Echols — Hot Stuff

Author: Alice Echols
Title: Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture
Year: 2010
Type: Book (W. W. Norton)

Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture is a book by the historian Alice Echols, published by W. W. Norton. It argues that disco, which presented itself as shallow and disposable, was inseparable from three changes in American life in the 1970s, the emergence of “gay macho,” a rising Black middle class and a growing openness about female sexuality, and its publisher describes disco as attacked from every side, as too gay and too straight, too Black and too white. Its evidence is a cultural history of disco’s records, performers, audiences and clubs, from the music’s roots in soul, R&B and funk through gay dance culture and the divas to a reading of Saturday Night Fever, written by a historian who had worked as a disco and funk DJ in the mid-1970s. Michaelangelo Matos in Bookforum and James Gavin in the New York Times praised it, and Tim Lawrence, whose history of New York dance culture it argued against, wrote that it was overeager to pick an argument with earlier historians.

Echols, a historian whose earlier books include Daring to Be Bad, a history of radical feminism, and Scars of Sweet Paradise, a biography of Janis Joplin, worked as a disco and funk DJ at the Rubaiyat in Ann Arbor in the mid-1970s, while a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and the book opens with a memory from those years.¹ W. W. Norton published it; Goodreads dates the edition to March 2010, and Publishers Weekly reviewed it in October 2009.² Its publisher writes that disco “may have presented itself as shallow and disposable” but argues that it “was inseparable from the emergence of ‘gay macho,’ a rising black middle class, and a growing, if equivocal, openness about female sexuality.”³

The first chapter traces disco from soul, R&B and funk and from European imports, and Lawrence called it a powerful reply to authors who had argued that disco watered funk down.⁴ In it Echols follows Black masculinity on record from James Brown’s sex machine toward Barry White’s love-man style, with Isaac Hayes’s orchestral records alongside.⁵ The book covers the dance floors of the Stonewall Inn and the Firehouse, presents Tom Moulton’s extended mixes as the model for the 12-inch single, and follow a change from effeminacy to a macho style that Echols connects with the Village People.⁶ The book calls the 1970s “the decade of the Big O” and argues that disco made what women wanted matter in popular culture, with case studies of Donna Summer, whose “Love to Love You Baby” Time magazine examined, Labelle and Chaka Khan.⁷ Echols sets Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” beside Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” as two records in which, in Matos’s account, one hears “freedom time.”⁸ She argues that earlier critics wrongly maligned Saturday Night Fever, which Gavin described as having “heterosexualized” the scene, and she extends Barbara Ehrenreich’s reading of the film as a critique of masculinity.⁹

The book’s description says that disco was attacked as “too gay and too straight, too black and too white.”¹⁰ The chapter on the backlash takes the Disco Demolition at Comiskey Park in 1979 as its emblem.¹⁰ She began her research in 2005, after Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day (2003) and Peter Shapiro’s Turn the Beat Around (2005), and she argued against these “revisionists”: in her account they had underplayed disco’s reach into the mainstream and its gay male core, and overstated how mixed the early dance floors were.¹¹ Lawrence, reviewing the book in the Journal of Popular Music Studies in 2011, found in it “an overeager desire to pick an argument where none really exists.”¹¹

Other reviewers were favorable. Matos, in Bookforum, called it a “stimulating rethinking of well-trod terrain” and wrote that the quality of its prose and ideas made its occasional research errors stand out.⁸ Gavin wrote in the New York Times that it “reexamines the ’70s as a decade of revolution,” and Kris Needs, in Record Collector, valued its “considered female perspective” on the male-dominated world of DJs.¹²

Key contributions

• Disco as inseparable from gay macho, a rising Black middle class and a new openness about female sexuality.
• Disco as a continuation of funk and R&B, against the charge that it diluted funk.
• Disco’s women and divas, and the place of female desire in the music.
• Saturday Night Fever defended against its critics as a critique of masculinity.
• The backlash’s contradictory charges: “too gay and too straight, too black and too white.”

See also

• Last Night a DJ Saved My Life — Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s 1999 history of the DJ
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats