Interesting Interview Regarding Disco

Alice Echols has written a book celebrating disco. I will have to read this book ASAP. Disco was, and is, a truly wonderful, magical musical form!

Yes, Lady Gaga is gender-bending, joyously synthetic and unabashedly fun, and after a decade in which hip-hop dominated pop music, she's bringing glitter back into the American mainstream. As Alice Echols argues in her new book, "Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture," she also signals a resurgence of disco -- and that the dance music trend that brought us Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby" and the Village People's "YMCA" is being repackaged for a new generation.

Echols, a former disco DJ and professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University, also believes that disco, which emerged from Motown and funk in the late '60s, deserves far more respect than it's received. As Echols explains in her readable and thoroughly entertaining book, disco played a crucial role in giving voice to female desire in American pop music, racially integrating the American dance floor and defining gay culture.

Salon spoke to Echols over the phone about Lady Gaga's outfits, how dancing caused the Stonewall Riots, and why the '60s are overrated.

Why do you think Lady Gaga signals a resurgence of disco?

I take a very expansive definition of disco. People who love rock music call everything from heavy metal to Little Richard rock. It's just assumed that it's a genre that can take in a lot of different styles. One of the things that annoys me about so much writing on disco is this idea that disco can only be talked about as the classic disco sound that lasted a few short years. Lady Gaga is disco to my ears. She's so great and conceptual, like disco David Bowie with a vagina. Plasticity is understood as a cool thing by Lady Gaga, and I think disco is the taproot source for this.

...You argue that the '70s, which have been maligned as the "Me Decade," got an unfair shake compared to the '60s, which was supposedly this time of transformation and great art. What are people missing about the '70s?

Honestly, if you were to look unflinchingly at some of those rock performances of the '60s today, like Joe Cocker at Woodstock, they're really kind of cringe-making. Obviously, there was great music at that moment, but the '60s have gotten the lion's share of attention both in popular and in scholarly histories, and it's been so outsized that it's made it hard for scholars to see what was unique about the decades that bookended it.

...Disco continued to be ridiculed and reviled by rock fans long after it disappeared from mainstream culture. Why has anti-disco sentiment lasted so long?

Rock music imported a lot of the ideas of musical authenticity from folk music, who really believed music should be natural and spontaneous and raw and filled with sincerity, and should not be commercial. If this is your standard, then disco flies in the face of that. It embraces artifice and the synthetic. People who love disco aren't going to say, "Oh man, can you believe the way Donna Summer sold out?"

I think there were different reasons why people hated disco, and it depended on the context. Because of disco's success and popularity, a lot of the local rock clubs closed down and became discos, which annoyed many people; disco appealed to a different constituency than the Rolling Stone crowd: women, gays and blacks. One of the reasons many men didn't like it, especially white guys, was that disco involved dancing.

And among some working-class whites in Detroit, for example, which was one of the epicenters of anti-disco, there was this idea of, "Hey, what happened to us and our music? It's being taken over by a bunch of black people!" Not everybody who hated disco was racist, obviously, but I think racism did inform the feelings of some people. There were white guys dressing up like the KKK at anti-disco rallies. There was also homophobia, and disco was the soundtrack of feminism, which was upsetting many men's lives.

What's your favorite disco song?

There are so many, but one of my very favorites is Diana Ross' "Love Hangover." I love it because it starts out slow so it's really challenging for the DJ. It's this incredibly lush-sounding song. She sounds so uninhibited for Diana Ross and so happy! There's just a kind of pleasure, and joy and infectiousness to that song and you really get the sense that she's somebody who's just had sex. I still remember so clearly dancing to it.