More importantly, opportunistic bandwagon-jumpers or not, the Bee Gees had an innate understanding of disco's complex emotional dynamic, the undertow of melancholy lurking beneath the dancefloor euphoria: their songwriting had always tended to the lachrymose. Beyond the Bee Gees tracks at its core, Saturday Night Fever did nothing more outrageous than hold a mirror up to disco at its zenith. There's a novelty track on there – Walter Murphy's A Fifth of Beethoven – but it had already been a huge hit a year before the album came out. On the most basic level thing, if it featured veteran Broadway composer David Shire, it also contained plenty of black artists: Tavares, the Trammps, Kool and the Gang, Philadelphia International house band MFSB. The argument that the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack somehow watered down disco from its black roots for mass acceptance carries no weight.
The problem may have been that Saturday Night Fever made disco, reviled by 70s rock fans as much for its gay roots as its sound, unstoppable because the songs they contributed to it were utterly undeniable: perfectly formed, tightly constructed, melodically rich. The Bee Gees were hardly the first band in history to change their musical style to fit with changing times, nor the first to wear faintly daft clothes while doing so. It's hard to see how an album as good as this became so freighted with negative associations.
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