Peter Shapiro's "Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco" C/D

His rap and drum'n'bass guides are quite good, I should probably check this one out too.

someone needs to mp3blog this book

fucking GREAT

^^^^^^^ Agreed. Good on the twisted, confused roots of disco.

I second what Tuomas said about the rough guide to d&b. Should pick this one up as well.

Matos OTM!

Watching Cruising the other night, I could say, "Hey! It's the Anvil! and Ramrod!"

It's a very different book from Love Saves the Day by Tim Lawrence, which I also liked very much. Lawrence is very much focused on the Loft and the rest of the story he tells emanates out from that; Shapiro is interested in an aerial overview, in which he gets to cases about a lot of specific records and other phenomena. (My mouth was watering as I read about all those versions of "Soul Makossa," though I'm guessing most of them aren't that good; still, if someone were to put together a CD-R of a bunch of them I'd devour it.) Shapiro is also a lot funnier. There's a line in there along the lines of, "Double Exposure's 'Ten Percent' is famous as the first-ever commercially available 12-inch single, but it would be noteworthy even if it were the 136th 12-inch single." Reading it, I knew more vividly than ever that Shapiro towers over me as a ridiculous collector madman and I should just retire my ears and go into accounting.

[Insert various "yes you should" zings here, I love you you big predictable message board you]

I admit I found the D&B guide kind of weak (part of that's not his fault though, the format on those mini-guides sucks esp. for a genre with so few album releasing greats) with so much of the focus lavished on lesser lights and the Modulations book is pretty lame too (although he only edited it I guess). . . THAT said I've liked Shapiro's stuff in the Wire and the bits I've browsed of this in bookstores have been great. I've been looking for a used copy got a while.

Actually the D&B guide would have been better if it been done Rough Guide top-100 Reggae Albums Stylee with the best 12"/dubplates releases. That would have been quite neat.

i finally bought a copy of this and i'm excited to read it. my kinda book. i don't read too many music books, but this is right up my alley.

Two chapters in and classico.

Love this book! I'm particularly struck by his research at the beginning into the hellholeness of NYC which I intend to crib from copiously.

someone needs to mp3blog this book

Yeah I was thinking the same right around page 20 or so.

The book would be indispensable if it included a CD with the music referenced.

I thought Feets was pretty boring, but then I'm not big on disco. Didn't like it much as a jazz record, but maybe it's great at Studio 54 or whatever.

-- BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, March 8, 2007 12:04 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Link
haha countdown to hoosteen love saves the day/turn the beat around souljazz/rhino reissue comp-inspired revelation begins now

-- deej, Thursday, March 8, 2007 12:09 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Link

its a great book but i found it to be a kind of repetitive read after awhile ... not that the information itself was redundant, just that each chapter seemed to follow a formula that felt deja vu-ish after awhile, perhaps because of the approach Matos describes above

this is more of a caution than a criticism, because its totally worth reading

my only complaint is that it wasn't longer

Great for the information it provides and letting the interviewees speak for themselves, particularly the always articulate Nile Rodgers, but sometimes the argument is thin or hard to follow or repetitive- there is a little too much "as we have already seen" or "as I have already proved in Chapter 1" going on.

there is a little too much "as we have already seen" or "as I have already proved in Chapter 1" going on.

yeah i think this is what i'm remembering about it

haha countdown to hoosteen love saves the day/turn the beat around souljazz/rhino reissue comp-inspired revelation begins now

-- deej, Thursday, March 8, 2007 12:09 PM (6 months ago)

^ otm

big hoos, fuck the books, just get this
http://www.amazon.com/Larry-Levan-Live-Paradise-Garage/dp/B0000A2E4L
it will change yr life

Echoing pretty much everything said above, good book. There were a couple of points in there I remember I had trouble with and/or prompted responses, but that made me like it even more, it was out to engage and argue a corner rather than simply providing recitation.

