I dislike disco and rap for the same reason: they are monotonous.

Not a big disco fan myself. Back in the early '70s, in my early 20s, I was living on Chicago's South Side and going to hear blues every chance I got. Young blacks my age were into disco and had no interest in this blues stuff—it was their parents' music. So at the clubs, it would be us younger whites and those parents, listening to J.B. Hutto or Junior Wells over cheap beers. And these stellar bluesmen were almost always backed by a group with a couple of blue-eyed blond guys from Sweden who had trekked to Chicago to worship at the waning flames of the Checkerboard Lounge and Theresa's. So much for racism. I doubt the black culturati would care to acknowledge it, but the primary force that kept the blues from outright extinction was a white audience that turned out during the decades that the black audience faded almost to black.

The only benefit of cars with loud music blasting out of them - invariably with the windows open - is that they make it easy to identify the morons of the world and avoid them. Turned-around baseball caps and saggy-baggy pants serve the same purpose. Or they could just wear a sign saying, "I am a moron." It's cleaner than drooling.

More likely Robert Speirs identifies the young, not necessarily the moronic (although at some points it may be hard to tell the difference). At any event, exuberant youth wishes (and has always wished) to make a racket and impose itself on the world. Even better, it wants to skewer those old fogies who think that plaid pants with a blazer have a higher inherent dignity than turned-around baseball caps, or even crotch-dragging trousers. The old fogies are probably more on the side of righteousness, but the good news is that most of the new fogies will grow out it in a few years. Meantime, do your best to ignore them and to manage your blood pressure. It was ever thus.

HMI - it's also really funny when one of those wearing baggy pants loses them. It's worth the loud music.

Greetings:

Who could possibly hate Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive".

While the Bee Gees may have been born in Britain, they're certainly considered Australian.

I had no room for the disco 'craze', but some of the music, including Donna Summers, was quite alright.

When I taught, I would play music in my classroom before school began- mostly jazz. One day a black student asked that I play some music from HIS generation, so I consented to his putting on some rap music. I greatly dislike rap, due to its loud and monotonous beat, but consented to his putting the music on. I could stand it for less than a minute , which was no big surprise, and removed the CD. “You don’t like black music,” my student said. I silently showed him a CD of Lester Young, to show that my objection was not to black music per se, but to rap. Surprisingly, he recognized a song from the Lester Young CD.

I'm 59 and still teach. I've had kids trying to interest me in rap and hip-hop for 25 years. A handful of cuts I've even found to be interesting enough to listen to more than once. I suppose that's not entirely surprising, as talented musicians have always worked in contemporary forms, even if those forms haven't found favor with their elders. That jazz Gringo likes didn't exactly launch to universal acclaim. To tell the truth, the surprising thing to me these days is the number of kids today who listen to the music of my own youth.

I still associate disco with the same things you did, and being raised around working musicians, with the destruction of their day-to-day livelihoods. The working-class bar-band culture that birthed and sustained rock and blues and R&B, a largely black and Hispanic culture (certainly more so than the audience for disco), was almost totally wiped out.

Disco Demolition night was the underclass audience's last pop-cultural stand (or the tantrum that followed their last defeat), and nowadays, more than anything, "racist" means poor. So of course rejecting disco then is racist now. Of course.

I can listen to some hip-hop. There's a band in the Dan Aykroyd/Chevy Chase movie, "Nothing but Trouble" that's pretty darn good. They have a beat and everything.

As for disco, I used to love it. The music was crap, but you could get laid like nothing in a disco in the late 70s/early 80s.

I can't dance for anything, (I've been told, "You dance like a white boy", which made me laugh, I am a white boy), but disco wasn't about dancing, it was about grinding and ....uhhh.... other stuff.