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)

The premise sits in the subtitle: a mocked music had a history worth telling straight. Peter Shapiro, a Wire contributor who had edited Modulations, an anthology history of electronic music, framed the case the way the book’s own jacket does — disco “may be the most universally derided musical form to come about in the past forty years,” yet “like its pop cultural peers punk and hip hop, it was born of a period of profound social and economic upheaval.”¹ The origin story arrives in one sentence: disco was “essentially a shotgun marriage between a newly out and proud gay sexuality and the first generation of post-civil rights African Americans, all to the serenade of the recently developed synthesizer.”²

The structure runs outward from a broke city. The opening chapter, “The Rotten Apple,” is a portrait of fiscal-crisis New York, the decaying city where the marriage was performed, and the history then reaches back past the genre entirely, to the Swingjugend of Nazi Germany and the French Zazous, dancers for whom moving to forbidden American records was already resistance.³ From there the book works the machinery. A chapter on “automating the beat” traces the four-on-the-floor into the synthesizer age and out to euro-disco, and the Village Voice’s Geeta Dayal praised the book’s “rapturous passages describing the way songs feel” — her verdict on its “I Feel Love” chapter ran “worth the asking price alone.”⁴ The breadth was the point. Dayal noted the book “is wholeheartedly populist in its approach,” giving “equal ink to ‘The Hustle’ and to underground party-starter David Mancuso” — the mainstream craze and the private floor held in one frame, where the earlier histories had picked a side.⁵ And the book states the sympathy’s limits plainly: Shapiro, Dayal observed, “is quick to point out disco’s less-than-utopian aspects too”: a music that “could be a force for exclusion” and for “creepily nihilistic excess.”⁶

Among the disco histories, the book is the single-volume middle term. Lawrence had published the downtown decade two years earlier, and his own survey of the field places Shapiro at the end of the first post-backlash wave of disco books; he thought the subtitle oversold the secrecy — “Even in 2005, Shapiro’s subtitle seemed a little melodramatic given that so much of the story had been told…”⁷ Dayal drew the cleaner division: Lawrence keeps the technical and club-historical detail, Shapiro tells you how the records feel. Echols arrived five years later to argue both of them had lionized the underground at the mainstream’s expense.⁸ The British press received the book as a rescue operation: the Observer called it a “rehabilitation of the dancing dinosaur,” and the Guardian’s reviewer left “knowing a great deal more about disco” than he arrived with. Jeff Chang blurbed it as riveting and essential.⁹ Shapiro filled out a strange and complete life around it: the Rough Guides to drum ‘n’ bass and hip hop, then a second career in intellectual-property law, before his death in July 2025 at fifty-five. Faber had already answered the derided-genre question by then, reissuing Turn the Beat Around in its Faber Greatest Hits series in 2020 — back in 2005, reviewers had to be talked into taking the subject seriously at all.¹⁰

Key contributions

• The shotgun-marriage origin: out gay sexuality and post-civil-rights Black America, with the synthesizer playing the wedding.
• The deep prehistory: the Swingjugend and the Zazous — the argument that dancing to forbidden records was defiance before the genre had a name.
• The mechanics chapter: the four-on-the-floor, the synthesizer, and euro-disco treated as craft history, with the “I Feel Love” reading as its showpiece.
• The populist frame: the Hustle and the Loft in the same book — mainstream craze and underground floor as one story, against the field’s habit of choosing.
• The stated dark side: disco as a force for exclusion and nihilistic excess, from a sympathetic historian.

See also

• Last Night a DJ Saved My Life — the booth history whose two disco chapters came early in the post-backlash wave
• Love Saves the Day — the downtown decade at archival depth; Shapiro is the reach and the feel to its detail
• Hot Stuff — the academic successor that took the mainstream’s side against both its predecessors

Footnotes

1. Both sentences are the publisher’s description, verbatim, per the Google Books record (accessed August 7, 2026), which also carries the book’s tagline: “one part cultural study, one part urban history, and one part glitter-pop confection.” Shapiro’s background — Spin, Vibe, The Wire, The Times, and the editorship of Modulations: A History of Electronic Music (2000) — per his Wikipedia article (accessed August 7, 2026). The title borrows Vicki Sue Robinson’s “Turn the Beat Around” (1976). ↩

2. Verbatim from the same publisher description per the Google Books record (accessed August 7, 2026). ↩

3. The chapter title per the Internet Archive’s catalog record of the paperback; the “graphic depiction of New York in the ’70s” per Geeta Dayal’s Village Voice review, June 28, 2005; the Swingjugend and Zazous prehistory, and the repetitive beat that “opened the doors to techno, house and hip-hop,” per Shapiro’s Wikipedia article (all accessed August 7, 2026). ↩

4. Chapter title per the Archive catalog record; both Dayal quotes per the Village Voice review (both accessed August 7, 2026) — her praise attaches to the chapter on “I Feel Love”; which of the book’s chapters that is goes unstated by the review. ↩

5. The same review (accessed August 7, 2026), verbatim. ↩

6. The same review (accessed August 7, 2026), verbatim. ↩

7. Lawrence’s sequencing of the post-backlash literature — Haden-Guest (1997), Jones and Kantonen (1999), Brewster and Broughton’s two chapters (1999), Cheren’s memoir (2000), his own book (2003), then Shapiro (2005) — and the subtitle judgment, quoted as carried, per his review of Echols, Journal of Popular Music Studies 23:2, June 2011 (accessed August 7, 2026). ↩

8. Dayal’s Lawrence-Shapiro contrast per the Village Voice review; Echols’s mainstream corrective per Michaelangelo Matos’s Bookforum review of Hot Stuff, April 1, 2010, which calls Shapiro’s book “heavier on both social context—the ‘Rotting Apple’ of ’70s New York—and discussion of the songs” than Lawrence’s (both accessed August 7, 2026). ↩

9. The Observer’s phrase (Molloy Woodcraft, “When mirrorballs ruled,” August 14, 2005) and Gary Lachman’s Guardian line (from “Disco infernal,” June 11, 2005) as carried by Shapiro’s Wikipedia article; the Chang blurb, paraphrased here, per jahsonic.com’s Shapiro page (both accessed August 7, 2026). ↩

10. The Rough Guides, the BakerHostetler law career, and the death (July 2, 2025, after a two-year cancer battle) per his Wikipedia article; the 2020 Faber Greatest Hits reissue (ISBN 9780571359820) per the edition’s AbeBooks record and the book’s Goodreads editions page (all accessed August 7, 2026). ↩