Johnny Mathis’s collaboration with Chic happened at a time of unprecedented unrest in popular music. The Chic Organization was weathering the ‘disco sucks’ storm and its aftermath. Although Chic weren’t, and never had been, a disco band (they were more accurately described as a musical outfit that used disco), they were among the chief suspects. Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with their hits (“Le Freak”, “Good Times”) would surely have known that they were a world away from Disco Duck, The Ethel Merman Disco Album, or “In the Navy”, but that wasn’t enough to spare them from the anti-disco scrutiny sweeping America. It was an ugly populist movement that resented everything disco stood for: racial minorities, gay rights, permissiveness, sexual freedom, wealth, and dancing.
Steve Dahl of WLUP in Chicago was the ‘disco sucks’ mastermind. He affected a lisp when he said the word ‘disco’ on air, making it clear just what he thought of the genre; it was indisputably gay. Not only gay but black. Not only black but Latin. Not only Latin but popular with sexually liberated clubbers on either coast who frequented places that not everyone could get into. It was elitist. It put the minorities in charge and, for once, the straight, white, male, conservative rock fans were the ones being left out. They weren’t going to tolerate that perceived slight. Discs were acquired so that they could be smashed in the air. It was the biggest case of record-burning since the one prompted by John Lennon’s 1966 ‘Jesus’ comments, culminating in the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, the White Sox baseball park in Chicago, on 12 July 1979, which was preceded by several other public anti-disco events throughout the country.