You're Wrong About: Disco Demolition Night

August 5, 2020 3:38 AM

Mike tells Sarah how a silly sports promotion galvanized a reactionary movement. Digressions include "Charlotte's Web," Jane Fonda and German-language musicals. Songs are dissected; the honor of David Bowie and late-night salad bars are defended.

[more episode blurb:
"Huge thanks to historians Tavia Nyong'o, Eric Gonzaba, Luis-Manuel Garcia and Gillian Frank for helping Mike with this episode!
Support us: Patreon/Paypal/Teepublic
Links!
- Tavia Nyong'o's "I Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents"
- Gillian Frank's excellent article on disco and his delightful podcast
- Luis-Manuel Garcia's alternate history of club culture and dissection of the gay left's opposition to disco
- Alice Echols' "Hot Stuff"
- Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey"
- Tim Lawrence's "Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979"
- Peter Shapiro's "Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco"
- Undone did a great episode on Disco Demolition Night
- "The Flip Sides of 1979"
- "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," the (fabricated) New York Magazine story that inspired "Saturday Night Fever"
- Tony Smith interview
- "Disco and The Queering of the Dance Floor"]

posted by progosk (8 comments total)

(Just in general, I was surprised to find YWA only mentioned in passing here and there on the blue, despite coming second in Time's best podcasts of 2019; here's some background on Michael Hobbes' and Sarah Marshall's sinularly engrossing creation; I've made this a single episode post so others can add their past favourites.)
posted by progosk at 3:44 AM on August 5, 2020

Oh! Thank you for posting this—I’ve been looking for a podcast and this sounds interesting. The topic is especially intriguing to me. I loathe the white dude knee jerk disco sucks thing and was so disappointed in Drunk History when Bob Odenkirk just blindly went along with that. Looking forward to hearing a better take.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 2:06 PM on August 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

This episode was incredible! I just love everything they do.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:53 PM on August 5, 2020

[Not to spoil anyone's appreciation of YWA, but only now have I noticed that Adam Buxton's pisstake Squarespace promo ("Today, on Important Infopod", can't find a linkable copy of it, maybe it's just something that Spotify interjects?), his impersonation of two podcast hosts ("So, Susan, tell me more about Squarespace... while I make strange noises") might actually be referencing MH's little interjections in the episodes where SM is doing the storytelling... :-D]
posted by progosk at 4:44 AM on August 6, 2020

I'm about six months behind of podcasts, so I've only just listened to Why Didn't Anyone Go To Prison For The Financial Crisis and I found it singularly infuriating. Turns out it's a lot of reasons beyond the obvious, and they're all fucked

Thankfully, the podcast is evergreen, although I don't know if I needed an increasingly granular series on two different sets of murders. The standout episodes that I've listened to were The Victims' Rights Movement, Kitty Genovese and "Bystander Apathy", The American Taliban, Columbine and (of course) The Satanic Panic.
posted by Merus at 5:54 AM on August 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

I love this podcast!! And this was a particularly good episode, I think. I recommend it to everyone, and it is often a hit.
posted by hepta at 8:30 AM on August 7, 2020

Thanks for the post. I really enjoyed the podcast. I was a little surprised that it spent so little time on the actual event itself. Maybe that's not the important part. But, it was the title.

The comparison with the thoughtful Undone show and the embarrassingly uniformed The Dollop show on the same topic is interesting.

Also, I'm happy to see YRA here. I love them. At least when they're not talking about OJ Simpson. (I don't think they're wrong about OJ's acquaintances. I just can't convince myself to care about any of it.)
posted by eotvos at 11:03 AM on August 8, 2020

YWA is so much like the better parts of Metafilter (going in depth on particular topics, quirkiness of its hosts, no advertisements, its discussion is on how the mainstream media often gets things wrong) in podcast form.


Regarding this episode, it was relatively informative about the origins of disco for this 30 something; I didn't know that 'sucks' as an insult used to be associated with homophobia,
posted by fizzix at 5:58 PM on August 11, 2020 [1 favorite]