How and Why They Killed Disco

[maz]

Everything I'm seeing about rap and hip hop can be substituted for any genre of music out there. Yes even trance.

You people just need to be more accepting to things you don't like out of the gate.

-maz

[ChEeZeBaLL]

Im sorry but hiphop today is terrible. Every song sounds the same in that it sounds like shit. The beats they use today are not interesting, the lyrics suck, and what is all this hispanic stuff that's going on now? There's some song that keeps getting played on the radio and the entire song is in spanish.

I really hope that people soon realize that hiphop and R&B these days is complete garbage.

EDIT: And I forgot to add, Disco is so awesome. Anyone know of an online record store where i could pick up some classic disco tracks on vinyl?

[Cheshire Cat ^..^]

It's not about whether it's terrible or not. It's about how wide-spread and consumable it is. Just turn on MTV for pete's sake.

[ChArBrOiL]

Last time I turned on MTV the "One More Time" anime music video was playing.

[maz]

Just tp prove a point:

Originally posted by ChEeZeBaLL
Im sorry but trance today is terrible. Every song sounds the same in that it sounds like shit. The beats they use today are not interesting, the lyrics suck, and what is all this hispanic stuff that's going on now? There's some song that keeps getting played on the radio and the entire song is in spanish.

I really hope that people soon realize that trance and techno these days is complete garbage.

Honestly, did you people eat paint chips as children? Is everybody mildly retard with the belief that their own likes are the only ones that matter?

I've seen tons of posts over the years I've been on this board with people bitching about "why don't my friends like edm?" Or something very similar. The most common response is "it's too repetitive." I just saw you make basically the same assumption over a different genre of music.

Ok, so there's a lot of bling out there in popular hip hop (which is pop music remember this). There's also a lot of stupid cheesey vocals and synth lines in trance. Let's not forget about the 909 or 808 which are both over used in electronic music. Hey guess what? They're still used in rap and hip hop.

I also see people complain about "commercial" trance on here all the time. Then these same people start praising "underground" trance. You know what, take all your stupid arguments about rap and hip hop and try looking farther than what you hear on the radio or on MTV. Are you really that shallow when it comes to music?

One thing I've learned over the years is that music is music. My main gripe about country is that there's not enough whiskey drinking and ass kicking in it anymore. Then again most music could use some whiskey drinking and ass kicking in it if you ask me.

-maz

[Tyrell]

First off I would just like to defend R&B music before this gets too far. Besides EDM (Trance and House music) R&B happens to be a genre I listen to at times. To you guys (Who is majority white) R&B means nothing to you but to me it is culture. R&B is the ONLY music genre out there for blacks thats mainstream that just happens to have deep roots. Like I said in an earlier reply, unlike Hip-Hop R&B way back to slavery times when blacks used to sing gospel. From there it transformed to Soul music and then came many sub-genres like Jazz and Blues. Sorry but R&B music ISN'T trash and it ISN'T going to die out. Rap may, but not R&B. Its like saying Country music will die out....it won't cause its culture/heritage music.

Listen to Alisha Keys, or the new Jon Legend (Produced by Kanye West) those are two of the biggest R&B singers out.

Yes sometimes it does get repetitive but don't act like R&B IS THE ONLY genre (Besides rap) that gets repetitive past and present. Just cause R&B talks about Love and Relationships all the time means it repetitive?

Atleast R&B music doesn't talk about pimpin hoes and representing your gang and shit like that. R&B music talks about love and if that is repetitive then I just feel sorry for you.

RAP/HIP-HOP on the other hand is a different story. I like that genre, I buy its CDs at times. But I'm just tired of it for some reason. Why? Cause I'm a black person. What does that have to do with it? Well its cause I'm a black person who just happens to LOVE music outside of R&B/RAP. And the stereotype is (Given from both blacks and whites) is that if you are black then you MUST Listen to (And only listen to) Rap music and R&B music. I hate that stereotype. I love EDM more then I do Rap/R&B so when I listen to that all the time I get stupid reactions and comments like "You aint black, you listen to that white boy shit"

Then when I rather goto a Rave then a Hip-Hop club with the guys, I get comments like "You wanna go just so you can hit on some white girls." and "Man nothing but white people **** with that shit" and the list goes on. See for you all that isn't a problem but for me it is.

In college at the dorms ALL of the black guys plays their Rap music loud and shit and their doors open. So when you hear rap and walk buy the room, its always a black dude. Then here comes me blasting something OTHER then (RAP/R&B) and they past my room and see a black guy in their with the lights turned off with a strobe light and black light on, they look at me as if something is wrong (Both black and white gives me that reaction). If I were a white person I wouldn't get that reaction. I just get that "Oh, he likes that techno shit" reaction.

