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My interest in music is quite recent (about 10 months) and until a while ago I thought these two were exactly the same. Now I can recognize that some songs, mainly in the end of the decade are pretty far from the very first concept of disco music, but most 80's pop songs just keep the same characteristics as 70's disco and, in my point of view, they're just being discriminated based on the year they came out. It's way more correct to group Boney M. with Whitney Houston than Prince with Taylor Swift, if you know what I mean. Am I the only one?
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Disco is basically a mix of soul and funk, adapted to long-form groove-oriented songs that people can dance to. The instrumentation is usually very lush, and in particular there is an iconic bouncing melodic bassline that you hear in almost disco song.
With mainstream 80's pop, like Prince or Michael Jackson, there is a lot of overlap with disco when it comes to the soul and funk influences. But 80's pop tends to be more bombastic and less groovy. The drums tend to sound bigger, especially on the downbeat of the snare, and the beats themselves are less syncopated, more straight-forward. A lot of 80's pop is danceable, but there is definitely less of a focus on a danceable groove and more emphasis on songwriting.
It seems both Prince and Michael Jackson had funkier, groovier music in their early albums. It doesn't feel like a coincidence either that they went into the other direction, maybe the public perception of the genres? The hostility between rock and disco etc. I would love to hear thoughts about this topic
I doubt it was anything that conscious. Disco has such a specific sound and is associated with such a distinct trend that it would take more of a conscious effort to replicate it than to avoid it. You also had the influence of New Wave and its emphasis on drum machines and synths representing the new cutting edge of music. 80's pop artists were just much more likely to borrow from New Wave than disco.
Exactly, I really don’t see the connection between 80s Pop and disco at all. New Wave was far more prevalent and influential on 80s pop music. Disco was dead silent by 1981.
As a genre, maybe, but there are heavy disco influences in New Wave: Orange Juice, Blondie, Talking Heads... I can think of dozens of groups that borrowed disco bass and drums and even sometimes attitude.
Underground disco/early house was very hip in the mid 80's.
Don't forget about digital audio, synth and drum machines. They were new and the pushed the sound in a new direction.
Michael Jackson started with disco didn’t he?
I can definitely see Jackson 5 as a precursor to disco, and Michael Jackson’s off the wall is straight up disco no?
I think the Jackson 5 was soul, first and foremost, but they did have some disco songs.
No.
And I don't think the one song someone tried to convince me was disco (Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)) has any disco elements.
EDM and disco are more similar than are disco and funk/R&B.
edit: in fact, most EDM is just disco.
Jackson 5 were Motown soul. Then they changed record label, lost a member, became The Jacksons, and did a lot of funk and Disco, which Michael Jackson then carried into his solo work in "Off the Wall".
It was made tor television instead of the dance floor.
Disco wasn't funk, though many musicians who played one could play the other.
Disco is four to the floor. Funk has a backbeat. Soul is just rock and roll but called soul, because it was usually blacks who sang it, and white people couldn't be directly marketed black music as recently as the 70s.
Disco is a sort of specificy thing (dance oriented 4 on the floor beats deriving from funk and soul, horns or synthetized horns, etc) . Pop is a broad thing encompasing sounds from rock, new wave, funk, etc with a more or less traditional song approach.
Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” is disco, and Blondie’s “Call Me” is pop/new wave. What they have in common is Giorgio Moroder, but you’d never confuse the songs’ genres for the other.
Disco is defined by a certain beat - a "four in the floor" drum beat; bass-hi-hat/snare, 1-2, walking-down-the-street type beat, usually around 120 beats per minute, and the groove of the entire song rests firmly on that beat.
There are lots of styles of 80s pop music. Disco is just one type. (Whitney Houston didn't do a disco track, as far as I can recall).
"I'm Every Woman" from the soundtrack of The Bodyguard is NYC garage house but, because the boundaries of disco aren't well defined, "I'm Every Woman" fits the description you gave in your first paragraph.
Good point, I guess house being really just a close evolution of disco - and that particular song a cover of a 1970s disco track.
Drummer, another component is those iconic hihat barks on the upbeats. It gives it that boom-tiss boom-tiss boom-tiss feeling.
Yes, definitely. Sometimes also with those ol' hand-clap sounds (eg. "Ladies Night").
She did Life’s a Party as lead soloist for Michael Zager Band in 1978, 7 years before her debut, but that’s a very very very deep cut
I don’t think anything else really qualifies, her uptempos in the 80s (singles and album tracks) were very digitally influenced. Maybe Someone For Me from her debut?
But what about ballads?
