This day in history: ‘Disco Demolition Night’
On this day in 1979, nearly 50,000 people packed Comiskey Park on the southwest side of Chicago to watch local DJ and notorious disco hater Steve Dahl blow up a bunch of disco records in between a White Sox doubleheader. “Disco Demolition Night” remains one of the seminal events in music history, reflecting the homophobic and racist backlash to a music genre with roots in gay and racial minority communities.
While the Sox hosted a “Disco Night” two years prior, the idea of hosting an anti-disco promotion struck interest. Partnering with Dahl and his team at WLUP, “Disco Demolition Night” was promoted far and wide across Illinois, promoting to fans that anyone who brought a disco record to the ballpark would be admitted for 98 cents to watch the albums get blown up in-between the doubleheader games.
The promotion turned out to be very successful—too successful. The crowd devolved into a full-on riot, with thousands of mostly young, white men rushing the field to destroy records. One eyewitness, a former Comiskey Park usher, told the Guardian in 2019 that he noticed a lot of attendees didn’t even bother to bring disco albums—they just brought “anything made by a Black artist.” (More)