Disco
early 1970s · United States
Four-on-the-floor dance music from early 1970s US clubs (Wikipedia).
The sound
A steady four-on-the-floor kick and open hi-hats over live bass, lush strings, and horns. Played by bands on real instruments, not machines.
Listen for: The four-on-the-floor kick and the open hi-hat on the offbeat, all played live by a band. This human groove is the engine house will later rebuild on machines.
Things to know
Disco started in 1970 at David Mancuso's private "Love Saves the Day" parties at the Loft, an invitation-only space in Manhattan for a mostly Black, Latino, and gay crowd.
Disco's groove is a four-on-the-floor kick with open hi-hats on the offbeat, played live by a band with bass, strings, and horns. No drum machines.
The 12-inch single was invented by disco producer Tom Moulton in the 1970s and is still the standard format for DJ releases today.
Larry Levan's ten-year residency at the Paradise Garage in New York (1977 to 1987) became the prototype for every serious club residency in dance music history.
Disco Demolition Night at Chicago's Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979, ended disco's mainstream pop run, but the music kept going underground and turned into house and techno.
Key tracks
Disco Inferno by The Trammps · 1976
I Feel Love by Donna Summer · 1977
He's the Greatest Dancer by Sister Sledge · 1979
We Are Family by Sister Sledge · 1979
Family tree
- House: House grew straight out of disco. When disco fell out of fashion, Chicago DJs kept the four-on-the-floor pulse alive and rebuilt it on drum machines. The kick stayed, the groove got tighter and more repetitive, and the result was a new genre that still carried disco's heartbeat.
- Techno: Detroit techno grew from the same electronic disco that house did. Producers like Juan Atkins and Derrick May took the synthetic four-on-the-floor pulse, stripped out the strings and the soul, and rebuilt it as something colder, more mechanical, and pointed at the future.
- French House: French house is built literally out of disco: two golden bars of a 1970s record, looped and filtered until they become a new song. Twenty years after Disco Demolition Night, Paris made the discarded records the most fashionable sound on Earth.
- Italo Disco / Synth-pop: Italo disco kept disco's four-on-the-floor pulse and swapped the studio orchestra for cheap synthesizers and drum machines. Giorgio Moroder's 1977 Munich records, the all-electronic "From Here to Eternity" and his production of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love," are the hinge point: disco's synth-heavy wing turning into one of the first strains of electronic dance music.