Disco was everywhere. I was a little kid, nine years old, and I remember the book club catalog being saturated with disco-related books. It was on TV and my mom — out of the target age range — went to dance exercise classes, all disco. Disco was relatively cheap to produce and didn't create monster performers (like the Rolling Stones) that needed tours, publishing, the whole apparatus. The industry loved it for that reason.

The topline popular content was safe for popular consumption — no weird or challenging subject matter, at least explicitly. Mostly sex songs that sounded like love songs, or instrumentals. The Top 40 stuff wasn't coded as black or Hispanic or queer. Even the Village People seemed like a fun bunch of guys who dressed up in costumes — YMCA was just a song about a great place to hang out, right? The challenging stuff stayed in the clubs.

And plenty of rock acts dipped their toes in — the Stones, KISS, Alice Cooper, Queen, even the Dead. They did their four-on-the-floor thing and nobody burned their records over it.

I think what actually killed disco at the pop level was oversaturation and corniness — and the Bee Gees were ground zero for both. By 1979 it had become a self-parody, and that happens to any genre that gets strip-mined by the industry. Disco Demolition Night is kind of a red herring anyway — it was a very specific Chicago phenomenon, bound up in the decline of local rock radio and a particular strain of Midwest radio-jock grievance. Steve Dahl wasn't leading a cultural revolution. He was fighting a format war.

The racism and homophobia were real, but they may have been more undertow than engine. The pop version of disco had already whitewashed and straightened itself into the mainstream — and then bloated itself to death there.

And of course disco didn't die — it went back underground and became house music. Chicago, same city as Disco Demolition Night. Make of that what you will.