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Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture
Disco thumps back to life in this pulsating exploration of the culture and politics of the glitterball world.
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. 20 photos.
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. 20 photos.
338 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2010
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650 people want to read
About the author
Alice Echols
16 books23 followersAlice Echols is a cultural critic and historian. A specialist of the 1960s, Echols is a professor at the University of Southern California.
Associate Professor of English, Gender Studies and History
Associate Professor of English, Gender Studies and History
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
October 25, 2010
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 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.
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.
September 9, 2018
This book has its work set out for it in trying to balance the historical demands of a contradictory time period. Echols is trying to explain the radical potential of disco but not render it immune to critique, and give us a solid theoretical perspective without ever straying far from what people were actually listening to. In this, she is mostly successful, and although I can see where she might be faulted for being too academic, not academic, etc., her achievement in condensing this sprawling era into a relatively short, easy-to-read book should not be understated.
January 10, 2024
rips
i love disco so much im gonna throw up
queen alice, former DJ, includes a four hour curated playlist at the end. here is that playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7Hk...
labelle said they tried to reach climax onstage during performances and sarah dash said with a faraway look in her eye, quote, "I really came in Philadelphia." what more could you want from performance, from music history, from the improbable gift of life itself
i love disco so much im gonna throw up
queen alice, former DJ, includes a four hour curated playlist at the end. here is that playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7Hk...
labelle said they tried to reach climax onstage during performances and sarah dash said with a faraway look in her eye, quote, "I really came in Philadelphia." what more could you want from performance, from music history, from the improbable gift of life itself
September 20, 2021
A fascinating look at a fascinating time in history, through the sometimes-maligned lens of disco. Loved it.
September 6, 2018
Echols' look at the 1970s and the rise and fall of disco is a beautifully nuanced study of 1970s culture. Looking at the relationships between music, culture, identity and how it impacted previously oppressed communities she shows how disco and discos created places for new identities. She shows how dancing was transformative not only for individuals but for subcultures who came together through the music and dancing to transform the world they lived in.
"Disco's influence extended beyond the realm of popular music. The 1970s are associated with identity politics, but they ere also a time when numbers of gay men, African Americans, and women ditched predictable social scripts. Disco played a central role in this process, which broadened the counters of blackness, femininity, and male homosexuality." xxiv-xxv
"Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture is an interpretative rather than a comprehensive history, one that focuses on these very shifts in identity and representation and the debates they triggered." xxv
"Disco did favour the synthetic over the organic, the cut-up over the whole, the producer over the artist, and the record over live performance. And if you believed that authentic soul music was raw and unpolished, then disco's preference for silky sophistication was further evidence of its inauthenticity." 10
"The Philly sound was a take-off of Motown, only more sophisticated," says Vince Montana, vibraphonist of MFSB, the house band of PIR." 15
"African American studies scholar Mark Anthony Neal also viewed the seventies as a time of "deterioration," when blackness was reduced to a commodity, and black middle-class flight from the inner city intensified the decline of black public life. And Brian Ward argued that with the rise of disco and funk, black Americans "were dancing to keep from crying." 28
"More often than not the Broadway musical presumed "a depressive status qui" best tackled through steely persistence and a cherry denial of suffering. In the way it veered between "some version of hellish and some version of swellish," the musical seemed to replicate gay life in these years. And while disco served up plenty of songs of romantic sorrow, it fashioned itself as the new sweetish status quo in which injury and solitude were banished and the principle of sybaritic soreness ruled." 41
"The contrast between the shadowy, almost quarantined quality of homosexual culture in the years before disco and its in-your-face visibility at the height of mirror-ball mania has sometimes encouraged the view that gay liberation and disco moved-or better still-danced-hand in hand. While the relationship between "going out and coming out" (an between consumer capitalism and gay liberation) was deep and reciprocal, it was not untroubled." 41
