{"id":162042,"date":"2025-03-21T19:00:36","date_gmt":"2025-03-21T18:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/luxus-plus.com\/?p=162042"},"modified":"2025-03-24T10:36:09","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T09:36:09","slug":"luxus-magazine-a-brief-history-of-disco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/luxus-plus.com\/en\/luxus-magazine-a-brief-history-of-disco\/","title":{"rendered":"[Luxus Magazine] A Brief History of… Disco"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/h4>\n

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Born in the New York underground and today the soundtrack of all the most chic places on the planet<\/b>, Disco has not had its last word<\/b> and the Philharmonie de Paris is paying tribute to it with Disco I’m Coming Out<\/i><\/b>, an exhibition running until August 17.<\/p>\n

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This more hedonistic variation of black music appeared in 1972<\/b>, in an America that was losing its bearings. Officially abolished, segregation<\/b> (based on race, color and sexual orientation) was then still in force<\/b> in a country traumatized by the Vietnam War<\/b> and a US President, Richard Nixon, who resigned against a backdrop of the Watergate scandal<\/b>. Disco thus appeared like a beacon in the night.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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Long before the Eurodance of the 1990s<\/b>, 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.<\/b><\/p>\n

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Born in the heart of New York… in the 1970s<\/h2>\n

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Like punk before it and hip-hop after, Disco took its first steps in a period of crisis.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/b><\/p>\n

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The Brooklyn Bridge connecting the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Manhattan in New York, in the 1970s<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The movie Taxi Driver<\/i> (1976) by Martin Scorsese<\/b> 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.<\/b><\/p>\n

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In his seminal essay on the cultural analysis of the disco movement, Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco <\/i>(2008), Peter Shapiro<\/b> pulls no punches in describing the situation at the time in his introduction: “<\/i>Disco may have shone like a diamond, but it stank of shit.<\/i><\/b> 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.<\/i><\/p>\n

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