Perhaps many do not know that in the 70s disco music contributed to a social revolution of enormous proportions.
It was an extremely difficult period for the United States: the Watergate scandal, which forced President Nixon to resign in August 1974, the heavy aftermath of the Vietnam War and the oil crisis had created a climate of strong pessimism.
In this context, thanks also to the evolution of the musical culture of African Americans, those social changes took place which contributed to giving a new role to minorities and the middle class, allowing sexual liberation and the different use of free time. In the late 1960s, with the breakup of the Beatles, the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, the realization arose that it was not possible to change the world with songs alone.
The “lightness” of disco music took root among young people, including those of the working class, among minorities and gays who finally came out of the ghetto and poverty to find themselves catapulted onto the “dance floor” illuminated by a thousand psychedelic lights where everything, in particular the social redemption seemed possible. Disco music became an inevitable model that managed to influence an era and whose influence is still felt today.
Perhaps this was the real cultural revolution if you think that from the 70s onwards, people dance continuously in the same way: the sounds and technologies, the deejays, change, but the basic rhythm is always in four quarters. The influence of the disco-music is probably still today probably underestimated in its social and racial component. Continuing to identify it only with “Saturday Night Fever” or with “Travoltism” is equivalent to not considering the profound impact it had in the US first and then in the whole Western world.