"One of the many young street queens who frequented the Stonewall contends that the unrestrained dancing there fostered the "articulation" of gay sexual desire." 46-47
"Shifts in consciousness are devilishly difficult to map, not the least in this case where change was more a matter of conjunction that straight-forward cause-and-effect." It is even possible to disaggregate dancing from protesting when dancing itself constituted a kind of protest and entailed its own alterations of identity and subjectivity?" 51
"The Stonewall riot and the fallout from it had the effect of legitimizing gay space. Bathhouses and discos, rather than meeting halls or community centres, became what journalist Andrew Kopkind called the "sensational glue" holding these communities together." 53
"Denied the opportunity of uninterrupted dancing with other men, gay men took to the disco like a drug. Nonstop music was central to the "throbbing lights, the engulfing sound, the heightened energy, and the hyberbolic heat," which together created what gay journalist Andrew Kopkind described as the feeling that "the world is enclosed in this hall, that there is only now, in this place and time." From the beginning, discos fostered the feeling of being in a "timeless, mindless state." 57
"Literary critic Walter Hughes pushed this analysis further, arguing that in allowing the insistent, penetrative disco beat to become a part of them, gay men "disturbed the very foundations of conventional constructions of masculine selfhood." For Hughes, disco, with its "seemingly endless cycles and plateaus," evoked the open-endedness and fluidity of the female orgasm. Disco was the music of "jouissance"-blissful pleasure." 75
"Nonetheless, disco foregrounded female desire to a far greater extent than rock music." 79
"Moreover, by 1977 there was no escaping the fact that disco and funk were diverging, with the former becoming more of woman's genre and the latter more of a man's." 104
"As glitzy and futuristic as disco was, it also seemed a throwback to the days when plastic ruled. By the time of "Love to Love You Baby," America was awash in fifties' nostalgia, jump-started by the Carpenters, George Lucas's American Graffity, and the TV series Happy Days." 111
"At the time, gay writer and activist Douglas Crimp tried to make sense of what he was seeing on the dance floors of gay New York. It looked to him as though gay men were developing identical bodies fashioned for a specific activity. At first he though they were designed for particularly athletic sex, but then it dawned on him: "These bodies have been made into dancing machines." 121
"it would be easy enough to treat gay macho as nothing more than a matter of shifting fashions. But embedded in this macho turn were changes in gay men's identity and subjectivity. Gays not presented themselves differently, they regarded themselves differently, searched out unfamiliar sorts of sexual partners, and expanded their sexual repertoire...While gay macho was facilitated by the recent introduction of Nautilus machines, its causes lay elsewhere-in gay liberation and in disco." 123
"By mid 1965, it would seem, the "college boy" look of chinos and button-down Oxford shirt was starting to lose ground to jeans and leather." 125
"Now gay men rather than heterosexual men became the embodiment of masculinity and the fantasized object of desire for each other." 127
"Although gentrification, parochial clannishness, and racism doubtless figured in the desire of some white gay men for a space of their own, it's also possible that the thrill of discovering one's own kind attractive played a role in the racial compartmentalizing of gay disco." 127
"The sexual geography of Fire Island, where the funky and unfashionably campy Cherry Grove was but a fifteen-minute walk from the glamorous, macho-man Pines, made for a palpable tension between the two communities. Cherry Grove may have boasted the Ice Palace, the first discotheque on the island (and some would argue in all of New York), but the Sandpiper in the trendier Pines had supplanted it. So had the Pines' butch style which to older Grovers seemed both "ridiculous and a sham." 128
"It's no accident that by 1979 some gays, including longtime gay activist Harry Hay, tired of the new gay masculinization, were coming together as "Radical Faeries" to reclaim their effeminacy." 132-133
"Kleinberg was no fan of gay macho, but he admitted that it seemed to have achieved the decoupling of effeminacy and sexual passivity. Even very butch-looking men take the "passive" role, he noted, and the only way to discern a gay man's sexual tastes is from the handkerchiefs and key chains that hang from his back pocket." 134
"Sylvester...Bruce Villanch described as a "Vegas showgirl version of a voodoo priest." 141
"The macho turn was also inseparable from gay liberation, which challenged the dominant culture's pathologizing of homosexuality, and from disco culture, where gym-built bodies ruled and sexual assertiveness reigned." 155
"Disco's global potential reportedly struck him (Stigwood) in January 1976, when he traveled on the maiden voyage of the Concorde from Paris to Rio." 161