Big classic.

hard to disagree with the love here

The only thing I will say is that there is an interesting book to be written examining the "not secret" history of disco. As a mainstream phenomenon it's still mocked, really, like it always was, even by generally pop-minded people who in this case prefer the underground and obscure. But it had an incredible grip on American popular culture for a few years there-- the closest we get to that now as far as dancing goes is people watching celebrities dancing on TV.

So classic, I watched Ms. 45 through its filter.

... and Dressed to Kill and Maniac and Cruising and et al.

i'm about 50 pages in and it's good so far.

The only thing I will say is that there is an interesting book to be written examining the "not secret" history of disco. As a mainstream phenomenon it's still mocked, really, like it always was, even by generally pop-minded people who in this case prefer the underground and obscure. But it had an incredible grip on American popular culture for a few years there-- the closest we get to that now as far as dancing goes is people watching celebrities dancing on TV

Yes! Yes! yes! thanks for saving me the the trouble of posting this thought or something similiar as I've done on every other disco thread of the last 3 years. doubt I'm up for writing this book but I'd love to read it. maybe you should have a go, Mark...

oh and deej is absolutely OTM about that Larry Levan @ Paradise Garage album, it's quite a document. Transports listeners back to the day, and notably it was recorded in 1979 at the height of the disco fad.

so now i am about halfway through this (i have been reading other things, but this has officially become riveting) and i just finished the section where shapiro claims that "love is the message" by mfsb is the most important dance song of the last 30 years. is this generally accepted wisdom or he is going out on a limb with the claim? i noticed on the mfsb wikipedia page it says that "love is the message" was the first song inducted to the dance music hall of fame in 2004.

fwiw, i think he is probably right because the song does embody a kind of inflection point both musically and culturally, but at the same time, i don't think time has been very kind to it. i'd much rather (and in fact do, a lot) listen to "moonboots".

I will never understand the appeal of MFSB. I guess you had to be there or something.

Same here. Even though disco is the air that I breathe, "Love is the Message" has always sounded to me like the theme to The Love Boat or some cheese-ass 1970s TV show. Certainly not disco's apotheosis.

BUT. I've never danced to it in a club and I hear THAT is how you'll get its message. Daphne Vega told me that she always hated the song too until she heard it in a club and got lifted.

And Jennie Livingston put it to good use in Paris is Burning.

the club setting is how it's described in the book (in a set by nicky siano followed by a stormy labelle track described as a kind of yin-yang combination) and i guess in that kind of sexually liberated, anything goes, drug-fuelled 70s club it might just be completely euphoric. the 70s were a strange strange time. sometimes i think that the 00s are more than a little like the 70s and not just in that recycled kind of way except that the 00s are so uptight. anyhow, the 20 or so preceding pages in the book make a very good case for the claim in very musicological sense.

Haha, this kinda stuff is what I said above that I really like about the book -- it makes arguments and causes them!

sometimes i think that the 00s are more than a little like the 70s and not just in that recycled kind of way except that the 00s are so uptight.

Is there any US dance scene that isn't a pale imitation of Europe at the moment? In order for it to be like the 70 (or even the 80's or 90's) the US should be setting the agenda for dance music. I don't think we are doing that anymore. There are shitloads of good records being made in the US, but there hasn't really been a major scene as a complete package in the last few years.

If anything this decade is the 50's:

Terrorism = Red Scare
Pro-Tools = Grainy Reverb & Echo era production

Means we're due for a crazy decade that we can look back at admiringly for 40 years to come?

hopefully.

Is there any US dance scene that isn't a pale imitation of Europe at the moment?

hip hop ya don't stop.

maybe time has started to go backwards!

although even our hip hop artists are sampling europeans these days. par for the course since "planet rock" i suppose.

