For many people, Disco is synonymous with Saturday Night Fever, collared shirts, platform shoes and sequins. Inseparable from the party, a living memory of the 1970s, mocked and even vilified in the mid-1980s, this musical genre, long considered minor, has become a manifesto of emancipation for minorities and a wonderful outlet in troubled times.
Born in the New York underground and today the soundtrack of all the most chic places on the planet, Disco has not had its last word and the Philharmonie de Paris is paying tribute to it with Disco I’m Coming Out, an exhibition running until August 17.
This more hedonistic variation of black music appeared in 1972, in an America that was losing its bearings. Officially abolished, segregation (based on race, color and sexual orientation) was then still in force in a country traumatized by the Vietnam War and a US President, Richard Nixon, who resigned against a backdrop of the Watergate scandal. Disco thus appeared like a beacon in the night.
This music could have been nothing more than a will-o’-the-wisp, relegated to a simple relic of the past, but the opposite occurred.
Long before the Eurodance of the 1990s, cherished by Gen Z and following the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, here is the international history of a genre that has since regained its acclaim, serving as the basis for the emergence of electro groups that are ambassadors of the French Touch such as Daft Punk and Justice.
Born in the heart of New York… in the 1970s
Like punk before it and hip-hop after, Disco took its first steps in a period of crisis.
It was born in the early 1970s in a dilapidated New York, plagued by crime, urban violence, the ghettoization of African Americans and drug trafficking.
The movie Taxi Driver (1976) by Martin Scorsese accurately reproduces the misery and squalor of the Big Apple at the time, with its rundown buildings and unsanitary sidewalks, populated by an underworld crowd drawn to prostitutes and narcotics.
In his seminal essay on the cultural analysis of the disco movement, Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (2008), Peter Shapiro pulls no punches in describing the situation at the time in his introduction: “Disco may have shone like a diamond, but it stank of shit. Whatever the elegant and sophisticated veneer under which it was concealed, it was nonetheless born, like a worm, from the rotten core of the Big Apple.
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