Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture

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Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture Pub. Date: 3/21/2011 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
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Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture Pub. Date: 3/29/2010 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

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Overview

In the 1970s, as the disco tsunami engulfed America, the once-innocent question, “Do you wanna dance?” became divisive, even explosive. What was it about this much-maligned music that made it such hot stuff? In this incisive history, Alice Echols captures the felt experience of the Disco Years—on dance floors both fabulous and tacky, 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 Echols shows that it was inseparable from the emergence of “gay macho,” a rising black middle class, and a growing, if equivocal, openness about female sexuality. 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.

As it provides a window onto the cultural milieu of the times, Hot Stuff 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. Throughout, Echols spotlights the work of precursors James Brown and Isaac Hayes, dazzling divas Donna Summer and the women of Labelle, and some of disco’s lesser known but no less illustrious performers such as Sylvester. After turning the final page of this fascinating account of the music you thought you hated but can’t stop dancing to, you can rest assured that you’ll never say “disco sucks” again.

Editorial Reviews

James Gavin

Alice Echols, a professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University and a former disco D.J., knows that most of the music she spun is considered "mindless, repetitive, formulaic and banal." But in her engrossing new book, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, she portrays that scene as a hotbed of social change—for gays, for women and their sexual rights, for blacks in the record industry. Other writers have done more to evoke the era's sleazy glamour and animal excitement. But Echols…has few peers among music sociologists. Scholarly but fun, Hot Stuff is not just about disco; it re-examines the '70s as a decade of revolution.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

As American studies professor and Janis Joplin biographer (Scars of Sweet Paradise) Echols succinctly states, “Nothing seems to conjure up the seventies quite so effectively as disco.” But while the decade’s weltanschauung is often dismissed as merely polyester and platform heels, Echols aims for—and thoroughly achieves—a range of higher cultural insights. Using an encyclopedic knowledge of the eras’ biggest stars, she shows how all sorts of musical disco styles played a “central role” in broadening the contours of “blackness, femininity, and male homosexuality” in America. She brilliantly explores the many ways that early disco clubs created new spaces “where gay men could safely come together in a large crowd,” at the same time often masking an early strain of the racial and class exclusion that dominated disco’s later years. She brings to light the influence of underground legends such as club deejay Tom Moulton, who first remixed popular records to make them longer for dancing and “created the model for the 12-inch, extended play disco single.” Best of all is Echols’s revelatory look at how the “critique of racism and sexism” in the film Saturday Night Fever offers “a richer portrait of the disco seventies” than its critics have granted. (Nov.)

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

Library Journal

Without a doubt, disco is the genre most associated with the music of the 1970s. The classic rock of the 1960s, the sounds of Motown and Phil Spector, and the soul of Stax and Atlantic made way to funkier sounds and throbbing beats. Beginning in the 1960s, Echols (American studies & history, Rutgers Univ.; Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin), who was once a disco deejay, analyzes the development of disco from the dance floor up and ends with disco's successors. Disco became a dominant force owing to the play time dance clubs gave the music rather than radio airplay. This growth through bars and clubs opened up relationships among disco and gay liberation, feminism, and African American rights. VERDICT While this is not a comprehensive history of disco, it is an intriguing critical study of the complex relationships and the nontraditional development of the genre. A definite purchase for academic libraries and pop-music enthusiasts.—Brian Sherman, McNeese State Univ. Lib., Lake Charles, LA

Kirkus Reviews

Through the lens of the music and its ethos, a former DJ examines what made the folly of the disco years so indelible. Echols (American Studies and History/Rutgers Univ.; Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks, 2002, etc.) opens with the memory of one of the early zeniths of her music-programming career in the mid-1970s. She worked at the Rubaiyat discotheque in Ann Arbor, Mich., where the disco movement slowly began to influence her clientele, including "Madonna Ciccone, who is said to have danced there before dropping out of U of M and heading off to New York." Yet, the author notes, the epoch had its detractors; many dismissed the trend as a "lamentable and regrettable period in American history." That general consensus failed to thwart Barry White, whose "Love's Theme" went on to become the first disco track to crack the top spot on the Billboard pop charts. Distinguished with hints of traditional funk and soul, the "insistent and whomping" beat of the R&B and Motown sound became the "incubator of disco." From a cultural standpoint, however, Echols points out that conversely, this particular harmonious amalgam "seemed a crazy reversal of all that the black freedom movement had fought for." The author attributes much of disco's success to the homosexual community's collective embrace, spurred by gay DJs like Tom Moulton (originator of the "remix"), who not only held prominent posts in nightclubs, but also within the music promotional industry. From disco's earliest incarnations, homosexual men celebrated the "gay glitterball culture" at respected New York nightclubs. But as their popularity increased, so did a propensity toward racial and gender exclusivity. The mid-'70s becameall about "the music, mix, drugs, lights, sound systems, and an unmistakable uniformity of dress." A resurgence in male "macho" masculinity followed, though female (and male) "divas" like Donna Summer, Patti LaBelle and Sylvester dominated the charts. Echols concludes with contemporary commentary on disco's predictable resurgence since "pop music is full of unlikely turnabouts."A well-researched, culturally sensitive time capsule. Agent: Geri Thoma/Elaine Markson Literary Agency

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393338911
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 3/21/2011
Pages: 338
Sales rank: 544,724
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Alice Echols is a professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University. A former disco deejay, she is the author of the acclaimed biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise. She lives in Highland Park, New Jersey.

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Plastic Fantastic: The Disco Year xv

1 I Hear a Symphony: Black Masculinity and the Disco Turn 1

2 More, More, More: One and Oneness in Gay Disco 39

3 Ladies' Night: Women and Disco 71

4 The Homo Superiors: Disco and the Rise of Gay Macho 121

5 Saturday Night Fever: The Little Disco Movie 159

6 One Nation under a Thump?: Disco and its Discontents 195

Epilogue: Do It Again 233

Notes 241

Playlist 303

Photograph Credits 307

Index 309

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