My Sociology of Pop Music course is taught by a 60 year old woman. The ratio of Decade to Class Discussion Time is as follows:

pre 1950 - 3 weeks
1950s - 1 week
1960s - 5 weeks
1970s - 2 weeks
"1980s & beyond" - 1 week

Means we're due for a crazy decade that we can look back at admiringly for 40 years to come?

For reels, the 00's have been like a decade long after school detention.

Of course I am going to be banging on to young people about boring old Detroit techno shit from the 20th century until my implants finally burn out in 2060.

My Sociology of Pop Music course is taught by a 60 year old woman. The ratio of Decade to Class Discussion Time is as follows:

pre 1950 - 3 weeks
1950s - 1 week
1960s - 5 weeks
1970s - 2 weeks
"1980s & beyond" - 1 week

OMG! That would make me want to kill.

Are you in Austin, Hoos? If so, I think I know what course you're talking about. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.

P.S. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

OMG! That would make me want to kill.

I'm right there with you.

maybe she wants to avoid excruciating ILX-style rap vs indie discussion

Hahahah.

Vahid, you should teach a course.

if she is really 60 years old she is probably making a sound pedagogical choice, OTOH the title of the course is really misleading ... "topics in pop music and sociology" might be better?

I suppose it also depends on definitions of pop. Actually a study in what 'pop' means over the decades would make a great course.

it's also probably a sound choice based on the fact that the social life of american listening to 60s pop music is probably the best-understood out of all those decades by the students (thanks to endless reruns of the wonder years?)

you only need to look at a whole lot of writing about chicago house or detroit techno to see the sort of shoddy stuff that happens when people base their ideas about a music on a culture they've misapprehended from the get-go

Mm, makes sense. I suppose that 60s baseline is ultimately inescapable.

this kind of comes full circle to something i've been thinking about as i've been lurking on this thread - i wonder whether the difference in books about disco could be traced back to the differences in their assumptions about gay culture(s) in the 70s (you could say the same thing about reggae, rap, etc) and i really wonder why there isn't more attention paid to unpacking these assumptions when people look at these books

the closest thing to this might be mark kpunk and reynolds and woebot and carmody endlessly wrangling over the "spirit of the age" of 70s britain as a way of unpacking prog or industrial or what have you ... it seems like there's very little in writing about disco that approaches this level, every time i crack one of these books i get a heavy whiff of glib generalization about the glamorousness of being a gay black (or puerto rican) garage-goer in new york in the 70s that makes the whole enterprise seem a little shallow and half-baked at the core

Generalization or, I think in Shapiro's case, relegation to a footnote or two...it was one of the (very few) actual problems I have with the book, but they really were secondary, in this case because the details were his to work with.

Isn't that another book though? Straight reportage on gay nightlife in late seventies NYC would make a fascinating book in its own right.

baja speaks to the point about the Saturday Nite Fever/mainstream disco fad mentioned upthread. for all the strenuous research and obv love of the music in Shapiro and Lawrence I think the tragic flaw in these books is the way they apply the indie-rock template to disco, glorifying the underground roots and playing down the crossover moment rather than weighing the whole movement as a continuum or evolution. understandable, but something of a revisionist point of view nevertheless.

I understand what you're saying, but Shapiro finds the right bemused/horrified tone in that chapter about middle America learning the Hustle and grannies buying Mickey Mouse disco records.

Alfred that book would be Albert "Satan" Goldman's wicked excellent and long-out-of-print Disco though the degree of familiarity and er enthusiasm beg the question of how straight Goldman really was.

]middle America learning the Hustle and grannies buying Mickey Mouse disco records.

^^received wisdom. much much much more to it than this. bemused/horrified is exact the wrong tone, sorry.

I've plugged that Goldman book on ILM so many times his estate should send me a check! last time, promise.

