Disco, punk and New Wave (1973-1981)

Disco

While Funk music had been part of the rock and roll scene in the early 1970s, it would eventually give way to more accessible songs with a danceable beat. The Disco format was propelled by such groups as K.C. and the Sunshine Band, MFSB, The Three Degrees, The O'Jays, Barry White, Gloria Gaynor, CHIC, and The Trammps. Suddenly, many popular hits featured the danceable disco beat, and discotheques -- previously a European phenomenon -- began to open in the U.S., notably Studio 54 in New York, which became the model for dozens of disco clubs nationwide.

The group most associated with the Disco era was The Bee Gees, whose music for the 1977 Paramount film Saturday Night Fever marked the pinnacle of the era. Many mainstream rock acts, including the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Queen (Another One Bites The Dust) and even the Grateful Dead, incorporated disco beats into their releases in attempts to keep up with the trend; many rock radio stations began to adopt all-disco formats.

But by the end of the 1970s an anti-disco backlash occurred as, in the rush to capitalize on the popular format, the overall quality of disco music began to fall and as rock fans reacted to the perceived loss of traditional rock outlets in favor of disco. The anti-disco movement culminated in the disco demolition riot in Chicago during the summer of 1979.

While much of the cachet of disco as a genre had dissipated by the end of the '70s, danceable sounds persisted; disco, in its own way, would spin off hip hop music (or "rap music") as we know today, when The Sugarhill Gang took portions of Chic's hit "Good Times" and transformed them into "Rapper's Delight", the first hip-hop recording to become a Billboard Top 40 hit single.

Punk Rock

Punk rock started off as a reaction to the lush, producer-driven sounds of disco, and against the perceived commercialism of progressive rock that had become arena rock. Early punk borrowed heavily from the garage band ethic: played by bands for which expert musicianship was not a requirement, punk was stripped-down, three-chord music that could be played easily. Many of these bands also intended to shock mainstream society, rejecting the "peace and love" image of the prior musical rebellion of the 1960s which had degenerated, punks thought, into mellow disco culture.

Punk developed as more than an aesthetic movement in America, with artists Richard Hell, Television (with whom Hell briefly played), Patti Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads and others of CBGB's taking the stage and changing music for years. The Ramones were the "safer" brand of punk: equally aggressive but mostly apolitical. Richard Hell was the flip side: he was a poet, his band could play their instruments as well, and usually better, than any corporate band. The Punk movement was born out of an intellectual movement, but The Ramones took a "dumbed down" sound to the mainstream. However, Punk spread to England where it became a more violent form of expression with the proto-typical band The Sex Pistols.

The Sex Pistols chose aggressive stage names (including "Johnny Rotten" and "Sid Vicious") and did their best to live up to them, deliberately rejecting anything that symbolized the establishment in England when they toured. They were most well represented on their first two singles "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen". Despite an airplay ban on the BBC, the record rose to the top chart position in the UK. The Sex Pistols paved the way for many other political bands like The Clash, whose approach was less nihilistic but more overtly political and idealistic. Artsier bands like Wire and The Fall gave Punk another side.

As the Pistols toured America, they spread their music as the first wave of Punk had been spread in theirs. Punk was mostly an East-coast phenomenon in the US until the late 1970s when Los Angeles-based bands such as X and Black Flag broke through.

It was also through punk, and to an extent, new wave, that Australia made its first major impacts on the global popular music scene. After Johnny O'Keefe's last major hit in 1961, Australian popular music was dominated by clean-cut family bands. Bubbling beneath the surface, however, was a group of pioneering bands like the surf band The Atlantics, but it was not until the late 1970s, with acts like The Birthday Party, INXS, SPK, and Midnight Oil offering an energetic experimentalism that the country's role in pop music became manifest

New Wave

Punk rock attracted devotees from the art and collegiate world and soon bands sporting a more literate, arty approach, such as the Talking Heads and Devo, began to infiltrate the punk scene; in some quarters the description New Wave began to be used to differentiate these less overtly punk bands.

If punk rock was a social and musical phenomenon, it garnered little in the way of record sales (small specialty labels such as Stiff Records had released much of the punk music to date) or American radio airplay, as the radio scene continued to be dominated by mainstream formats such as disco and album-oriented rock. Record executives, who had been mostly mystified by the punk movement, recognized the potential of the more accessible New Wave acts and began aggressively signing and marketing any band that could claim a remote connection to punk or New Wave. Many of these bands, such as The Cars and The Go-Go's were essentially pop bands dressed up in New Wave regalia; others, including The Police and The Pretenders managed to parlay the boost of the New Wave movement into long-lived and artistically lauded careers.

Between 1982 and 1985, influenced by Kraftwerk and Gary Numan, New Wave went in the direction of such New Romantics as Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, Psychedelic Furs, Talk Talk and the Eurythmics, sometimes using the synthesizer entirely in place of other instruments. This period coincided with the rise of MTV and led to a great deal of exposure for this brand of synth-pop. Although many "Greatest of New Wave" collections feature popular songs from this era, New Wave more properly refers to the earlier "skinny tie" rock bands such as The Knack or Blondie.

Punk and post-punk bands would continue to appear sporadically, but as a musical scene, punk had largely self-destructed and been subsumed into mainstream New Wave pop by the mid-1980s, but the influence of punk has been substantial. The grunge movement of the late 1980s owes much to punk, and many current mainstream bands claim punk rock as their stylistic heritage. Punk also bred other genres, including hardcore and gothic rock.