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Disco: Music, Movies, and Mania under the Mirror Ball
- 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