THATS why I want RAP to die out. I like rap to but I ALSO like EDM more and between the two if I had to sacrifice one, it would be RAP.

Also I don't dress like your typical Black dude. I were normal casual A&F/Old Navy type clothing. So you get the idea. I'm not too fond of the whole RAP movement.

[Cheshire Cat ^..^]

Originally posted by ChArBrOiL
Last time I turned on MTV the "One More Time" anime music video was playing.

I love anecdotal evidences. Don't you? Besides, do you have american MTV?

maz and Tyrel, I wasn't talkin about the problem with rap and r&b in musical sense. I was talking about it in cultural/commercial sense. The most commercial rap/r&b song will outsell a most commercial trance song by 100 times if not 1000 - there's no denying in it.

[TampaDave]

What aggravates me about hip hop is not the music itself -- to each its own -- but the fact that in many places there is no alternative. Every room in every club on every street is playing the same thing.

This speaks to the topic, in that the club business is like birds on a wire, when one flies they all fly. Makes you wonder if people wouldnt have gotten so darn sick of disco if it hadn't been so ubiquitous.

Course they're probly saying the same thing about trance in Europe.

[spencerjrus]

Originally posted by Cheshire Cat ^..^

You won't see kids now rolling down the street with disco beats. Sorry.

Except that I and many of my close friends do (and I'm sure we are not alone in the world), which was the entire point of my post.

[Cheshire Cat ^..^]

Sorry, didn't know you're a kid.

My point still stands though. I'm sure there are some kids in the world rolling down to any music you can imagine.

[bclover58]

While you and I don't necessarily think about it as a business, Music production is there to make money. Very big money. When you can sell a million of anything, you make good money.

The Music Business today is made up of even fewer decision makers then there were in the late 70's. The countless mergers have ended up with a few giant boardrooms that control everything we hear and most everything that is sold in North America.

The relationship between the Music Makers and the Music Vendors is what my first post was about. The union that represents musicians in the United States of America is virtually responsible for the kinds of music being sold today on our continent. Back in the late 70's, they met with the record companies and a decision was made to stop the practise of re-releasing imports as domestic product in some genres. Dance music is one of those areas. There have been hundreds of European titles that could have been huge hits here, had their labels chosen to release them.

The Internet has made it possible to both know about and hear music from anywhere in the world. This fact is what is bugging the American record industry. They have lost control of what people in their countries hear and can buy. The Disco dance halls of the 70's were seen as a threat to the record labels' control of what America heard and bought. And that is why the labels, along with the musicians, had to kill Disco. They lost control.

Coming soon to a set of ears near you will be Satellite radio. And once again, the record companies are going to loose control, as will the local radio stations, of what people will be hearing. Internet radio has already made a tiny dent, but not as big of a gash as Satellite radio is going to make.

Trance music is the pop of the future. When America hears this music, they will like it. America isn't hearing a lot of trance right now because over-the-air radio programming is controlled by people who follow a guideline to play what the labels give them for free.

It's all about control.

[Ishkur]

Originally posted by bclover58
The Disco dance halls of the 70's were seen as a threat to the record labels' control of what America heard and bought. And that is why the labels, along with the musicians, had to kill Disco. They lost control.

are you, like, being ironic?

[bclover58]

Originally posted by Ishkur


are you, like, being ironic?

No, factual !!!! Disco was like an open wound to many executives in the U.S. record business. They had spent a fortune to 'enlist' key radio programmers to play their hits during the 60's and early 70's. Suddenly, hits were no longer just coming up through the ranks of key market radio stations. Clubs were breaking hits.

The amount of royalty payment money that American record executives had to send overseas grew to enormous amounts during the Disco era as well.

[Ishkur]

You are a moron then.

American record executives are businessmen first, musicians second. You said it yourself. Anything that streamlines music from composer to consumer, that makes the process more efficient, with less overhead, enabling them to cut costs, cut corners, and make more money......was preferred. That's the nature of pop music.

To the average record executive in the late 70s, Disco was a god damn GODSEND. You didn't need a band...hell, you didn't even need to own a studio in some cases. It was an assembly-line process (stolen, actually, from Barrie Gordie's Motown system of hit production) specifically designed to churn out cheap, plastic, fake pop fluff....christ, Stock, Aitken and Waterman made no less than 700 top singles using the EXACT same drum beat during their reign in the 80s. Pop music makes tons of money because of this fact. Disco made more. You can make even more money as a record executive, in fact, not by making music, but by licensing it. To do so requires a lot of initial capital, of course, which is why record companies started gobbling up each other back then, and today there are only really about 6 left, co-opting each other's shit.

