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Disco: Music, Movies, and Mania under the Mirror Ball
This dazzling volume shines new light on the songs, styles, and enduring pop culture impact of the 1970s musical genre that emerged from Black and Latin queer culture to take the world by storm.
Half a century after the drug-fueled, DJ-driven, glamour-drenched musical phenomenon of disco was born at a New York City loft party, disco’s musical and fashion influences live on in popular culture.
This is a frolicking, entertaining, yet serious tribute to the overlooked art form of disco, which has never been given its proper due, nor taken its true place in the historic struggle for LGBTQ+, gender, and racial equality.
Painting a vivid portrait of this provocative era, DeCaro explores the cultural importance of disco and how the music and dance that originated in queer Black and Latin clubs of the day became a mainstream phenomenon, changing our culture along the way.
With glamorous photos from disco’s heyday up through today, DeCaro examines disco’s pervasive influence on pop culture over the last fifty years—exploring disco in film and television as well as in fashion and interior design.
Through entertaining texts—as well as interviews with artists and celebrities of the era, such as Donna Summer and Grace Jones, among others—this book champions the diverse origins of disco while celebrating its influence on today’s groundbreaking artists such as Lady Gaga, Duo Lipa, and Miley Cyrus. A must for all lovers of music, style, and pop culture.
Half a century after the drug-fueled, DJ-driven, glamour-drenched musical phenomenon of disco was born at a New York City loft party, disco’s musical and fashion influences live on in popular culture.
This is a frolicking, entertaining, yet serious tribute to the overlooked art form of disco, which has never been given its proper due, nor taken its true place in the historic struggle for LGBTQ+, gender, and racial equality.
Painting a vivid portrait of this provocative era, DeCaro explores the cultural importance of disco and how the music and dance that originated in queer Black and Latin clubs of the day became a mainstream phenomenon, changing our culture along the way.
With glamorous photos from disco’s heyday up through today, DeCaro examines disco’s pervasive influence on pop culture over the last fifty years—exploring disco in film and television as well as in fashion and interior design.
Through entertaining texts—as well as interviews with artists and celebrities of the era, such as Donna Summer and Grace Jones, among others—this book champions the diverse origins of disco while celebrating its influence on today’s groundbreaking artists such as Lady Gaga, Duo Lipa, and Miley Cyrus. A must for all lovers of music, style, and pop culture.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
240 pages, Hardcover
Published October 15, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 14, 2024
I've never felt so old and decrepit as when I was reading Frank DeCaro's Disco: Music, Movies, and Mania under the Mirror Ball. Not because I grew up at the height of the disco era, wore Qiana shirts for middle school band performances, knew how to do the Hustle, and still have an exhaustive recall of the lyrics of Sylvester songs. No, it's because the text of Disco is set in what looks like a five-point sans serif font that required both a bright light and the use of readers. The typesetting is a baffling choice, given the likely demographic of its readers.
That, however, is the only misstep DeCaro and his editors make with Disco. Printed on luxurious stock and abundantly festooned with colorful photos, DeCaro spends as much time poking fun at the excesses of the disco music revolution that consumed an entire decade as he does extolling its pleasures and virtues. Playlists of essential music cover from the early nineteen-seventies through 2024. Though the narrative is largely chronological, the author takes ample detours from the music to explore the rise and fall of the clubs in which it was played, its presence in movies, television, and on Broadway, and the many ways popular culture incorporated it and informed its development. I found particularly funny a chapter on the many 'very special disco episodes' of popular TV shows...perhaps because I could recall all too many of them.
The volume is packed with top-notch interviews with artists, DJs, and producers. DeCaro's follow-through is particularly impressive on the decline of disco—in America, anyway—and its embrace and resurgence in the decades that followed. I'd recommend that if anyone wanted to explore more on the technological innovations that led to many of the music industry's interest in disco, they'll find a deeper dive in Peter Shapiro's Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. Similarly, Tim Lawrence makes a more thorough examination of disco's self-reinvention in his excellent and essential Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983.
DeCaro's Disco, however, is the liveliest and most visually pleasing seminar a reader could undertake on the disco phenomenon. Just bring along your reading glasses.
That, however, is the only misstep DeCaro and his editors make with Disco. Printed on luxurious stock and abundantly festooned with colorful photos, DeCaro spends as much time poking fun at the excesses of the disco music revolution that consumed an entire decade as he does extolling its pleasures and virtues. Playlists of essential music cover from the early nineteen-seventies through 2024. Though the narrative is largely chronological, the author takes ample detours from the music to explore the rise and fall of the clubs in which it was played, its presence in movies, television, and on Broadway, and the many ways popular culture incorporated it and informed its development. I found particularly funny a chapter on the many 'very special disco episodes' of popular TV shows...perhaps because I could recall all too many of them.
The volume is packed with top-notch interviews with artists, DJs, and producers. DeCaro's follow-through is particularly impressive on the decline of disco—in America, anyway—and its embrace and resurgence in the decades that followed. I'd recommend that if anyone wanted to explore more on the technological innovations that led to many of the music industry's interest in disco, they'll find a deeper dive in Peter Shapiro's Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. Similarly, Tim Lawrence makes a more thorough examination of disco's self-reinvention in his excellent and essential Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983.
DeCaro's Disco, however, is the liveliest and most visually pleasing seminar a reader could undertake on the disco phenomenon. Just bring along your reading glasses.
September 4, 2025
The king (or is it "queen"?) of kitschy-queer pop-culture criticism delivers with this glittery coffee table survey of over 50 years of disco...the music that racist homophobic bigots have always hated and that the rest of us have always loved, loved, loved!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews