40 years ago the Chicago White Sox hosted Disco Demolition Night where fans would be admitted into old Comisky for $.98 cents as long as they brought in a disco record to blow up in between a twinight doubleheader with the Tigers.
Well, 50,000 fans ended showed up to the stadium and in the aftermath of the records being blown up in centerfield, the crowd stormed the field causing massive amounts of damage. So much so that the second game with Detroit had to be canceled.
The worst part though about the unjustified unrest was the opportunity some took to attack minority groups. Disco was extremely popular in gay, Hispanic and African American communities at the time and the retrospective sociocultural analysis was the undertones of Disco Demolition Night was a bigoted attack on those particular Communities. Essentially it would be like having a Hip Hop demolition night during a doubleheader intermission today.
Via Vice:
Vince Lawrence, a then-teenaged usher at the event told NPR he was uncomfortable being one of the only Black people at the stadium, and remembered that fans were just bringing LPs by black artists: “[There were] Tyrone Davis records, friggin’ Curtis Mayfield records and Otis Clay records. Records that were clearly not disco.” All those artists are black artists. Whatever the the intent, this was obviously not just about disco but also about simmering racial resentment. Funk legend and disco dabbler Nile Rodgers of Chic later said of the event, “It felt to us like Nazi book-burning. This is America, the home of jazz and rock and people were now afraid even to say the word ‘disco’. I remember thinking—we’re not even a disco group.”
