What took the first steps?

Disco culture has often been interpreted by musicologists as part of the entertainment and service industry; one wonders why, from its very beginnings, it was not considered a place of musical production. Before indicating “what,” it is right to ask when disco began to take its first steps. It was decidedly at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, in a New York City that represented everything that was wrong with America: corruption, rape, robbery, drug trafficking, garbage, murder, racial conflict, intolerance, and violence of every kind.

And where, if not in films such as “The French Connection,” “Taxi Driver,” and “Death Wish,” can one get a clear image of the New York atmosphere of that time?

The answer to our question arises precisely from that atmosphere…
Disco stems from the fusion of contradictory impulses: exclusion and inclusion, luxury and waste, acquisition and abandonment, commitment and detachment, seriousness and frivolity.
During its journey, disco was imprisoned between different worlds… “homosexuality and heterosexuality”… “black and white”…
In this image of such a degraded New York, who was trying to reclaim the city? Local artists and musicians began to use any type of abandoned space.
Thus was born the “loft jazz” scene, made up of free jazz musicians who gathered in abandoned lofts. And “The Loft” itself was recognized as New York’s first discotheque; David Mancuso, its creator, the father of discotheques.

DISCOTHEQUES SEEMED TO BE COMPLETELY OUT OF SYNC WITH THAT PERIOD OF POLITICS AND PROTEST. But in the first half of the 1970s, laws made it difficult for Black, Hispanic, and gay people to frequent and consume in public places. Precisely for this reason, disco music was heard in ‘private’ venues that organized invitation-only parties, where clandestinity brought with it a strongly clandestine form of entertainment characterized by sex and disco, accompanied also by a large dose of drugs.

THE DISCOTHEQUE: INTEGRATION AND FREEDOM

The dance floor was a public, polymorphous, polyracial, polysexual space, free from the influence of the State, the Church, and the family.

Shapiro: “In a sense, the 1970s discotheque put into practice what the 1960s had preached: the communion offered by the dance floor was the embodiment of the vision of peace so longed for during that period.”.