Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

- Blurb -

To many, disco seemed to have been born fully fully formed from the imaginations of John Travolta and the Bee- Gees, but the music and culture that would become known as disco was taking shape a decade before Saturday Night Fever as the exclusive property of New York hedonists in members-only loft parties and disused warehouse spaces cum dance clubs. Disco emerged from the fall-out of the Black Power Movement and an almost exclusively gay scene in a blaze of poppers, strobe lights, tight trousers, hysterical diva vocals and synthesized beats in the late sixties. Drawing on the music of Sly Stone and Parliament Funkadelic, and the ethos of pleasure-is-politics, disco was the first musical form to explore the relationship between the machine and the body, and consequently became the progenitor of house, hip-hop and techno. As such, and as a genre, disco radically re-defined the sensibility of the seventies to the extent where reactionary rockers felt the need to launch a paranoid 'Disco Sucks' campaign at the end of the decade.