Well-known late 1970s disco performers included Evelyn Champagne King, Tavares, Chic, the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Village People and the Jacksons. While performers and singers garnered the lion's share of public attention, the behind-the-scenes producers played an equal, if not more important role in disco, since they often wrote the songs and created the innovative sounds and production techniques that were part of the disco sound. Many non-disco artists recorded disco songs at the height of its popularity, and films such as Saturday Night Fever and Thank God It's Friday contributed to disco's rise in mainstream popularity and ironically the beginning of its commercial decline.
Disco was very important in the development of hip hop music, British new wave and disco's direct descendants: the 1980s and 1990s dance music genres of house music and its harder-driving offshoot, techno.
During the early 1920s, a popularised dance form of jazz became popular at nightclubs in major cities. Many parallels exist between the dance music of the 1920s and disco music from the 1970s. Both forms of music featured lavish orchestrations. Both came during periods of relative social liberalism. They both became popularised through black nightclubs, although disco was just as heavily popularised through popular culture as well. It was during the 1920s that the disco ball first appeared. An example can be seen in the nightclub sequence of Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, a German silent film from 1927. The Great Depression led to a religious revival and to a socially conservative period in which nightclubs were shut down and relations between whites and minorities became strained. By 1935, swing music had replaced the dance music that had characterised the nightlife of the 1920s.
Disco has its musical roots in late 1960s soul, especially Philly and New York soul, both of which were evolutions of the Motown sound. The Philly sound is typified by lavish percussion, which became a prominent part of mid-1970s disco songs. Music with proto-disco elements appeared in the late 1960s, with 'Tighten Up' and 'Mony Mony', 'Dance to the Music' and 'Love Child'. Two early songs with disco elements include Jerry Butler’s 1969 'Only the Strong Survive' and Manu Dibango's 1972 'Soul Makossa'.
The disco sound, while unique, almost defies a unified description as it was an ultra-inclusive art form that drew on as many influences as it produced interpretations. Jazz, classical, latin, soul, funk and new technologies just to name a few of the obvious were all mingled with aplomb. Vocals could be frivolous or serious love intrigues all the way to extremely serious social conscious commentary. The music tended to layer soaring, often reverberated vocals, which are often doubled by horns, over a background "pad" of electric pianos and wah-pedaled chicken-scratch (palm muted) guitars. Other backing keyboard instruments include the piano, string synth and electroacoustic keyboards such as the Fender Rhodes piano, Wurlitzer electric piano and Hohner clavinet. Synthesizers were also fairly common in disco, especially in the late '70s. The rhythm is laid down by prominent, syncopated basslines played on the bass guitar and by drummers using a drum kit, African/Latin percussion, and electronic drums such as Simmons and Roland drum modules. The sound was enriched with solo lines and harmony parts played by a variety of orchestral instruments, such as harp, violin, viola, cello, trumpet, saxophone, trombone, clarinet, flugelhorn, French horn, tuba, English horn, oboe, flute, and piccolo.
Most disco songs have a steady four-on-the-floor beat, a quaver or semi-quaver hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat and a heavy, syncopated bass line. This basic beat would appear to be related to the Dominican merengue rhythm. Other Latin rhythms such as the rhumba, the samba and the cha-cha-cha are also found in disco recordings and Latin polyrhythms, such as a rhumba beat layered over a merengue, are commonplace. The quaver pattern is often supported by other instruments such as the rhythm guitar and may be implied rather than explicitly present. It often involves syncopation, rarely occurring on the beat unless a synthesizer is used to replace the bass guitar.
In 1977, Giorgio Moroder again became responsible for a development in disco. Alongside Donna Summer and Pete Bellotte he wrote the song 'I Feel Love' for Summer to perform. It became the first well-known disco hit to have a completely synthesised backing track. The song is still considered to have been well ahead of its time. Other disco producers, most famously Tom Moulton, grabbed ideas and techniques from dub music (which came with the increased Jamaican migration to NYC in the '70s) to provide alternatives to the four on the floor style that dominated. Larry Levan utilised style keys from dub and jazz and more as one of the most successful remixers of all time to create early versions of house music that sparked the genre.
The disco sound was much more costly to produce than many of the other popular music genres from the 1970s. Unlike the simpler, four-piece band sound of the funk soul of the late 1960s, or the small jazz organ trios, disco music often included a large pop band, with several chordal instruments (guitar, keyboards, synthesizer), several drum or percussion instruments (drum kit, Latin percussion, electronic drums), a horn section, a string orchestra and a variety of classical solo instruments (e.g. flute, piccolo, etc.).
Disco songs were arranged and composed by experienced arrangers and orchestrators, and producers added their creative touches to the overall sound. Recording complex arrangements with such a large number of instruments and sections required a team that included a conductor, copyists, record producers and mixing engineers. Mixing engineers had an important role in the disco production process, because disco songs used as many as 64 tracks of vocals and instruments. Mixing engineers compiled these tracks into a fluid composition of verses, bridges and refrains, complete with orchestral builds and breaks. Mixing engineers helped to develop the disco sound by creating a distinctive-sounding disco mix.