"...Fever, he argued, "made disco safe for white, straight, male, young and middle-class America." 184
"Disco's conquest of America occurred against a backdrop of diminished possibilities. No longer able to count on cheap and bountiful energy, plentiful jobs, and military invincibility, Americans approached the indignities of the late Carter years with a kind of angry bewilderment." 202
"Certainly, for some Americans, the feeling of beleaguerment was compounded by the ways in which feminism, gay rights and civil rights were changing the national landscape. By the mid seventies a sizeable number of onetime liberals, dubbed neoconservatives, were joining together with longtime conservatives to mobilize "Middle America" against abortion rights, affirmative action, school busing, sex education, the Equal Rights Amendment, welfare, and "criminal coddling" civil liberties." 203-204
"In February 1980, Billboard reported that American radio had adopted a "virtual ban" on disco as a format." 209
"The consensus among historians and discographers is that the backlash against disco reflected anger and frustration with America's changing sexual and racial rules." 209
"Attacked for being both too gay and too straight, too black and too white, oversexed and asexual, leisure-class as well as leisure-suited (loser) class, disco represented anything but a stable signifier." 214
"Disco's influence extended beyond the realm of popular music. The 1970s are associated with identity politics, but they ere also a time when numbers of gay men, African Americans, and women ditched predictable social scripts. Disco played a central role in this process, which broadened the counters of blackness, femininity, and male homosexuality." xxiv-xxv
"Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture is an interpretative rather than a comprehensive history, one that focuses on these very shifts in identity and representation and the debates they triggered." xxv
"Disco did favour the synthetic over the organic, the cut-up over the whole, the producer over the artist, and the record over live performance. And if you believed that authentic soul music was raw and unpolished, then disco's preference for silky sophistication was further evidence of its inauthenticity." 10
"The Philly sound was a take-off of Motown, only more sophisticated," says Vince Montana, vibraphonist of MFSB, the house band of PIR." 15
"African American studies scholar Mark Anthony Neal also viewed the seventies as a time of "deterioration," when blackness was reduced to a commodity, and black middle-class flight from the inner city intensified the decline of black public life. And Brian Ward argued that with the rise of disco and funk, black Americans "were dancing to keep from crying." 28
"More often than not the Broadway musical presumed "a depressive status qui" best tackled through steely persistence and a cherry denial of suffering. In the way it veered between "some version of hellish and some version of swellish," the musical seemed to replicate gay life in these years. And while disco served up plenty of songs of romantic sorrow, it fashioned itself as the new sweetish status quo in which injury and solitude were banished and the principle of sybaritic soreness ruled." 41
"The contrast between the shadowy, almost quarantined quality of homosexual culture in the years before disco and its in-your-face visibility at the height of mirror-ball mania has sometimes encouraged the view that gay liberation and disco moved-or better still-danced-hand in hand. While the relationship between "going out and coming out" (an between consumer capitalism and gay liberation) was deep and reciprocal, it was not untroubled." 41
"One of the many young street queens who frequented the Stonewall contends that the unrestrained dancing there fostered the "articulation" of gay sexual desire." 46-47
"Shifts in consciousness are devilishly difficult to map, not the least in this case where change was more a matter of conjunction that straight-forward cause-and-effect." It is even possible to disaggregate dancing from protesting when dancing itself constituted a kind of protest and entailed its own alterations of identity and subjectivity?" 51
"The Stonewall riot and the fallout from it had the effect of legitimizing gay space. Bathhouses and discos, rather than meeting halls or community centres, became what journalist Andrew Kopkind called the "sensational glue" holding these communities together." 53
"Denied the opportunity of uninterrupted dancing with other men, gay men took to the disco like a drug. Nonstop music was central to the "throbbing lights, the engulfing sound, the heightened energy, and the hyberbolic heat," which together created what gay journalist Andrew Kopkind described as the feeling that "the world is enclosed in this hall, that there is only now, in this place and time." From the beginning, discos fostered the feeling of being in a "timeless, mindless state." 57
"Literary critic Walter Hughes pushed this analysis further, arguing that in allowing the insistent, penetrative disco beat to become a part of them, gay men "disturbed the very foundations of conventional constructions of masculine selfhood." For Hughes, disco, with its "seemingly endless cycles and plateaus," evoked the open-endedness and fluidity of the female orgasm. Disco was the music of "jouissance"-blissful pleasure." 75
