“To this day Disco Demolition Night stands in infamy as one of the most ill-advised promotions of all-time, but arguably one of the most successful as 30 years later we’re all still talking about it.” (Jeremiah Graves, baseball analyst in 1979)

What started as a promotional act of one man being in charge of getting people to the Comiskey Park stadium in Chicago Illinois on July 12th 1979 turned out to become an event that went down in history for various reasons:

• The totally unexpected culmination of fans of Rock music protesting about the rising popularity of Disco music amongst their children and the young generation being more attracted to this fresh style of music then to the music their parents were partying to.

• The way the promotion was focused, some say it was on purpose as lots of puritans welcomed the slogan ‘Disco sucks’ being ambiguous as the Disco movement was supported by black people and a large gay community in the first place as it was crossing borders in a wide sense, so to call it ‘Disco sucks’ was a direct offense to the gay community.

• As they normally expected around 5000 people to attend the games they were completely overwhelmed by the response this promotion received, official numbers state there were around 55.000 people trying to get into the stadium with several thousand having to stay outside due to the maximum capacity of the stadium.In the first half of the game people started to throw the disco records they brought to the stadium on the field, with lots of them flying like weapons onto the green, getting stuck in the ground due to its speed. The players were advised to wear extra protection gear in order to not get hurt…

• On the break between the first and second half the announcement of the explosion of the box filled up with Disco records created a mass reaction with first a few, then a few hundred and finally thousands of people invading the play field as the security company in charge for the game was completely overstrained. The explosion ripped out a huge hole on the field and the feet of thousands did the rest, ending in a cancellation of the second half of the game.

 After the whole event media all around America did a coverage on the event turning it into something completely different then the original intention, it finally became a perfect promotion for Disco – not against it. It showed once more the deeply enrooted racism amongst many of the american population and at the same time the urge for changing this.

Concluding it can be said that the Disco Demolition Night actually helped opening up the minds of many to a movement that was impossible to be stopped, and as history proves that modern dance music was born out of Disco we can say we owe a lot to this era and the Disco Demolition Night.

To commemorate this anniversary and the fact that Disco Music is more in demand than ever Aristofreeks aim to inject the original Disco music spirit into modern house music, bringing back the funk and fun to merge with modern beats through reworks of existing Disco anthems like ‘We are Family’ feat. Kathy Sledge (original member and voice of Sister Sledge) plus taking it one step further through working with original key players like the Chic singers (Norma-Jean Wright, Luci Martin and Alfa Anderson) and Kathy Sledge on brand new tracks soon to be released. And as Nile Rodgers is currently one of the biggest acts and collaborating with Daft Punk winning several awards on this year’s Grammys, including ‘album of the year’ with ‘RAM’ and ‘record of the year’ with ‘Get Lucky’, it is undeniable that Disco music is more in demand than ever before.

You should be dancing!