Less rough around the edges these days, disco polo is a booming business and its stars are living a life of luxury. This clearly worked the trick for Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who defeated the incumbent Lech Wałęsa to become president in 1995, in no small part thanks to this piece:Īt the turn of the century disco polo went on a blood-curdling rollercoaster ride, going out of style overnight before bouncing back in style a few years later. A mainstream TV network was airing a weekly show on this latest thing in music, disco polo clubs were opening by the dozen and there were no limits to what you could be seen wearing:ĭuring disco polo’s heyday in the mid-1990s, it was embraced by politicians, who stood little chance of winning elections if they didn’t get a popular disco polo band to sing about what fine chaps they were.

Sales soon shot through the bazaar roof and the genre was given a more attractive-sounding name, calqued half-heartedly from Italo disco. Conceived in the late 1980s, the genre was initially known as sidewalk music because cassettes were sold primarily in stalls on streets and in bazaars. The beginnings of disco polo were far less refined though, at least production-wise. This hasn’t, however, prevented disco polo from becoming a crowd favourite at wedding parties all across Poland, with popular hits typically sung by the entire dance floor at the top of their voices.įor starters, let’s give it over to Zenek Martyniuk, the undisputed king of disco polo, and his band’s hit single Przez Twe Oczy Zielone ( Because of Your Green Eyes), viewed nearly 200 million times to date on YouTube: When it’s not melodramatic lines about unrequited love, the lyrics feature the sort of locker-room language that doesn’t really lend itself to quoting here. While it continues to mystify musicologists and remains a symbol of bad taste for many, disco polo happily defies all the odds with its earwormy melodic line and remains many a Pole’s guilty pleasure.

Think of disco polo in terms of a cross between disco and folk music, just not a very good cross. An ear-bleeding mixture of simplistic melodies and lovey-dovey lyrics, disco polo has become a fixture at parties across Poland and a source of sizeable fortunes for its biggest stars.

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