disco

The tradition & historical record

Disco is a genre of dance music and a subculture that emerged in the late 1960s from the United States' urban nightlife scene. Its sound is typified by four-on-the-floor beats, syncopated basslines, string sections, brass and horns, electric pianos, synthesizers, and electric rhythm guitars. Discothèques as a venue were mostly a French invention, imported to the United States with the opening of Le Club, a members-only restaurant and nightclub located at 416 East 55th Street in Manhattan, by French expatriate Olivier Coquelin, on New Year's Eve 1960. Disco music as a genre started as a mixture of music from venues popular among African Americans, Latino Americans, and Italian Americans in New York City (especially Brooklyn), Baltimore, and Philadelphia during the late 1960s to the mid-to-late 1970s. Disco can be seen as a reaction by the 1960s counterculture to both the dominance of rock music and the stigmatization of dance music at the time. Several dance styles were developed in the United States during the period of disco's popularity in the 1970s, including "the Bump", "the Hustle", "the Watergate", "the Continental", and "the Busstop". During the 1970s, disco music was developed further, mainly by artists from the United States as well as from Europe. While performers garnered public attention, record producers working behind the scenes played an important role in developing the genre. By the late 1970s, most major U.S.

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Disco”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

disco is genre of dance music and a subculture that emerged in the 1970s from the United States' urban nightlife scene, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ¹

The source record links this tradition to 42 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ¹