How A Lie Helped Launch Disco

For better or worse, much ink has been spilled about the late 70s phenomenon of Disco. Unless you were there, it’s difficult to truly grasp how quickly (and unrelentingly) the genre took over and leaked into every aspect of the music industry. Those thumping dance beats were everywhere, in the clubs and dominating on the radio. And don’t even start with the fashions it inspired.

Established acts were making attempts to cash in on the trend, including The Rolling Stones, Ringo Starr, and Rod Stewart. Old songs that had no business being remixed, from Al Jolson’s tunes to Beethoven’s symphonies, were part of it as well.

Disco reached critical mass with the release of one film: Saturday Night Fever from 1977. The movie grossed nearly $26 million in its first three weeks, even later landing an Academy Award nomination for John Travolta for Best Actor. The soundtrack album by the Bee Gees won multiple Grammy awards, including “Album of the Year.” Saturday Night Fever became a staple in pop culture, and it all started with a single article in New York magazine.

Written in 1976 by Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” offered a look at a phenomenon in nightclubs in the Big Apple. There was only a little issue: it was mostly made up.

The article was presented as factual reporting about a new subculture. There was no reason to doubt it. It played with stereotypes, and when in doubt, few things work as well as writing about how “kids today” are weird, scary, self-centered, or a combination of all three.

Cohn was a newcomer to the US and a music journalist. After convincing his editor to write about the current scene, he travelled to Brooklyn, in hopes of visiting the 2001 Odyssey disco. He never made it beyond the door: a fight took place just outside the club, and one of the involved threw up on him. Not exactly the glamorous night he was expecting.

However, an idea began to take shape.

Partially inspired by people he knew back in England, Cohn filled in the empty spaces, and the article took on a life of its own. It took little time before someone bought the rights to the story. In this case, it was Robert Stigwood, famous for managing stars like Cream and the Bee Gees and for producing films like Grease.

Not bad for a big fat lie that would probably have remained hidden forever, but as the 20th anniversary of the movie approached, Cohn revealed the truth in another article for New York.

“I knew nothing about this world,” Cohn wrote. “And it showed. Quite literally. I didn’t speak the language, so I faked it.”

It seems almost unbelievable. On the other hand, we’re living in times where journalists are often questioned about just how they present the facts.

But as usual with history, a little context doesn’t hurt.

The late 70’s were an age of “New Journalism.” Figures like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe were famous for their very subjective takes on news reporting.  Like the movie, the article that fully exploded the Disco craze was mostly fiction, but it was also a product of its time.

-Anthony Arrieta

Photo: Disco ball (Sarah from UK via Wikimedia Commons)