Early records were the standard 3-minute song until Tom Moulton thought they were were just too short and he came up with a way to make songs longer. He wanted to take the crowd to another level. He had a hard time trying to get these longer versions put on vinyl; the problem was that the 7-inch single couldn't hold more than some maximum 4-5 minutes with good quality. He really wanted people to get to hear the longer version, especially on the dance floors, so Tom and friend, José Rodriguez who did his remastering, pressed one single on 10-inch instead of 7-inch. The next single they cut on 12-inch, the same format as an album. This was how they come to invent the 12-inch single, which fast became all DJs' tool and format.
The 12-inch single format also allowed longer dance time and format possibilities. In May 1976, Salsoul Records released Walter Gibbons' remix of Double Exposure's 'Ten Percent', the first commercially-available 12-inch single. Motown Records’ Eye-Cue label also marketed 12-inch singles, however, the play time remained the same length as the original 45s. In 1976, Scepter/Wand released the first 12-inch extended-version single, Jesse Green's 'Nice And Slow'. This single was packaged in a collectible picture sleeve, a relatively new concept at the time. 12-inch singles became commercially available after the first crossover, Tavares' 'Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel'.
Some cities had disco dance instructors or dance schools which taught people how to do popular disco dances such as touch dancing, the hustle and the cha cha. There were also disco fashions that discotheque goers wore for nights out at their local disco, such as sheer, flowing Halston dresses for women and shiny polyester Qiana shirts for men with pointy collars, preferably open at the chest, often worn with double-knit suit jackets.
Some notable professional dance troupes of the 1970s include Pan's People and Hot Gossip. For many dancers, the primary influence of the 1970s disco age is still predominantly the film Saturday Night Fever. In the 1980s this developed into the music and dance style of such films as Fame, Flashdance and the musical Chorus Line.
In addition to the dance and fashion aspects of the disco club scene, there was also a thriving drug subculture, particularly for drugs that would enhance the experience of dancing to the loud music and the flashing lights, such as cocaine (nicknamed 'blow'), amyl nitrite (poppers) and the other quintessential 1970s club drug Quaalude, which suspended motor coordination and turned one’s arms and legs to Jello. According to Peter Braunstein, the massive quantities of drugs ingested in discotheques produced the next cultural phenomenon of the disco era - rampant promiscuity and public sex. While the dance floor was the central arena of seduction, actual sex usually took place in the nether regions of the disco: bathroom stalls, exit stairwells and so on. In other cases the disco became a kind of 'main course' in a hedonist’s menu for a night out.
Famous disco bars included the very important Paradise Garage as well as cocaine-filled celeb hangouts such as Manhattan's Studio 54, which was operated by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. Studio 54 was notorious for the hedonism that went on within; the balconies were known for sexual encounters, and drug use was rampant. Its dance floor was decorated with an image of the Man in The Moon that included an animated cocaine spoon. The popularity of the film Saturday Night Fever prompted major record labels to mass-produce hits, a move which some perceived as turning the genre from something vital and edgy into a safe product, homogenised for mainstream audiences. Though disco music had enjoyed several years of popularity, an anti-disco sentiment manifested in America.
This sentiment proliferated at the time because of oversaturation and the big-business mainstreaming of disco. Worried about declining profits, rock radio stations and record producers encouraged this trend. According to Gloria Gaynor, the music industry supported the destruction of disco because rock music producers were losing money and rock musicians were losing the spotlight. Many hard rock fans expressed strong disapproval of disco throughout the height of its popularity. Among these fans, the slogan 'disco sucks' was common by the late 1970s.
Disco music and dancing fads began to be depicted by rock music fans as silly and effeminate, such as in Frank Zappa's satirical song 'Dancin' Fool'. Some listeners objected to the perceived sexual promiscuity and illegal drug use (e.g., cocaine and Quaaludes) that had become associated with disco music. Others were put off by the exclusivity of the disco scene, especially in major clubs in large cities such as the Studio 54 discotheque, where bouncers only let in fashionably-dressed club-goers, celebrities and their hangers-on. Rock fans objected to the idea of centring music around an electronic drum beat and synthesizers instead of live performers.
The television industry, taking its cue from the music industry, responded with an anti-disco agenda too. A recurring theme on the television show, WKRP in Cincinnati contained a hateful attitude towards disco music. The anti-disco backlash may have helped to cause changes to the landscape of Top 40 radio. Negative responses from the listenership of many Top 40 stations encouraged these stations to drop all disco songs from rotation, filling the holes in their playlists with new wave, punk rock and album-oriented rock cuts. Indeed, Jello Biafra of anarcho-punk band The Dead Kennedys likened disco to the cabaret culture of Weimar Germany for its apathy towards government policy and its escapism (which Biafra saw as delusional). He sang about this in the song 'Saturday Night Holocaust', the B-side of the song 'Halloween'.
During the early 1980s, dance music dropped the complicated melodic structure and orchestration which typified the Disco Sound. Examples of well-known songs which illustrate this difference include Kool & the Gang’s Celebration (1980) and the Pointer Sisters’ I'm So Excited (1982).
The rising popularity of disco came in tandem with developments in turntablism and the use of records to create a continuous mix of songs. The resulting DJ mix differed from previous forms of dance music, which were oriented towards live performances by musicians. This in turn affected the arrangement of dance music, with songs since the disco era typically containing beginnings and endings marked by a simple beat or riff that can be easily slipped into the mix.