Rhythm, Love, and Soul
This emphasis on dance became an important distinction in the differentiation between disco and rock. Disco was enjoyed predominantly in urban areas by racial and ethnic minorities and queer people whereas rock’s audience was largely situated in the white suburbs. Disco was music for social dancing while rock was art meant to be listened to in solitude. Again, this rockist discourse, in attempting to elevate rock music to the status of art, creates a racialized distinction, mirrored in the segregation of the Billboard music charts, which began labelling its soul chart “Black Singles” in 1982. Richard Dyer, in his book White, argues that one of the major defining concepts in building white identity is white people’s supposed ability to separate their minds from their bodies. He writes that according to this prejudice “the white spirit could both master and transcend the white body, while the non-white soul was a prey to the promptings and fallibilities of the body” (Dyer, White 23). Rock music, with its rejection of dancing and pretensions to artistic integrity, aligned itself in opposition to the more base and popular form of disco, which not only celebrated dancing and synthesizers (the bane of every guitarist’s existence) but was also aligned in the public consciousness with LGBT and other urban subcultures.intended for people to come together to have fun, release tension from the social unrest of the past decades. Funk-dance music allowed for social interactions; the musical themes, the poetry within the music, still advocated social consciousness, but you just danced to it instead of standing around listening or holding hands marching in the streets. (56)