Ballads aren't usually disco. Keeping Whitney Houston as an example, listen to "Didn't we almost have it all". Firstly it's slow - I think about 66 bpm (although confusingly some online sources list it as twice that, because they are doubliing the tempo).
Listen to the drum beat. As the song comes in, it's just a hi hat. Then a couple of bass hits. Into the chorus and after she sings "giving", there's a run of drum beats "bom-bom-bom-bom". It isn't that consistent, simple, 1-2 dance beat that defines disco. Compare it to MJs "Billie Jean". Listen to what the drum beat is doing - it's more uptempo, and it's "bom-dap, bom-dap" - all the way through. That's disco.
Imagine striding confidently down a city street, each foot striking the pavement perfectly in time to "Billie jean", or "Staying alive", or "good times" by Chic. That's disco. You can't do that to a ballad.
So you mean there are NO disco ballads? When I asked about ballads, thought about ABBA only, but according to your explanation, the answer is no.
Btw Whitney Houston was just an example, I could say Madonna, MJ, Wham!, Queen, all that kind of people
And surprisingly, I managed to understand the "bom-bom-bom-bom" thing perfectly, it was an awesome way to explain. I owe you one.
I wouldn't definitely say there are no disco ballads - but If by "ballad" we mean a sentimental love song, then I can't think of any. Usually the slower tempo alone makes it not disco.
You mention ABBA - Super Trouper is Disco. It's got that Disco beat. But "Fernando" is ballad, and definitely not disco. In fact, it's kinda interesting, because Abba sometimes have a reputation for being a "disco group" but most of their songs were not disco at all. They were, however, pop songs.
Queen - rock, and pop/rock, mostly. Not disco.
Wham - maybe "club Tropicana" is disco. Otherwise, Wham! recorded mostly just pop, but not disco.
Michael Jackson - lots of disco in late 70s/early 80s, especially on the off the wall album and with the Jacksons. A couple of songs on Thriller (including "thriller" itself) are disco tracks. Then he moves away from disco into other pop music.
Madonna - "Holiday" was disco. The original version has a tom-tom intro, but then - Bam!.- and it's into a pure disco beat. Most of Madonna's other hits are pop but not disco.
ABBA are mostly schlager, just very well-written, polished schlager instead of the traditional cheese overload.
Edit: if you don't believe me, imagine the songs stripped back and throw an accordion in there. Even stuff like Voulez Vous, which has disco elements, could easily be schlagerised.
A part of that beat is the other half of the rhythm section.
The bass adheres to the four to the floor method in disco. If the first beat is emphasized, it's not disco.
Yeah I realized I didn't explain it the best way. And today I heard "Give me the night" by George Benson. There's a bit towards the end when it breaks down to the 4/4 bass that forms the backbone if the song, before everything else vibes back in. I heard it and thought it & thought of this thread - it would have been a better example to use for OP.
This was like the most useful information of my life. Thanks a lot
80’s is a completely different .. well in my opinion .. I listened to all “ new wave “ if you will… I love Gary Numan , Ultravox, Japan, kraftwerk, New Order, OMD, The Human League, Talking Heads, Duran Duran.. the list goes on.. but this by far not disco.. I’m my opinion.. ask anyone about this music genre..🇨🇦🎵📀🎹
What you talk as 80s pop is Boogie. Boogie music come from Disco and Funk. Boogie comes from disco but is less fast than disco (over 120 BPM for disco and between 90 to 120 for Boogie) and it takes the repetivness of funk music. But the main difference between disco funk and Boogie is that contrarly with Funk which is more played as live, improvisation, Boogie is more produced in the studio with synths and drum machines.
In Boogie music we take more times in the mixage session to create experimental sounds that will make you dance. This is the difference between Disco and "80's pop songs" that you think is the same.
As well as the musical elements, which others have explained well here, it depends on lineage and country of origin to an extent. There's the Moroder-Cerrone lineage of electro/Eurodisco, which led to Italo Disco and then French House. A lot of the Italo Disco artists were German too, and German disco is a (cheesy) thing in its own right as well.
In Britain, the synthpop came directly from post-punk and was quite rough and experimental at first. Far away from the glamour of disco when it started out, bunch of students at polytechnic schools messing about really. I always think Pulp could've been one of the Sheffield synthpop bands to break through in the 80s if only they could've afforded the synthesisers, instead it took until Britpop in the 90s for them to be noticed.
Some Moroder, Eurodisco influences came into British synthpop later on, but the basis for it was always post-punk. You can hear this with the Joy Division to New Order transition, even after they became influenced by Italo disco they still sounded like a band that used to be Joy Division. The exception to this post-punk lineage is Pet Shop Boys and Erasure, who set out to be pop bands from the start. Soft Cell were part of the post-punk lineage though, as were Dead or Alive.
