Shapiro — Turn the Beat Around

Author: Peter Shapiro
Title: Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco
Year: 2005
Type: Book (Faber and Faber)

Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco is a history of disco by the music journalist Peter Shapiro, published by Faber and Faber in 2005. Its publisher presents disco as the meeting of gay liberation and the Black Americans who came of age after the civil rights movement, and compares its origins with those of punk and hip hop. Shapiro traces disco’s forerunners to the dance cultures of wartime Europe and follows the history of the DJ and the music’s spread into the mainstream. He reads disco as the final expression of American liberalism before the conservative turn, and the disco revival of the late 1990s as an erasure of the gay and Black people who made the music. Its evidence, as the Observer saw it, is wide interviewing and reading. Reviews were mostly favorable: the Observer called it scholarly, the Village Voice praised its writing about how songs feel, and the Guardian thought it interesting cultural history, if at times overloaded with detail and not wholly convincing in tying disco to the Swing Kids of Nazi Germany. Later historians of disco, Alice Echols among them, re-examined its account.

Shapiro started writing for The Wire in 1994 and was on its staff from 2000 to 2003, and he wrote the Rough Guides to soul, hip hop and drum ‘n’ bass.¹ Faber and Faber published Turn the Beat Around in New York and London in 2005; the Observer reviewed the British edition under the subtitle The Rise and Fall of Disco.^{2, 3} Shapiro later practiced media and intellectual-property law.⁴ He died on July 2, 2025, at fifty-five, after a long illness.¹

The publisher’s description sets out the argument: like “its pop cultural peers punk and hip hop,” disco was “born of a period of profound social and economic upheaval,” and from the outset it was “essentially a shotgun marriage between a newly out and proud gay sexuality and the first generation of post-civil rights African Americans.”⁵ The book opens in New York, in a chapter called “The Rotten Apple,” and later chapters take up disco and sexuality, the automation of the beat, disco’s place in soul, the craze, the music’s retreat underground and its legacy.^{2, 6} In the decaying city of the 1970s, Shapiro writes, “gays, blacks and Latinos were feeling the exaltation of the damned” in “fading hotels and former churches.”³

Shapiro finds disco’s prehistory in wartime Europe: in the Swing Kids, young Germans who danced to banned jazz under the Nazis, and in the Zazous of occupied France, “taking their name from nonsense syllables scatted by Cab Calloway.”^{7, 8} He also places disco in American politics, against the rise of “the South’s distrust of big government and the welfare state, and the racial dynamic of that hatred”: “Disco, in a sense, was liberalism’s last hurrah, the final party before the neocon apocalypse.” In his account, “Disco’s own last hurrah was Chic’s ‘Good Times.‘”⁸ Of the disco revival of the late 1990s, he finds that the films 54, The Last Days of Disco and Boogie Nights were “all marked by the almost complete absence of gay or black characters.” “It was a whitewash,” he writes.⁸

Reviews were mostly favorable. Molloy Woodcraft, in the Observer, called the book “scholarly and painstakingly researched,” had “the impression he spoke to everyone he possibly could,” and counted “20 pages of notes and eight of bibliography.”³ He thought its history of DJing techniques “fascinating” and named one drawback, that it had just six photographs, though he added that the writing carried the reader without them.³ Geeta Dayal, in the Village Voice, admired its “rapturous passages describing the way songs feel” and called it “wholeheartedly populist,” as ready to discuss “The Hustle” as the underground parties of David Mancuso. She added that “Shapiro is quick to point out disco’s less-than-utopian aspects too,” among them its capacity to be “a force for exclusion.”⁹ Gary Lachman, in the Guardian, still disliked disco but called the book “an interesting work of cultural history”; he was “not entirely convinced by the connection” to the Swing Kids and felt there was “sometimes too much information about DJs, clubs, producers and records.”⁷ The paperback’s praise page quotes Mark Blankenship, in Variety, and Jeff Chang, who called it “riveting, powerful, and essential.”⁸

Later historians of disco revisited Shapiro’s account. Michaelangelo Matos, reviewing Alice Echols’s Hot Stuff in Bookforum in 2010, wrote that Shapiro’s book was “heavier on both social context” and “discussion of the songs” than Tim Lawrence’s; Echols, he wrote, “re-examines Lawrence’s and Shapiro’s now-familiar narrative.”⁶ Echols quoted Shapiro’s picture of middle America’s “quintessential mainstream disco experience”: “hearing ‘Y.M.C.A.’ six times in one night at the Rainbow Room of the Holiday Inn in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” Research on that experience, she argued, “simply has not been done”; she blamed its scattered nature in part and, more tentatively, discographers’ eagerness to ground disco’s legitimacy in “the gay/queer underground.”⁶ Lawrence, reviewing Echols in 2011, wrote that even in 2005 Shapiro’s subtitle “seemed a little melodramatic,” given “that so much of the story had been told.”¹⁰

Key contributions

• Disco as the meeting of gay liberation and the Black Americans who came of age after the civil rights movement, in the publisher’s phrase “a shotgun marriage.”
• A European prehistory of disco in the Swing Kids of Nazi Germany and the Zazous of occupied France.
• Disco as, in a sense, the final expression of American liberalism before the conservative turn, and the late-1990s disco revival as an erasure of disco’s gay and Black culture.

See also

• Last Night a DJ Saved My Life — Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s 1999 history of the DJ
• Love Saves the Day — Tim Lawrence’s 2003 history of American dance music culture in the 1970s