Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture

Abstract

Like the decade with which it is identified, the 1970s, disco music has been the subject of several recent efforts at revisionist history meant to invest the phenomenon with a new sense of cultural significance. Alice Echols's Hot Stuff is the third such work of note to appear in recent years, following Tim Lawrence's oral history, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 (2003), and Peter Shapiro's journalistic survey, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (2005). Mindful of these efforts, Echols seeks to distinguish her study by paying equal attention to mainstream and underground developments—in contrast to the lionization of disco's more underground character by Lawrence and Shapiro—and by providing running commentary on disco's distinctive way of rearticulating American social relations during a time of transition. In the strongest portions of the book, Echols draws on her established expertise at the intersections of feminism, sexual politics, and popular culture to analyze the varieties of masculinity and femininity that found expression through disco music and its accompanying dance club culture. She makes a persuasive case for disco's importance as a vehicle for giving voice to female desire—and black female desire in particular—in a chapter that places the well-known disco diva Donna Summer alongside the more artistically independent Chaka Khan and Labelle. In a similar vein, Echols examines the ways black masculinity became recast through disco, observing the exaggerated, near-parodic manhood of the protodisco figure Isaac Hayes and the softer, more vulnerable figure of the disco singer and bandleader Barry White, whose preoccupation with the pleasure of his imagined female companions conveyed the changing terms of public sexuality in the 1970s.

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