^^received wisdom. much much much more to it than this

But that's straight from the book!

bemused/horrified is exact the wrong tone, sorry

Well, what would you suggest? While I like a lot of those purportedly mercenary disco crossovers like "I Was Made For Lovin' You" and that Mickey Mouse disco album, I see what Shapiro finds so yucky -- he finds that subsection of disco emblematic of a lot of societal trends which themselves bloomed as a result of the enormous profits coming from the manufacturing and sales of disco records. He's skeptical! And that's ok. I mean, as a gay man I'm really happy that a very gradual tolerance of homosexuality meant that popular works of art like All That Jazz or An Unmarried Woman could casually allude to gayness without being snarky, and I'd like to think that the flamboyance of disco culture -- whether it's Sylvester or Donald Duck singing "Welcome to Rio" -- had something to do with it.

In my own experience, I remember reading Tom Smucker's wonderful chapter on disco in that Rolling Stone book on rock published in the early nineties and being google-eyed at those pictures of afterhours parties (handlebar mustaches! glitter boots! size 27 waists!). Bemused affection is how I'd describe that essay.

I remember reading Tom Smucker's wonderful chapter on disco in that Rolling Stone book on rock published in the early nineties

Hehe, you know Mr. Matos is a massive fan of that legendary chapter, yes?

a lot of societal trends which themselves bloomed as a result of the enormous profits coming from the manufacturing and sales of disco records.

but see disco was an unprecendented disaster for the music biz on the whole, after the multi-media success of Sat Nite Fever the record business didn't know how to sell the new sound, flooding the market with disco albums and refusing to push the 12 inch singles buyers were clamoring for, eventually leading to the crash of 1979 and I would argue, the death of vinyl records. (and I was working in record stores 1977-79 so I didn't just read about this in Hit Men.) but you are absolutely correct about the gradual tolerance of gays, disco encouraged this trend and even those goofy novelty records had quite a subversive effect.

I'm not surprised -- Mr. Smucker was, if memory serves, dancing a bit at Matos' house a few months ago, the serendipity of which made me google-eyed all over again.

(xpost)

and we CAN argue whether the picture of gay male life as a popper-fueled satyricon (hello, Cruising!)was helpful in the long term.

But to be fair to Shapiro (I know the Lawrence less well), he shows how contingent that satyricon was: the members-only Loft; the lily-white and rich scenes at the Pines, Tenth Floor, Flamingo, etc.

That kind of perspective is sorely missed in Anthony Haden-Guest's book on 54. I've always loathed that quote (from Jim Fouratt of all people) about the supposed genius of 54's door policy. Maybe I'm misreading it. But he's gushing about the utopian aspect of 54 without acknowledging that only a select group of people got to enjoy/experience this utopia.

for those that didn't hear it the first time, love is the message

Love is the message if you're white, buff, rich.

yeah where is fattey disco???

m coleman: is it actually possible to read that goldman book without paying $500?

probably not. I found it in a used book store for $10 in 1989, well before the revival of interest in disco. a few years back I actually tried to get a publisher I was involved w/to reprint it but the massive amount of photos -- it's a coffee table book -- made that financially impossible. on the other hand, it's not long, maybe 20K words so maybe someday soon you can print it out "books on demand" style? but the pics are a trip.

also Goldman's pariah status/reputation doesn't help

Yeah, every time I listen to "Love is the Message" I'm all "ugh, turn off the saxophone; why is this song a classic?" until it gets to the bridge, which kicks so much ass ... and then it goes back to the lameness and it goes back and forth until it gets good and stays good for the last half.

J.D. - Maybe your library system has it?

but see disco was an unprecendented disaster for the music biz on the whole, after the multi-media success of Sat Nite Fever the record business didn't know how to sell the new sound, flooding the market with disco albums and refusing to push the 12 inch singles buyers were clamoring for, eventually leading to the crash of 1979 and I would argue, the death of vinyl records. (and I was working in record stores 1977-79 so I didn't just read about this in Hit Men.)

both the Lawrence and Shapiro books discuss this stuff, though--especially Lawrence, which is a bit surprising considering how underground/roots his focus is, especially compared to Shapiro. then again, Lawrence discussed in partly as a follow-up to the extensive stuff on record pools, so even there you get it from a latter-day perspective.

