@internrachel @julia1

This weekend I devoured Alice Echols’s Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (239 delightful pages). Echols is both an English and gender studies professor and a former DJ (at this amazing sounding but sadly long-defunct club in Ann Arbor called the Rubaiyat), so she has the requisite scholarly detachment but also an insider’s understanding of how the music was experienced by the people hearing it for the first time in the 70s and early 80s.

It’s separated into six chapters, each one considering the music/movement through a particular lens, whether that of changing notions of black masculinity, disco and its ties to the gay liberation movement, the emergence of “gay macho,” in which gay men started aping the hypermasculine styles of heterosexual archetypes (so…pretty much all of the Village People, who are revealed as totally subversive here), the increased focus on women’s pleasure (as opposed to men’s desire) in disco music, and, possibly my favorite, a reconsideration of “Saturday Night Fever” as a commentary on masculinity.

I particularly enjoyed her discussion of how disco evolved alongside the emerging gay culture. To me, gay men and clubbing are so entwined it almost never occurred to me there was a time when that wasn’t true, but, as Echols points out, same-sex dancing was actually illegal in the 1960s, and that law was enforced even at gay bars. (At a club on Fire Island, a staffer had to sit atop a ladder on the dance floor and shine a flashlight on anyone seen to be breaking this law, which could just mean two men facing each other while dancing.) Disco came about partially because gay bar owners were too cheap to spring for live bands, so the jukebox was the only source of music, and the patrons worked to shorten the gaps between songs, and eventually to eliminate them altogether, and favored songs that made the transition easy. Club popularity translated into record sales, and so the labels released 12-inch versions with extended dance breaks.

In short: really great book. Also comes with a playlist.