Researching Disco

When researching my chosen genre (Disco) I noticed a few things, when looking up 'Disco' the 1970's appeared regularly. It seemed disco was a thing of the past with an outdated look and no recent music being produced. Disco seemed dead, unwanted by the public any longer, I was put off choosing disco by this point and thought if I were to make this disco magazine it wouldn't appeal to the public of today! Further into my research I noticed the fashion of disco such as disco pants, scrunchies, glittery items, big hair, clashing patterns and bright colours were rapidly coming back into fashion! Huge brands such as Urban Outfitters, Topshop, River Island, Primark and many more are selling these disco related items making the fashion of disco known to different generations. This showed to me disco wasn't completely dead and in fact becoming something cool and retro rather than outdated and something embarrassing that only your parents or grandparents would know about! I decided to look on the Urban Outfitters website which is a popular clothing brand with a main target audience of teenagers, I typed 'Disco' into the search bar, this produced clothing and accessories such as 'Roller disco leggings' and various 'Disco sunglasses', this showed me that disco was definitely in fashion today. When looking through a magazine aimed for teenage girls and young woman I discovered a picture of 'Rihannah', a well known pop artist known for inspiring young girls and being a fashion icon, she was spotted wearing a disco sequin top and holographic shoes and bag, furthermore showing the fashion of disco becoming more popular!

The problem now was that the magazine I am going to create has to be a music one, not fashion so I decided to do more research into the music aspects of Disco. After some research I came across Madonna, a more recent artist who had produced an album called 'Confessions on a dance floor', this was a perfect example of more recent types of disco music. I soon realised that Disco hadn't died, it had just changed throughout the years, I noticed aspects of disco such as highly synthesised sounds are in a lot of music today that we wouldn't class as 'disco music'. Other genres of music have borrowed aspects of disco such as a lot of pop music is now dance music which includes many aspects of disco in them. I also found that disco music is still played on radios today as it is 'feel good music' which has an aspect of fun making people want to get up and dance, songs like 'Chick - Le Freak' are played and 'The trammps - Disco Inferno' are still popular. Overall I realised if I was going to make a disco magazine that would appeal to the public today it would have to be for teenagers or young adults due to the age ranges that the fashion and pop industries aim their products and music to.