"Nonetheless, disco foregrounded female desire to a far greater extent than rock music." 79
"Moreover, by 1977 there was no escaping the fact that disco and funk were diverging, with the former becoming more of woman's genre and the latter more of a man's." 104
"As glitzy and futuristic as disco was, it also seemed a throwback to the days when plastic ruled. By the time of "Love to Love You Baby," America was awash in fifties' nostalgia, jump-started by the Carpenters, George Lucas's American Graffity, and the TV series Happy Days." 111
"At the time, gay writer and activist Douglas Crimp tried to make sense of what he was seeing on the dance floors of gay New York. It looked to him as though gay men were developing identical bodies fashioned for a specific activity. At first he though they were designed for particularly athletic sex, but then it dawned on him: "These bodies have been made into dancing machines." 121
"it would be easy enough to treat gay macho as nothing more than a matter of shifting fashions. But embedded in this macho turn were changes in gay men's identity and subjectivity. Gays not presented themselves differently, they regarded themselves differently, searched out unfamiliar sorts of sexual partners, and expanded their sexual repertoire...While gay macho was facilitated by the recent introduction of Nautilus machines, its causes lay elsewhere-in gay liberation and in disco." 123
"By mid 1965, it would seem, the "college boy" look of chinos and button-down Oxford shirt was starting to lose ground to jeans and leather." 125
"Now gay men rather than heterosexual men became the embodiment of masculinity and the fantasized object of desire for each other." 127
"Although gentrification, parochial clannishness, and racism doubtless figured in the desire of some white gay men for a space of their own, it's also possible that the thrill of discovering one's own kind attractive played a role in the racial compartmentalizing of gay disco." 127
"The sexual geography of Fire Island, where the funky and unfashionably campy Cherry Grove was but a fifteen-minute walk from the glamorous, macho-man Pines, made for a palpable tension between the two communities. Cherry Grove may have boasted the Ice Palace, the first discotheque on the island (and some would argue in all of New York), but the Sandpiper in the trendier Pines had supplanted it. So had the Pines' butch style which to older Grovers seemed both "ridiculous and a sham." 128
"It's no accident that by 1979 some gays, including longtime gay activist Harry Hay, tired of the new gay masculinization, were coming together as "Radical Faeries" to reclaim their effeminacy." 132-133
"Kleinberg was no fan of gay macho, but he admitted that it seemed to have achieved the decoupling of effeminacy and sexual passivity. Even very butch-looking men take the "passive" role, he noted, and the only way to discern a gay man's sexual tastes is from the handkerchiefs and key chains that hang from his back pocket." 134
"Sylvester...Bruce Villanch described as a "Vegas showgirl version of a voodoo priest." 141
"The macho turn was also inseparable from gay liberation, which challenged the dominant culture's pathologizing of homosexuality, and from disco culture, where gym-built bodies ruled and sexual assertiveness reigned." 155
"Disco's global potential reportedly struck him (Stigwood) in January 1976, when he traveled on the maiden voyage of the Concorde from Paris to Rio." 161
"...Fever, he argued, "made disco safe for white, straight, male, young and middle-class America." 184
"Disco's conquest of America occurred against a backdrop of diminished possibilities. No longer able to count on cheap and bountiful energy, plentiful jobs, and military invincibility, Americans approached the indignities of the late Carter years with a kind of angry bewilderment." 202
"Certainly, for some Americans, the feeling of beleaguerment was compounded by the ways in which feminism, gay rights and civil rights were changing the national landscape. By the mid seventies a sizeable number of onetime liberals, dubbed neoconservatives, were joining together with longtime conservatives to mobilize "Middle America" against abortion rights, affirmative action, school busing, sex education, the Equal Rights Amendment, welfare, and "criminal coddling" civil liberties." 203-204
"In February 1980, Billboard reported that American radio had adopted a "virtual ban" on disco as a format." 209
"The consensus among historians and discographers is that the backlash against disco reflected anger and frustration with America's changing sexual and racial rules." 209
"Attacked for being both too gay and too straight, too black and too white, oversexed and asexual, leisure-class as well as leisure-suited (loser) class, disco represented anything but a stable signifier." 214
September 16, 2025
More about the “idea” of disco and its effect on American society, then a music theory lesson, the book follows a somewhat narrow path from disco as liberating to disco as conforming. The author presents disco as a gay, white, upwardly mobile “Manhattan” phenomenon that eventually spread to more exotic locations like Great Neck and Bensonhurst.
