as they went along; they absorbed what was going on around them, but ultimately they were their own catalysts.

All of which is to say that rock music is a strange beast, one that continually takes on new shapes, new dimensions. And, in the end, who would really have it any other way?