Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter explores both early discomania’s commercial recognition of discotheque hits as potential Top 40 pop hits and an emerging mass “disco industry” built on the foundations of a formerly underground discotheque subculture. In a January 1976 review of the first Billboard Disco Forum, a New York Times critic described this emerging industry’s uniquely American entertainment traits—it was “loud, noisy, tacky-stylish, energetic, thoughtless and fun,” and steeped in trend-chasing capitalism and guilty-pleasure pop enjoyment. In April 1976, a Village Voice dance-music critic noted that this trend’s increasing pop-chart crossovers revealed “two audiences, each in near-total ignorance of the other”—the “hard-core” discotheque subculture and mainstream discomania. The developments studied here include this bandwagon commodification of disco as pop, and how new promotion practices and “discofied” production worked to target a mainstream di$co-pop market. This “#x201D; substitution for disco’s “s” is in keeping with a common headline spelling in the press and captures the gold-rush mentality in play. Across 1974–1975, there was no common conception of “disco” music as a coherent style. Over 1975–1976, however, there emerged a broad understanding of “disco” as a formulaic pop genre defined by “discofied” production traits. Trade coverage reveals much about such pop discofication and the foundations for discomania’s eventual pop-culture dominance via its ever-growing impact on the “masses” who were unlikely to experience celebrated urban discotheques that fueled the glamour of pop-culture discomania. This chapter thus additionally explores cultural intersections between nightclubs outside New York and radio’s Top 40 format.</jats:p>