November 3, 2013
I read this book alongside Peter Shapiro's book "Turn The Beat Around." Though both books cover similar terrain, Echols' book is more organized and readable, because the author focuses on cultural shifts that occurred in the 1970s. Each chapter focuses on one topic; for example, one chapter discusses a changing image of black men as reflected in the music of the day (especially as popular R&B music moved from "political" songs to "lovemaking" songs i.e. Barry White). Another chapter traces the changes in gay male bar culture -- from congregating in seedy bars under threat of arrest and police raids, to dancing (and doing a lot of other things) openly in huge discos with steep membership fees that excluded all but the most affluent. Echols is careful to avoid sweeping generalizations, so the focus on cultural changes works as a thread to hold the book together. The book shows how music changed in response to the culture, and how culture changed in response to the music. The book inspired me to seek out music I'd never listened to before (such as the Philly soul of the early 70s that created a template for the disco sound). I'd like to know more about how and why disco went from being a "subversive, politically incendiary" music to a "safe" and "silly" object of nostalgia (which Echols hints at in the closing chapter).
October 6, 2020
I knew nothing about disco, even though it turns out I know a lot of disco songs. Even stuff I didn't know was disco - Rod's Steward's Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?! Even though this book isn't an authoritative history of disco (it frames the disco phenomenon around show it empowered different social groups), it's still a pretty detailed and well-written story of disco.
If you know little to nothing about this music genre, it's worth a read. Hot Stuff's also worth reading if you are curious about the struggles of women, gays and black americans in those years. Overall, very interesting, informative and provocative. Keep your phone with you. You're going to look up a lot of music...
If you know little to nothing about this music genre, it's worth a read. Hot Stuff's also worth reading if you are curious about the struggles of women, gays and black americans in those years. Overall, very interesting, informative and provocative. Keep your phone with you. You're going to look up a lot of music...
August 29, 2011
Who would have guessed that the rise and fall of disco makes a great story? Whether you were there (I was) or you weren’t, this book is a lot of fun to read, and it’s thoroughly researched—this writer knows her pop music and pop culture. The story of disco has several strands (both musical and cultural), which the author elucidates with considerable flourish, while successfully regenerating the feel of the era. Moreover, she convincingly places disco in the context of broader social and political history.
April 23, 2019
I have been intending to read this book for quite sometime. I am so glad I finally got around to it. I was young during the height of the Disco era. So although I remember listening to the music, I was too young to appreciate or understand the cultural significance and shifts that the genre brought about. This book is well researched as is evident by the lengthy Notes section. And it is clear the author, Alice Echols, has a sincere fondness for the subject. As a “bonus” she even included a playlist at the end of the book.
July 20, 2011
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 professional historians.
September 5, 2015
This book was just about as enjoyable as being on the dance floor. I appreciated reading about how Disco fits into LGBT, feminist, and African-American history (from this author's perspective) and about how it intersected with Punk and New Wave. Who would have though PIL would make an appearance in a book about Disco? In short, my love of Disco has been validated! Disco does NOT suck.
March 10, 2023
Great read. Very good on the black and gay origins of disco and full of interesting facts. Chaka Khan and Nile Rogers were both members of the black panthers. The Meters were the backing band on Lady Marmalade. Jeff Baxter played the solo on Donna Summer's Hot Stuff.
September 23, 2025
This was one of the stray books I picked up when I did a lot of research on disco music for a script that I ultimately went in another direction with. But I still remain fascinated by the disco scene and so apparently is Alice Echols. This book starts off as a good faith effort to depict the discos that WEREN'T in New York (specifically, Ann Arbor), but eventually strays big time from this. And this initially made me crestfallen. Because I really hoped for a non-NYC panorama of gay culture, the many women who shaped cubs (including Echols herself, who served as a disco DJ), and all that. Only because I appear to be the rare Brooklynite who regularly thinks of life outside this amazing city. But then Echols shifts to more mainstream and known disco pioneers (such as Sylvester), only to serve up one of the most interesting deep dive interpretations of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER that I've ever read and truly revealing how much that movie was a myth rather than reality. Those late chapters alone are probably why you should read this book if you're interested in this subject.