Not only that, but Disco's unprecedented popularity and oversaturation of the mainstream (no music genre had ever taken over like Disco had) made it a sure-fire winner. Businessmen always try to eliminate the unknowns and the risks whenever possible. Putting out disco music in the 70s was a slam dunk. It was the thing to do: EVERYONE made a disco album, or a disco-influenced album. The Bee Gees--traditionally a slow ballad pop-rock band--turned out a Disco album that has since overshadowed the rest of their collective output--all 30 years of it--combined. Queen, Rod Stewart, Pink Floyd, AC/DC--they all toyed with disco at one time or another. Its influence was all-pervasive and inescapable. It was drenched over EVERYTHING.

The job of a record label is not to control what Americans want to listen to. The job of a record label is to make money....and to make money, it has to determine what Americans like, and sell it to them. And in the 70s, this was Disco. They felt neither threatened nor afraid of the dance music's dominance. They simply identified it as a commodity to be sold. That's the nature of pop music. It will sell it's own mother if there's a profit in it. It doesn't care what the music is, so long as the music makes it money.

Marketers love centralization of tastes, habits and attitudes. It makes it easier to market to people that way--and thus make money. It's when things defragment and people go their separate ways that it gets hard to sell a single product to everybody. But for three glorious years in the late 70s, no record executive ever had a problem making money in the music biz.

But this is getting beyond your original premise, which is that "real" musicians killed disco because the music was taking their jobs. And I still say that's balls, for two reasons I outlined:

1) Disco is not dead

2) Nothing has changed. Manufactured dance music still dominates the airwaves and the clubs. The "real" musicians, as you say, have failed.

So there.

[Cheshire Cat ^..^]

Great, I've found another reason for why RIAA has a really big problem with music sharing. Even iTunes has localized versions.

[StarkRavinMad]

Originally posted by bclover58
Coming soon to a set of ears near you will be Satellite radio. And once again, the record companies are going to loose control, as will the local radio stations, of what people will be hearing. Internet radio has already made a tiny dent, but not as big of a gash as Satellite radio is going to make.

And as for this comment, well, you are as misguided about this as you were about everything else. Several of the channels carried by XM are run by Clear Channel, who pays enough of the XM bills that XM can't afford to dump them (not that they would anyway). Sirius is mostly hits based programing with tight rotations, that is largely dictated by what was popular or is popular. Of course that's when they're even devoting time to music...Sirius is shifting their focus to Sports and video which will comsume more of the already costly bandwidth. If you look at the programming of either Satellite carrier (neither of which is making money yet) it is dominated by rock and hip hop with a token few electronic/dance channels. Satellite radio is not our saviour.

Originally posted by Clashbakk


I live in Alabama, and I hear rap a lot. It's showing signs of decline in many ways.

#1. They are down to rapping about shoes and white tees.

#2. Less meaningful lyrics.

#3. Rap is becoming dime-a-dozen. G-Unit is crap.

#4. Repetitive sh*t over and over again.

#5. Angry old hag politicians and that a**hole Bill O'Reilly can't shut the hell up. Too much violence, smut, the whole bunch.

#6. Wiggers. White people are infesting the music. Our school now officially has a wigger. (I'm white and I can't stand them)

#7. Who gives a f*cking f*ck about your Escalade and the twenty-some b*tches inside? Come on, make some new stuff.

#8. Crunk. We came, we saw, we repped our clique yO!

#9. Suge Night's out, just waiting for up-and-comings to fall into his trap.

#10. The greats are dying. Now we just have to sit and wait for 50 Cent and Justin Timberlake to get sniped.

The only rapper I think is good is probably Dizzee Rascal. Above par background beats, interesting lyrics (is "Jezebel" the new "Brenda Had a Baby"?), and no mentions of bigg bawla dubbs or pimp cups. Yuh.

Perfectly said, dont forget the priceless names...
or wait, even calling eachother 'Dog', that used to be an insult, oh wait... it still is!

[ChEeZeBaLL]

Originally posted by Tyrell

Atleast R&B music doesn't talk about pimpin hoes and representing your gang and shit like that. R&B music talks about love and if that is repetitive then I just feel sorry for you.

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. With most r&b songs today featuring rap artists, I hear a lot of the same kind of stuff in r&b that i hear in hip-hop.

[UpInFlames1234]

Originally posted by ChEeZeBaLL


I'm going to have to disagree with you there. With most r&b songs today featuring rap artists, I hear a lot of the same kind of stuff in r&b that i hear in hip-hop.

dude, new r&b IS rap... just a guy that has talent sings the chorus... and the rapper raps the verses

[Cheshire Cat ^..^]

Now, you've got it wrong, new pop IS r&b.