Faber & Faber

Turn the Beat Around: Peter Shapiro

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Synopsis:

To many, disco seemed to have been born fully formed from the imaginations of John Travolta and the Bee-Gees, but the music and culture that would become known as disco was taking shape a decade before Saturday Night Fever, as the exclusive property of New York hedonists in members-only loft parties and disused warehouse spaces cum dance clubs. Disco emerged from the fall-out of the Black Power Movement and an almost exclusively gay scene in a blaze of poppers, strobe lights, tight trousers, hysterical diva vocals and synthesized beats in the late sixties. Drawing on the music of Sly Stone and Parliament-Funkadelic, and the ethos of pleasure-is-politics, disco was the first musical form to explore the relationship between the machine and the body and consequently, became the progenitor of house, hip hop and techno. As such, and as a genre, disco radically re-defined the sensibility of the seventies to the extent where reactionary rockers felt the need to launch a paranoid 'Disco Sucks' campaign at the end of the decade.

Featuring artists like Chic, Sylvester, Donna Summer, Larry Levan and Frank Grasso, as well as a discussion of the clubs, labels, fashions and trends that defined the period, Turn the Beat Around illustrates how and why disco - 'the music that taste forgot' - changed the face of popular culture for ever.

Tags:

Categorised as:

Music, Stage & Screen

Sub-categories:

Popular Music

Places:

New York

Genres & Themes:

Counterculture; Disco; Homosexuality