November 18, 2020
Someday Goodreads will have half star ratings, because 3 1/2 stars would have been just right. As someone who isn't ashamed to say that she really liked the 70's disco music, this book was made to order. It provides a good history of the genre, and had me skipping over to YouTube frequently to again listen to songs I haven't heard in quite awhile that were mentioned here. And then there were the often little known artists, since that period of music, with few exceptions, was not as performer-centric as most other popular music is. When did I ever focus in on Sylvester to such a degree before reading this? But although there wouldn't have been disco without a post Stonewall gay arising, at times it felt like this book was more of a study of gay history then of this period in popular music. That's why I didn't rate this book as 5 star.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 30, 2023
My actual rating of this book is 3 1/2 stars! This book took a great look at the disco music and its impact on culture! There were a couple of factors that prevented this book to be 4 stars for me! The chapters in this book were way too long! The author could have split up the six chapters into even smaller chapters to engage the reader a little better! It came off as a long read! Also, the chapter about Saturday Night Fever did not need a synopsis about basically the whole movie - not necessary! But otherwise, if you are interested in learning about disco culture in the 70's, you should get this book!
June 12, 2024
If any genre can best be written about as a cultural phenomenon with lasting societal and musical effects, including how it was rebranded as 'dance music', it's disco. With a great opening chapter that brings in the author's experience as a DJ(!) in the 1970s, the book drops in the odd academic term but is good at expressing how women, gay men and African Americans all gravitated to a sound that, by 1979, was more or less murdered by its own popularity.
July 10, 2024
One would hope a book about disco wouldn't read like a thesis paper, but I also appreciate the research and an attempt to reframe some of the touchstones of the era. I wish the writing on the performers had been more in-depth, but I guess I have my Sylvester biography for just that reason.
Points for making me remember some old gems (hello Stargard!) and re-introducing me to some of the queer novels of the 70s that I have now added to my list.
Points for making me remember some old gems (hello Stargard!) and re-introducing me to some of the queer novels of the 70s that I have now added to my list.
October 17, 2025
Great fun
R&B Soul - Music
M F S B (mother father sister brother) or rather
Tom Moulton mixes it up
Philadelphia international records an independent production agreement with Columbia records
& no ---disco doesn't suck it dances
R&B Soul - Music
M F S B (mother father sister brother) or rather
Tom Moulton mixes it up
Philadelphia international records an independent production agreement with Columbia records
& no ---disco doesn't suck it dances
September 30, 2012
In the thirty years since it supposedly died, disco music and its culture have remained fodder for anecdotes about a forgettable decade in U.S. history and popular culture. Seeking to erase that legacy, historian and former disco DJ Alice Echols effectively examines the development and trajectory of disco in Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. Echols argues through the well-known images of disco that the genre and its culture reshaped American life by empowering various groups despite political and social backlash in the 1970s. While conceptions about disco remain rooted in films like Saturday Night Fever and phrases like “Disco Sucks,” Echols uncovers how the genre remained a core component of popular music beyond the 1970s as performers blended genres to create hybrids and attract wide audiences.
Echols divides her study of disco and popular music in the 1970s into six chapters, with an introduction and epilogue serving to define her approach to the subject as an “interpretive history,” including autobiographical elements from her time as a DJ in grad school (xxvi). A loose chronological organization weaves the chapters nearly seamlessly, and each section describes a different component to disco culture before discussing how it is interwoven with the next.
