Description
American studies scholar and former deejay Alice Echols captures the experience of the Disco Years--on dance floors, at the movies, in the streets, and beneath the sheets. Disco may have presented itself as shallow and disposable--the platforms, polyester, and plastic vibe of it all--but the disco scene carved out a haven for gay men who reclaimed their sexuality on dance floors where they had once been surveilled and harassed; it thrust black women onto center stage as some of the genre's most prominent stars; and it paved the way for the opening of Studio 54 and the viral popularity of the shoestring-budget Saturday Night Fever, a movie that challenged traditional notions of masculinity, even for heterosexuals. But while exploring the cultural milieu, Echols never loses sight of the era's defining soundtrack, which propelled popular music into new sonic territory, influencing everything from rap and rock to techno and trance.--From publisher description.… (more)
Publication
W. W. Norton & Company (2011), Edition: Illustrated, 368 pages
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LibraryThing member kraaivrouw
This was good, but not as good as I expected it to be. Maybe I set too high a standard for Ms. Echols, but probably I want something different than this book really is. If you're looking for a fairly academic review of the disco period with detailed information on specific artists and songs, this
I have a strange history with disco. I was a punk in high school and later in life and I forswore the corporate driven mass-produced junk food that was disco with all the fervor of a teenager. I've spent most of life flouting authority and refusing to get in whatever box the world said I had to be in because I'm a woman. I've never been interested in having someone else define being female for me - I get to define that for myself. This made punk imminently more attractive, if only because it was guaranteed to outrage somebody and to violate expectations and you've gotta love that.
Later in life I've found that I actually like some disco (especially if it has a good rhythm section) and I've always liked some of what followed and was influenced by it - Bronski Beat, Soft Cell, Talking Heads, Blondie, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and arguably Joy Division/New Order. Guess I prefer the part of the musical sequence that turns from producer-driven music to music driven by artists.
This book is pretty good, but there are things missing here and things that are too detailed and places where I disagree with Ms. Echols' analysis. Ms. Echols falls into the unfortunate trap of many writers of musical history - she spends page after page detailing the production history of song after song ad infinitum. Perhaps providing a discography in the back of the book and detailing selected seminal works would be a better way to go.
Her analysis is relatively strong when she talks about the homosexual dance club scene, one of the birthplaces of disco. She does a good job of putting the music into that context and in those chapters and her chapter about Saturday Night Fever (one of my all-time favorite movies for its brilliant picture of working class life in the seventies when literally everything was up for grabs) she excels in most of her analysis, particularly in her discussion about the ways disco influenced what was male vs. what was female in this country. Prior to the seventies a real man certainly wouldn't blow dry his hair much less use hair care products and moisturizers and various kind of makeup as men do now. This represents a shift in consciousness and Echols explicates this with skill.
Less skillful are her chapters on women and disco and the one on black masculinity both of which miss the mark and the depth of her analysis elsewhere in the book. I could feel the author's discomfort in writing these sections and wish she had been able to get past that and to provide a more honest analytical critique.
I disagree with Ms. Echols' careless dismissal of criticisms of disco for being all the things my teenage self thought it was - yes, disco is ear candy and there's a place for that, but I'm suspicious of anything the corporate musical world and its radio shills want to shove down my throat - I may be more broadminded in my musical tastes, but I still maintain a healthy wariness about the virtue of what corporations are trying to sell me today. Like it or not there is meat in this argument and if you're going to dismiss it then you need to provide an alternative to it and suggesting that disco is female and rock is male is simple, but not substantive.
I agree with Echols' dismissal of the tendency of historians who focus on music of the seventies to dismiss disco because it was heavily commodified and to harken back to the good old days when the form was pure and wonderful and everyone skipped together to the happy music holding hands and strewing the dance floor with daisies. And stuff.
This is a criticism that gets thrown at almost every kind of music (plus everything else). While it's true that disco had humble beginnings and became mass-produced and commodified, it's also true that that is the cycle in music and most everything else, including literature. Write one successful vampire romance series and it will be immediately followed with dozens of other formulaic vampire romance series. Don't believe me? Check out the young adult book section of Target next time you stop in.
Guys may tell you they got into a band to get laid (and they probably did), but somewhere in that motivation nestles the hope that the band will hit it big and make oodles of money and achieve fame and adulation and they'll be STARS. It is the nature of music (and books and art and just about everything else) in a capitalist society to become commodified and corporatized. Even my beloved punk fell into that cycle (see also, Green Day).
The more interesting argument has to do with what it means when producers take over the music rather than artists driving their own sounds. You can see this in much of today's hip-hop which is all about the producer and is so mechanized that musicianship is under-valued in favor of recording methods that allow producers to cut the musician right out of the picture. What does that mean in a broader social context? I'm not sure myself, but it's something a lot more interesting to talk about rather than focusing on rock is only for white guys (see you later Living Color - you don't matter) and chicks like boppy pop (bye bye Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney - you're not guys so you can't make rock). The world is more complex than this particular dichotomy and with music that was (and continues to be) popular in transgendered communities that dichotomy seems pretty worthless.
Overall this is an interesting book and it obviously gave me a lot to think about. If you're interested in music and how it works in the world this is a great book for you, even if it doesn't do everything it could have.
