Apr 25, 2004

Hockey music: Punk Rock, Guy Lafleur Disco, the organ, and more

From Gary Genosko:

"Puck rockers would like us to think they have principles, and they like to wax nostalgic about the organs and organ players of yesteryear. The sports world's organ music, it seems, is the proto-punk aesthetic. Organ music was used in hockey arenas to whip up the emotions of hometown fans (albeit with considerable cheese and fluff). There were telling moments of rebellion. For example, the league (the establishment) intervened, as they once did in Major League Baseball, when organists (the rebels) began to play "Three Blind Mice" whenever the referee or one of his two linesmen was thought to have made a bad call against the home team. There is a certain defiance attached to the organ, and it is said to have had its purest punk expression in the early music of Elvis Costello and the Attractions, with their aggressive, punchy organ work.

Unfortunately, puck rockers have it all wrong. The real music of hockey is disco - and I have incontrovertible evidence to support my claim, even if I feel a bit disheartened in staking it. For once upon a time I felt for disco the same contempt puck rockers now feel for cold and remote Euro-synth-pop. When I was a teenager, my neighborhood road hockey team had a bitter rivalry with a team we contemptuously called "the discos." They were the hair team, and we were greasy and shaggy; they wielded blowdriers, and we looked like we just rolled out of bed: Stayin’ Alive meets Dazed and Confused in a struggle over hockey style."

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