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Historically speak­ing, disco has always been the bas­tard child of pop­u­lar music in the eyes of the news media.  They treated it like a fad at the out­set,  devel­oped a grudge towards the genre as it rose to promi­nence and then rushed to slam the lid on the cof­fin when it fell from grace with the lis­ten­ing pub­lic.  Since then, it has been mostly dis­missed as kitsch when it has been peri­od­i­cally revived by news out­lets.  In death as in life, disco has suf­fered for a lack of seri­ous explo­ration from the news media.

Thankfully, disco has received a bit more kind­ness via book-length stud­ies of the genre.  Over the last decade, a small but notice­able crop of disco stud­ies have sprung up that take it seri­ously as a musi­cal form and go into the details of how it was made and who played it.  However, the book-length study of disco is a young genre and still has plenty of room to grow beyond basic facts-and-people jour­nal­ism.  There’s a need for greater con­text between these facts, some­thing to help the reader under­stand the why in addi­tion to the how, when, where and who.

Thus, it is nice to report that a new book has fired an open­ing salvo in the attempt to bridge the con­text gap between the disco facts and soci­o­log­i­cal mys­ter­ies of how the genre came to be.  The book is enti­tled Hot Stuff: Disco And The Remaking Of American Culture.  That’s a title that promises a lot but the book’s author, Alice Echols, is uniquely well-equipped to make good on its promise.  Not only is she a Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, she was also a d.j. dur­ing that early 1980’s era in which disco sup­pos­edly died.

Hot Stuff makes a case for disco’s endur­ing influ­ence by explor­ing its com­plex rela­tion­ship with a num­ber of soci­etal trends that emerged during the early 1970’s.  A brief but com­pelling intro­duc­tion sets the stage for Echol’s explo­rations by explain­ing the direct rela­tion­ship she devel­oped with the genre and its cul­ture by work­ing as a d.j. at the Rubaiyat, an Ann Arbor club.  Her expe­ri­ences shed some inter­est­ing light on the cul­tural com­plex­i­ties of how a club of the era func­tioned.  More impor­tantly, they also allow her to intro­duce a series of ideas that she explores through­out the remain­der of the text.

From there on, Echols breaks her study of the rela­tion­ship between soci­ety and disco down into sec­tions aimed at specifics force that exerted a sym­bi­otic push and pull on the genre’s devel­op­ment and level of influ­ence.  Topics include how the rise of disco dove­tailed with a shift in black mas­culin­ity from the finger-pointing, politi­cized macho men of early 1970’s funk to the smoother, more urbane “love men” like Barry White, the rela­tion­ship between gay lib­er­a­tion and the devel­op­ment of dis­cothe­ques as soci­etal enclaves for gay men and the con­flicted rela­tion­ship between women and the genre (i.e. women were wel­comed in the music as divas but often rejected from club life by the gay-driven nightclubs).

One really inter­est­ing chap­ter deals with the rise of the “gay macho” ideal in disco life, chart­ing how gay men cre­ated a jeans-clad, short-haired styl­is­tic ideal that rep­re­sented their evo­lu­tion from the effem­i­nate, tragic gay-male per­sona of old to a more assertive, self-reliant vari­a­tion that became the defin­ing stan­dard for gay men in the disco scene.  Movie fans will also be fas­ci­nated by an excel­lent chap­ter on the film Saturday Night Fever that explores its mak­ing in great detail and then ana­lyzes its rela­tion­ship to the disco scene.  In con­trast to many disco schol­ars who reject it as pure Hollywood fic­tion, Echols makes a strong case for how it works as a cri­tique of the racist and sex­ist atti­tudes that disco fre­quently found itself fight­ing against.

The book closes with chap­ters that prove how disco sur­vived its sup­posed death dur­ing the infa­mous 1979 anti-disco rally at Comiskey Park by infil­trat­ing pop music via club-influenced musi­cians like Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson as well as less-likely stu­dents like Public Image Ltd.  An intrigu­ing coda reveals how the dis­tance pro­vided by the pas­sage of time has allowed disco to become a “safe music,” thus ensur­ing its influ­ence will continue.

As the above descriptions should reveal, Hot Stuff offers its read­ers plenty of food for thought.  Better yet, it does so in a con­cise style that avoids bela­bor­ing the ideas it explores (the main text of the book runs about 240 pages) and backs that text up with a painstak­ingly detailed set of foot­notes that offers the reader plenty of addi­tional mate­r­ial to explore.

Echols’ writ­ing is as intel­lec­tual as you might expect from a pro­fes­sor but she avoids allow­ing the book to devolve into term-paper bland­ness via a nice sense of restraint and bound­less enthu­si­asm for her sub­ject mat­ter.  She also keeps the text fresh via nice thumbnail-sketch pro­files of disco per­form­ers like Donna Summer and Sylvester within the chap­ters and peri­odic side­bars that explore the his­tory and influ­ence of par­tic­u­lar iconic disco songs like “More, More, More” and “Stayin’ Alive.”

All in all, Hot Stuff is a fine tes­ta­ment to disco’s endur­ing power, deliv­ered with a brac­ing mix­ture of intel­li­gence, enthu­si­asm and uncom­pro­mis­ing opin­ion.  The defin­i­tive disco his­tory has yet to be writ­ten but Echol’s savvy tome will def­i­nitely be an impor­tant ref­er­ence for it.