1979: Rock audiences decide they can no longer passively reject disco. As a publicity stunt, DJs stage disco bonfire rallies at sporting events; but even with people buying disco albums just to burn them, Rolling Stone reports that the disco boom may be over, noting the sharp recent decrease in the number of disco albums being sold.
This couldn't have come at a worse time, since the dollar bins are already filled to capacity with Candi Staton and Disco Tex albums. Soon joining them will be Patrick Hernandez, whose lone hit "Born To Be Alive" smuggles background vocalist Madonna into American homes for the first time.
"I Will Survive" is the first winner of the Grammy's newly instituted "Best Disco Recording" this year, although the murmurs are getting louder that disco's had its day. Neither the category nor Gaynor's career will survive into the '80s. Odder still, Donna Summer wins "Best Rock Female Vocalist" for "Hot Stuff." Her crossover to rock comes when rock acts attempting to cross over to disco--including Rod Stewart, the Kinks, ELO and Kiss--is at its peak. "Enough Is Enough" we plead, which tragically gives Barbra Streisand the idea to duet with Donna Summer. And there's Sesame Street Fever and that screechin' Ethel Merman disco album to deal with! Annie get your gun and put me out of my misery.
1980: The year the boogie died for sure. Studio 54 shuts down. The Village People's Can't Stop the Music stops their career cold. The Bee Gees, too busy suing their management for fraud and misrepresentation to record, threaten that their next record will have no disco. And no sales for that matter. We get our first indication that rap will be replacing disco as urban-dance music when Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks" reintroduces politics to the R&B chart and reaches number four.
The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" does even better and is the first rap record to go gold. There'll be other disco records in later years like Patrice Rushen's "Forget Me Nots" and the Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men" (co-written by Paul Shaffer) in 1982, but they defiantly will be called "dance records"-- or in Rick James' case, "punk-funk" records. Stars on 45, which incongruously stitches together seven Beatles songs with the Archies' "Sugar Sugar" and Shocking Blue's "Venus," is a shocking success. Disco failures the Beach Boys finally get a disco hit in 1981 by overdubbing a metronomic drum click across eight of their old recordings.
Perhaps the loudest death knell was Donna Summer transforming into a humorless born-again Christian in the early '80s, denouncing homosexuality as a sin against God. Becoming Anita Bryant for the Studio 54 set wasn't the shrewdest career move, especially since her core following was bottom heavy with rump wranglers. She'd have to work harder for the money, and less of it, from here on out.