I do want to read the Goldman book, a lot, but obv the price is prohibitive.

This is on order from Amazon. Should see it soon. Hyped to the max now.

Yeah, great thread.

If anything this decade is the 50's:

Terrorism = Red Scare
Pro-Tools = Grainy Reverb & Echo era production

if i were to use this same kind of analog to back up my 70s claim, i would say:

iraq = vietnam
laptop = drum machine

and then add

smiling faces = casual (PC) racism and homophobia

that last one should be flipped the other way around in keeping with the first two.

apologies if this has been mentioned before, but is there any substantive difference between "turn the beat around: the secret history of disco" and "turn the beat around: the rise and fall of disco"? i've seen it listed as both, at various times

Iraq = Korea

Fighting terror with out actually fighting terror = fighting communism without actually fighting communism

Tracer: I wonder if those aren't separate subtitles for UK and US.

<i> the record business didn't know how to sell the new sound, flooding the market with disco albums and refusing to push the 12 inch singles buyers were clamoring for, eventually leading to the crash of 1979 and I would argue, the death of vinyl records.</i>

More about this please (esp. the "death of vinyl" part).

I don't agree with this. This was an example the business shifting in the 1970's to the mentality that they knew what people wanted and that they could dictate to people what they should buy. Marketing worked really well with Frampton Comes Alive, Rumours, and Saturday Night Fever but it didn't work so well for an entire genre that was being imposed on an entire country without any real grass roots support.

Vinyl didn't die as a broad consumer format until the majors stopped allowing retail outlets to return their unsold stock to the distributors in the late 80's. It wasn't dead when Prince came along, it wasn't dead for Duran Duran, it wasn't dead for Billy Joel and it certainly wasn't dead when the savior of the music industry dropped Thriller.

I can see the AOR angle and the pushing of album sales, but that didn't come in until the mid 90's. There were still cassette singles and CD Maxi-singles available at mall record stores well into the early 90's.

The death of vinyl comes from the post-60's mentality that Zappa describes in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UAWqwLjN70

Vinyl didn't die as a broad consumer format until the majors stopped allowing retail outlets to return their unsold stock to the distributors in the late 80's.

actually this happened a decade earlier, the change in return policy was a major factor in the crash of 1979. By the early 80s cassettes were outselling vinyl with the CD waiting in the wings. apparently you're too young to remember "the home taping is killing music" campaign, the industry was quite worried about the future despite the success of Thriller.

Rolling Stone ran a couple of stories in '81 or '82 about omigod-home-taping that read like first drafts of similar stories about mp3's a few years ago.

I know tapes were popular, but how many critics, audiophiles, and college students (or whoever) were buying them in the early to mid eighties for anything other than portability?

Just got this in FOPP for £3. Nice.

3 things:

1) there is an interesting book to be written examining the "not secret" history of disco

is this still the case? dying for a book that covers peak-period disco and beyond: chic, zebra-print rod, bee gees at their most imperial, all the mainstream acts going disco etc.

2) though as said above, the goldman book covers this. i've seen it for around £70. before i buy does anyone here have it and fancy scanning it for the good of ilx and disco? if not i'll get it and try to do it

3) Tom Smucker's wonderful chapter on disco in that Rolling Stone book on rock published in the early nineties

anyone have this and fancy scanning in?

bee gees at their most imperial

brilliant - will write the book if i can use this phrase to describe SNF soundtrack

please do! there's an amazing please kill me style book (with wider scope obv) to be written about disco's rise & fall. enough with all the beardy bluster about the little underground parties that kicked it off, i want to know why acts like hollies and supertramp converted - record co pressure or genuine love for the sound? and just the whole gory details, excesses, warts and ultimate demise. genuinely surprised there isn't anything out there already