People like to say it is a disco album (I remember saying it myself once or twice over the years) but it isn't. The reason that people started referring to Off the Wall as a disco album was mostly about trying to redeem disco.

Remember that until like 10 years ago, disco mostly still sucked... even for a lot of Black people. It was something everybody was still embarrassed about and tried to distance themselves from. Nile Rodgers, Janice Marie Johnson and all those other people you saw on that Unsung proudly repping disco? Ten years ago, all of them were denying ever being disco artists, claiming they didn't know what disco was, that it was a label slapped on them while they were just making their regular rock/jazz/R&B etc.

Conventional wisdom amongst a lot of people was that apart from maybe Donna Summer, nobody whose career started in disco survived into the next decade... which proves they were manufactured/talentless/wack etc*... But OTW was used as a defense against that argument.

Ten years ago, calling Off the Wall "disco" was almost a revolutionary act... Because everybody loves Off the Wall. So if you're saying disco sucks... well, you like OTW, don't you? So maybe disco doesn't suck THAT much! (An alternate version of this argument was "Prince is a genius, right? Did you listen to his first two albums?")

OTW has got some disco-ish elements but even the track on there that's got the word "disco" in it was not straight disco in the conventional sense. It's an R&B album made in an era in which R&B had not fully shaken off much of the glitter from the night before's disco... It would not fully shake it all off until 1984 or 85 anyway, which is why you get stuff like boogie, freestyle, electro, Hi-NRG coming out during that time (not to mention Italo.)


*Lately I've heard the same argument used to diss New Jack Swing