Disco Demolition: let’s get retro and do this again.
It’s the 30th anniversary of the infamous Disco Demolition night at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
Peace, love and total destruction, man.
What started as a simple promotional bit, just like giving out bobble heads, quickly turned into a surreal scene. An orgy of pop culture destructions, the cathartic discard of a quickly fading trend, and a pop culture phenomenon in it’s own right.
It is certainly difficult to comprehend the reaction that the promotion caused. To truly appreciate it, you have to watch some actual local news coverage of the mayhem that ensued. The moment was also captured in stills and is still on dispaly online: Chicago Tribune photos.
It remained so vivid in people’s memories that what should have been a forgettable schtick one night at a Chicago baseball game is now the object of retrospectives such as this news story for 25th anniversary. Heck, an entire full-length documentary was put together about that fateful night thirty years ago and it even got play on Keith Olberman.
Disco Demolition has gotten so much hype through the years, it’s made me sad that I was barely able to form words at the time and definitely don’t remember one minute of the event when it actually happened.
However, instead of dwelling on my temporal deficiencies, I say we capitalize on America’s most reliable entertainment strategy: copying something that worked in the past. That’s right, just like Dukes of Hazard, the A-Team, and most recently Land of the Lost, I propose we bring back Disco Demolition. But, why limit it to records — or even one musical genre? Let’s put our own forward-thinking spin on it. Let’s have not one, but many demolition nights where we take on anything that’s bugging us, has overstayed it’s fashionable welcome, or that gets in our way. How perfect is that? Not only will we make the world a better place, but we can have [insert object of contempt] demolition nights several times a year at ball parks across the land.
The only thing limiting us is our imagination (and the level of our pent up aggression). After the jump, I’ve got my top ten wishlist for bringing back Demo nights. It’s better to flame out, than fade away!
10. Nickelback CDs, shirts, posters, etc. How did these pop-grunge douchebags make it past the nineties much less for nearly a decade afterward?
9. Crocs. Plastic shoes that look like Dutch wooden clogs – c’mon do I really need say more?
8. Super huge, SUV, multiple child mega-strollers. These beasts seem to be more and more common. I’m sure they’re a godsend for people who don’t know the concept of birthspacing (or bipedalism – let the kid walk, they’re built for it), but they take up more space than an Escalade and people insist on using them in confined public spaces like supermarket aisles which pretty much shuts down that part of the store. I’ve also notice people using them as bulldozers as they fearlessly run over strangers with those things.
7. Hands-free accessories. Hey, these things do have functionality but people act like it’s surgically attached to their ear. It used to be that walking around talking to somebody that wasn’t there was cause for concern, now it’s just “networking.”
6. Plastic shopping bags. I used to live in a place where shopping at the Walmarts and wind were daily occurrences and there wasn’t a tree in town that didn’t have at least 150 plastic bags in various states of decay hanging off the limbs after a particularly breezy day. It was a beautiful city to be sure.
5. Koozies. Does anybody use these things? Everyone’s giving them away: banks, ball parks, truck stops, tourist traps. Seems like everyone has a company Koozie yet I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. And that includes my recent stint in Redneckistan. I figured if there was any demographic that fully appreciate the Koozie it would have been the denizens of that dark place.
4. Your computer. If you’re like 90% of everyone else, you have a computer with a Windows OS. If you’re like 100% of other Windows users, your OS is for crap and your computer is probably going to crash before you finish reading this. Not to mention that as soon as you bought your shiny new computer with its shiny new version of Windows, a new version was already in the works and will be released before the year’s end. So you might as well toss that sucker in a bonfire.
3. Stock portfolio. Unless you’re an insider, you’re screwed until everything settles down. In a way, this has already been done for you so you might as well get some kicks out of it.
2. Fruity beer. Injecting domestic swill beer with artificial lime flavoring neither improves the flavor nor makes it more refreshing. It makes a marginal brew down right undrinkable.
1. Fauxhawks. I’m not, of course, actually advocating we demo actual people who wear this laughable badge of douchebaggery. Instead, we should make a huge effigy of some guy in full d-bag regalia and resplendent fauxhawk and burn that sucker down in a altered stupor — like what happens at Burning Man. Dredlocks and bodypainting optional. Not only is this poignant, but how better than to one-up the original Demo night than with a full bore festival of hedonism, weirdness, and fire under the night sky?