In Hot Stuff, Echols demonstrates how disco and its performers tuned into the rearrangement of the political and sexual spheres of Americans. Echols focuses on a variety of groups to emphasize how racial, sexual, and class intersections in the 1970s played out through the expansion of disco music and clubs and argues disco acted as a form of pop music that offered greater social opportunities within American culture. In the clubs, disco music was mixed to emphasize rhythm tracks, while performers experimented with new styles to attract listeners and dancers. Emerging male performers personified a masculinity attuned to the desires of women through the music, while veterans understood “disco … had democratized the music scene” (19). After Stonewall, emerging disco clubs offered gay men more spaces to interact in large groups while mainstream America took notice of homosexuality as a new form of hipness and idealized masculinity through “macho drag” (127). Women meanwhile first enjoyed disco dancing as “beards” for gay men before Stonewall, but were excluded in its aftermath. However, Echols points out women found an outlet for cultivation and promotion of their own sexuality within disco, while sexual exchange in the 1970s operated as a commodity for sale and exchange. Finally, Echols considers the placement of Saturday Night Fever beyond its embodiment as the peak of commercialized disco, remarking that the film provided a lens to view gender, racial, and sexuality shifts in 1970s America. Furthermore, Fever affirmed an ethos of upward mobility through hard work in the urban sphere, according to Echols examination, because disco and dancing culture reconfigured and equalized gender and sexual roles between men and women (182).
Ultimately, Echols concludes the “discophobia” that permeates our consciousness of disco and its place in the 1970s has faded in the years since the genre supposedly died in the early 1980s, largely due to the participatory democracy inherent to the listening of disco. The genre allowed a greater accessibility for a wide array of listeners and dancers, making disco “safe music that crosses generational and racial lines in ways that much rock and rap don’t” (239). Echols discussion in Hot Stuff adds to the literature of popular music in American culture and history, and in this case illustrates how music permeated the daily and social lives of all Americans, not simply the groups examined as the core components of disco in the 1970s.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 8, 2010
Granted I know everyone loves to hate disco for all the things it isn't, "authentic", "novel" blah blah blah...but danged if folks don't need to have fun and just shake it.
Author makes good points about how no one bothers to "hate" disco anymore because so many of the points people who hated disco back in the day have become commonplace in present-day dance, rap, rock music that the point is moot. Everyone samples, and remixes to the 12" market, repetition has pretty much supplanted "creative lyrics" in just about every marketed genre, and gay is great in all things entertainment, and clubs are pretty much (although not nearly entirely) post-racially" integrated, so there's no longer a reason to hate on disco! Or at least no one bold enough to swim against the current to defend their disco gripes in the face of the transparent racism, sexism, and homophobia which are latent in the blanket hate of disco over any other contemporary forms of music.
I really enjoyed the Echol's expositions on the post-Stonewall renaissance of dance as a collective casting aside the shackles of closeted life in urban areas and the role "gay macho" (machismo?) fashion played out (both good and badly). Also how black female singers were afforded a market share for performance and profit; previously tied by the music industry to a prim & proper or sexualized "vamp" dichotomy that limited modes of expression.
A fun read, I learned a bunch and enjoyed just about every page of it!
Author makes good points about how no one bothers to "hate" disco anymore because so many of the points people who hated disco back in the day have become commonplace in present-day dance, rap, rock music that the point is moot. Everyone samples, and remixes to the 12" market, repetition has pretty much supplanted "creative lyrics" in just about every marketed genre, and gay is great in all things entertainment, and clubs are pretty much (although not nearly entirely) post-racially" integrated, so there's no longer a reason to hate on disco! Or at least no one bold enough to swim against the current to defend their disco gripes in the face of the transparent racism, sexism, and homophobia which are latent in the blanket hate of disco over any other contemporary forms of music.
I really enjoyed the Echol's expositions on the post-Stonewall renaissance of dance as a collective casting aside the shackles of closeted life in urban areas and the role "gay macho" (machismo?) fashion played out (both good and badly). Also how black female singers were afforded a market share for performance and profit; previously tied by the music industry to a prim & proper or sexualized "vamp" dichotomy that limited modes of expression.
A fun read, I learned a bunch and enjoyed just about every page of it!
June 14, 2013
IMO this is a highly readable and not too overly academic book but i must say that i do fail into the "i was expecting more"-camp. Not to say that this is a bad book because it is not but i think i probably would need to read & would rather enjoy other books about Disco, a few of which were actually were cited in this book: Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, My Life in the Paradise Garage: Keep On Dancin' et cetera. Not too say that "Hot Stuff" is w/o merit. There are some great anecdotes, subtextual information and historical insight here but again i would have rather it been more about the music w/ more probing music-criticism and less about the cultural politics surrounding the 70's.
Still a great book: Super-short, compressed book barely over two-hundred pages.
