Disco Demolition Night, Comiskey Park, 12 July 1979

JUL 12 1979

Footage of the White Sox promotion in which a crate of disco records was blown up between games of a doubleheader, the crowd stormed the field and the second game was forfeited. Contemporary critics including Dave Marsh and Nile Rodgers read the ritual as an attack on music made by Black, Latino and gay people; Steve Dahl, who staged it, has always denied that. Disco was already declining, so the night symbolised and accelerated a collapse rather than causing it - and it is the collapse that pushed the music underground into the Chicago and New York clubs where house was made.