There was a similar lineage of non-disco synthpop in Germany called Neue Deutsche Welle, which is where you get stuff like Grauzone (who were Swiss). It was based on industrial/punk/new wave and didn't have anything to do with disco.
There was also some French synthpop that had nothing to do with disco, and some of it was amazingly cheesy, e.g. Partenaire Particulier.
On the other side of the Atlantic, you had Blondie who were slightly disco-adjacent but generally new wave there didn't have much to do with disco. The 'Disco Sucks' movement didn't help.
Every danceable song with the four-on-the-floor beat is just Disco. The name may have become less used but the genre is still alive and kicking at a 4/4 beat.
Dua Lipa's stuff
This is very, very wrong. There was a 4/4 beat before disco and there is a 4/4 beat after disco. Disco doesn't have worldwide ownership in perpetuity over a drum beat.
Perhaps read first what I wrote before deeming it very, (even)very wrong.
The four-on-the-floor beat is a 4/4 beat, Its use as a dancefloor beat was invented by Earl young on The Love I Lost, which is considered the first Disco song. Every danceable song that uses it since is borrowing it from Disco.
Of course there are other 4/4 beats.
.
From the paragraph before the Earl Young paragraph on Wikipedia:
You’re also making the argument that things like Tech-House and Gabber are disco as opposed to being loosely inspired by it through several intermediary generations - so you are completely wrong even beyond this oversight, to be totally fair to the other poster.
Disco comes from Discotheque. It is the music specifically made for the dance floor. The beat is the thing and the beat was created for the single purpose of getting people to dance. Any music made later to dance to using the disco beat is Disco, it is just no longer called that. I know it is fashionable to limit Disco to a short lived fad but that is just not true.
Reading many other responses in this thread I see many people just have no clue.
Boney M. Had a sense of humor-Rasputin is a great and hysterically funny song-which I consider Euro-pop.
Anyway, I’ve been through both the Disco era and 80’s pop.
My thoughts: I have never been a fan of disco, I never got into the disco aesthetic nor did I get into clubbing. Give me Warren Zevon, The Dead, Jimi, and had I known of Nick Drake back then, I’d be thrilled.
However, we all have our “closet favorites “ from disco times. Mine was ABBA and KC and the Sunshine Band. And TBH, ABBA was more disco lite.
I think the main difference was Disco had the heavy and faster beats and timing whereas 80’s pop, although lots of electronic elements ( Pop Goes the World; Wang Chung; The Safety Dance) the beats seemed to be slower and the music somewhat softer-sounding. In addition, the birth of MTV showcased a ton of 80’s pop.
Music got better in the 90’s.
Disco is less of a real genre determined by musicians and more of a marketing term by record labels. Most of it was just upbeat funk and soul music or poppy dance music. It has some generic musical quantifiers but overall it just means “upbeat 70s music.” So no there’s really no difference between 70s disco and upbeat 80s pop music in America for the most part, besides maybe production techniques. Musically they’re not different at all. “Never Gonna Give You Up” would clearly be considered disco had it been released a few years earlier.
Synthesizers for one. 80s pop casts s wider net as well with New Wave and traditional rock acts like Huey Lewis snd Phil Collins.
But the disco backlash only got rid of the branding ànd disco balls. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Boy George fit right in to disco. Thriller could've been called Disco Dead or something.
Disco has swing and soul. Disco often has a realness to it even if fully synthetic. The vocals in disco will be front and center and a center piece of the song.
80s pop is highly influenced by disco, but the beat is usually more strict. The vocals will often not always be the focus of the piece and their delivery often times less soulful or dramatic.
A good example would be comparing Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall to his follow up 3 years later Thriller.
Off the Wall is often called a Disco record and for good reason, but it’s really disco/funk/soul. The instrumentation is mostly live acoustic sounds. There’s a huge emphasis on soulful vocals. The bass and drums feel very loose but they are still in time.
Compare that to Thriller which squarely fits into pop, even though songs like “Wanna Be Startin Somethin” are firmly lined up with Disco or Funk … the track has a VERY strict drumbeat and bass line. The delivery of the vocal is less “soulful” and more “urgent”. The whole album has a vocal delivery that’s more “rock and roll” overall.
These two albums are 3 years apart by the same artist with a lot of the same producers, engineers and musicians. They’re both dance albums at their core.
But one is much more so Disco and one is much more so Pop, even though the overlap is insanely similar.