Still a great book: Super-short, compressed book barely over two-hundred pages.
May 10, 2010
Excellent book. I only wish it were longer, and had come with a soundtrack! (I found myself looking up different artists on youtube, and I recommend reading this book with a computer nearby. Interestingly, there is a playlist included, but it's at the back of the book.)
Echols, a professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, is also the author of "Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975," which is in my collection. Apparently she was also a disco dj for a time. I knew she would bring an interesting perspective to disco culture.
My only complaint is that I couldn't get "Stayin' Alive" out of my head after reading the Saturday Night Fever chapter.
Echols, a professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, is also the author of "Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975," which is in my collection. Apparently she was also a disco dj for a time. I knew she would bring an interesting perspective to disco culture.
My only complaint is that I couldn't get "Stayin' Alive" out of my head after reading the Saturday Night Fever chapter.
May 28, 2010
Disco. A guilty pleasure as I grew up when disco was BIG. Favorite memories of disco: college spring break in Sun Valley, ID, skiing all day and dancing all night to disco with men, women, whomever. This book is somewhat academic and traces the roots of disco from beginning to end (though some think it hasn't ended). Author gives a unique point of view as she was a DJ for many years. I learned that the famous "Disco Break" (the break in the music before you whip the dance crowd back into a frenzy) comes from gospel music. Book moves into hip hop, punk, electronica, trance, and so on. I lost some interest at the end, but interesting if you enjoy disco music.
January 17, 2016
Interesting topic, well-written book, but it's more about disco as cultural phenomenon than as a music genre. I would have been interested in more info about the actual music and less info about homosexuality in the 70's, but that's a matter of taste, I guess.
Also, when talking about the influence of disco on current popular music, I wasn't really convinced: she calls The Prodigy 'techno music', and she doesn't mention the big wave of European filter disco in the late 90's (Daft Punk, Cassius, Modjo etc.) or house music by Armand van Helden etc. It doesn't detract from the rest of the book, though.
Also, when talking about the influence of disco on current popular music, I wasn't really convinced: she calls The Prodigy 'techno music', and she doesn't mention the big wave of European filter disco in the late 90's (Daft Punk, Cassius, Modjo etc.) or house music by Armand van Helden etc. It doesn't detract from the rest of the book, though.
January 27, 2013
I think this book is really good. It taught me a lot about disco and the culture of the 1970s, as well as having a pretty rocking playlist. I do think, however, that Echols needed to have a broader range of knowledge regarding what trends were popular in the discotheques. All of her statements are meant for New York, but she makes it sound like all of America was acting that way. Several people have told me that when they read this, they noticed that San Francisco was not the way she described all discos as being. So, just go into this knowing she's mostly speaking about New York disco, not SF.
October 25, 2012
A historian's examination of disco's impact on American society and culture, particularly how it affected both black men and women, women in general, and gay men. I found the beginning very slooooow - the parts about the music technology were a snooze for me - but then it became very interesting. As someone who lived through the era, but was a clueless teenager at the time, this was eye-opening and engrossing.
October 24, 2010
A unique and enlightening analysis of an easily dismissed element of the 1970s and beyond. Having spent my teenage years during this period, I was familiar with most of the music and artists discussed, although I never gave much thought to the social evolution underway. The detail included in this book can feel overwhelming, but even a cursory review yield worthwhile information.
March 31, 2015
Oh, I really, really liked this. I found the careful history of interlocking movements -- gay, black, feminist -- to be well-handled.
If you have any interest in pop cultural history, the history of women's lib, of gay visibility, of black pride, this is a book you want to read. Fascinating and well-written.
The only downside is the **relentless** earworms I've had all weekend.
If you have any interest in pop cultural history, the history of women's lib, of gay visibility, of black pride, this is a book you want to read. Fascinating and well-written.
The only downside is the **relentless** earworms I've had all weekend.
September 8, 2012
An interesting examination of '70s culture!
It's an entertaining read, but maybe could have gone a little
deeper in it's look at trends and long-lasting effects and evolution of the
disco "lifestyle".
It's an entertaining read, but maybe could have gone a little
deeper in it's look at trends and long-lasting effects and evolution of the
disco "lifestyle".
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