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is your book. If you also want nuanced discussion that places disco in its own sociocultural milieu and offers detailed analysis of its impact (both past and future) and of what the rise and fall (to rise again) of producer-driven music means in the larger context, then this is not your book.I have a strange history with disco. I was a punk in high school and later in life and I forswore the corporate driven mass-produced junk food that was disco with all the fervor of a teenager. I've spent most of life flouting authority and refusing to get in whatever box the world said I had to be in because I'm a woman. I've never been interested in having someone else define being female for me - I get to define that for myself. This made punk imminently more attractive, if only because it was guaranteed to outrage somebody and to violate expectations and you've gotta love that.
Later in life I've found that I actually like some disco (especially if it has a good rhythm section) and I've always liked some of what followed and was influenced by it - Bronski Beat, Soft Cell, Talking Heads, Blondie, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and arguably Joy Division/New Order. Guess I prefer the part of the musical sequence that turns from producer-driven music to music driven by artists.
This book is pretty good, but there are things missing here and things that are too detailed and places where I disagree with Ms. Echols' analysis. Ms. Echols falls into the unfortunate trap of many writers of musical history - she spends page after page detailing the production history of song after song ad infinitum. Perhaps providing a discography in the back of the book and detailing selected seminal works would be a better way to go.
Her analysis is relatively strong when she talks about the homosexual dance club scene, one of the birthplaces of disco. She does a good job of putting the music into that context and in those chapters and her chapter about Saturday Night Fever (one of my all-time favorite movies for its brilliant picture of working class life in the seventies when literally everything was up for grabs) she excels in most of her analysis, particularly in her discussion about the ways disco influenced what was male vs. what was female in this country. Prior to the seventies a real man certainly wouldn't blow dry his hair much less use hair care products and moisturizers and various kind of makeup as men do now. This represents a shift in consciousness and Echols explicates this with skill.
Less skillful are her chapters on women and disco and the one on black masculinity both of which miss the mark and the depth of her analysis elsewhere in the book. I could feel the author's discomfort in writing these sections and wish she had been able to get past that and to provide a more honest analytical critique.
I disagree with Ms. Echols' careless dismissal of criticisms of disco for being all the things my teenage self thought it was - yes, disco is ear candy and there's a place for that, but I'm suspicious of anything the corporate musical world and its radio shills want to shove down my throat - I may be more broadminded in my musical tastes, but I still maintain a healthy wariness about the virtue of what corporations are trying to sell me today. Like it or not there is meat in this argument and if you're going to dismiss it then you need to provide an alternative to it and suggesting that disco is female and rock is male is simple, but not substantive.
I agree with Echols' dismissal of the tendency of historians who focus on music of the seventies to dismiss disco because it was heavily commodified and to harken back to the good old days when the form was pure and wonderful and everyone skipped together to the happy music holding hands and strewing the dance floor with daisies. And stuff.
This is a criticism that gets thrown at almost every kind of music (plus everything else). While it's true that disco had humble beginnings and became mass-produced and commodified, it's also true that that is the cycle in music and most everything else, including literature. Write one successful vampire romance series and it will be immediately followed with dozens of other formulaic vampire romance series. Don't believe me? Check out the young adult book section of Target next time you stop in.
Guys may tell you they got into a band to get laid (and they probably did), but somewhere in that motivation nestles the hope that the band will hit it big and make oodles of money and achieve fame and adulation and they'll be STARS. It is the nature of music (and books and art and just about everything else) in a capitalist society to become commodified and corporatized. Even my beloved punk fell into that cycle (see also, Green Day).
The more interesting argument has to do with what it means when producers take over the music rather than artists driving their own sounds. You can see this in much of today's hip-hop which is all about the producer and is so mechanized that musicianship is under-valued in favor of recording methods that allow producers to cut the musician right out of the picture. What does that mean in a broader social context? I'm not sure myself, but it's something a lot more interesting to talk about rather than focusing on rock is only for white guys (see you later Living Color - you don't matter) and chicks like boppy pop (bye bye Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney - you're not guys so you can't make rock). The world is more complex than this particular dichotomy and with music that was (and continues to be) popular in transgendered communities that dichotomy seems pretty worthless.
Overall this is an interesting book and it obviously gave me a lot to think about. If you're interested in music and how it works in the world this is a great book for you, even if it doesn't do everything it could have.
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LibraryThing member e-zReader
I just finished reading Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. I was never into the 1970s disco scene and didn't really know too much about it or how huge it really was socially or economically. It's a great look at the music and the effects on and by the gay and African-American
Both books are very well researched and have extensive indexes. (I wish Echols had included a bibliography) In Hot Stuff, Echols quotes several times from Dancer from the Dance and The Farewell Symphony. I read Dancer many years ago and she's got me reading the Edmund White book now.
Since October is LGBT History month read one or all of these books. You won't be disappointed.
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communities. Two interesting companion books are Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. Both of these books offer a very good look at life in the 1970s. Hot Stuff takes a broad national look but both books center in on NYC. Russell was a minimalist, but serious composer of contemporary classical music but wrote a couple of disco hits including "Is It All Over My Face?".Both books are very well researched and have extensive indexes. (I wish Echols had included a bibliography) In Hot Stuff, Echols quotes several times from Dancer from the Dance and The Farewell Symphony. I read Dancer many years ago and she's got me reading the Edmund White book now.
Since October is LGBT History month read one or all of these books. You won't be disappointed.
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LibraryThing member gayla.bassham
This proved to be a fascinating look at disco and its effect on African-American, gay, and feminist thinking in the 1970s. Echols may overreach in some of her analysis, but I thought most of her arguments were convincing, and the writing was more engaging than I have come to expect from
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professional historians. Show Less
ISBN
0393338916 / 9780393338911