Customer Reviews

Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture

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Echols new book on disco is an engaging, smart read. She brings to life both the political complexities of the time as well as the music and it's many scenes. A brilliant historian and superb storyteller (the book is filled with great anecdotes), Echols' book transcends the usual fare on disco by taking on an in-depth account of how disco both reflected and contributed to the ways that identities of African Americans, gays, and women shifted in these years. A must read for anyone interested in the cultural history of disco and the legacies of 70's social change movements.

Lively, readable, yet serious and scholarly, once again, Echols gives us a social and cultural history of America in the 1970s that we all need. This book is a pleasure from the first line to last, with the insets in between, adding a particularly nice touch, as they each focus on a specific song and illustrate its place in an important moment in disco's history. Thoroughly researched, yet a page-turner, Hot Stuff reveals things that some of us assumed, but could never really prove, especially in relation to disco's essential role in an emerging, out gay culture in the USA.
Enjoy! I did!

Great overview of before, during and after the disco era.

What it meant socially to different groups, how it changed US culture and values, the lifestyles behind the music, and best of all, the music itself.

Copious footnotes, and even includes a DJ setlist!

Great all-encompassing history of disco, with special focus on disco and GLBT, disco and women, and disco and Black Americans.

"Hot Stuff" is a new book about disco, the music and its impact on worldwide culture by Alice Echols, who is professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. She is a former disco deejay, and author of the well-received Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin. Disco, to be sure, still reminds many of John Travolta's famous white polyester suit in the monster hit little disco movie Saturday Night Fever (30th Anniversary Special Collector's Edition), not to mention his strut down Bay Ridge's 86th street in that movie; and the drug-enhanced glamour of New York's Studio 54; even Brooklyn's noted dive, with which we became familiar in the same movie, 2001 Odyssey.

Then of course, there was the decade of the 1970's, when disco took hold, memorably and lastingly christened the narcissistic "Me" decade by esteemed American author Tom Wolfe. And, as is well-known, disco was hated by various white, macho rock critics: was it just coincidental that disco had something to do with the movements for women's, gay, and black rights? And was it just coincidental that the 70's, unfortunately, followed on the 60's that supposed decade of peace, love, drugs, sex and rock and roll that those same critics deeply loved, even as they deeply resented disco? Well, who knows, but there are still people driving around 40 years later with those famous bumper stickers, "Disco Sucks;" and what, I wonder, did disco, which is simply dance music, ever do to them?

At any rate, I loved disco: I simply loved, and love, to dance: a love that science is showing is hard-wired in all of us. Newborn babies will dance, given the chance. But Echols, who has clearly done a great deal of research, gives us more than just the music, although she does give us a good history of how the music came to be. And she gives us a solid study of the wide and important influence of the music. As it happens, Echols gives us more information than the general reader, who is not an academic specialist in this area, can absorb, or probably wants or needs. It's too much information for me, and I, surely no specialist, was there, dancing my fool heart out. But the author gives us a few too many lists of influential musicians and pieces of music, and I certainly couldn't call them all to mind; I found myself wishing that the book came with a CD of the more obscure tunes. But only a fool would complain about a book's being too informative. While I am on this subject, anyone reading this review will likely have read the angry one ahead of it. I've no idea why Echols, and/or her publisher chose to use again the title "Hot Stuff," vivid title though it is, when it had already been used for a book on the same subject matter, and I'm not familiar with this other book.

The disco soundtrack Saturday Night Fever: The Original Movie Sound Track which was dominated by the Australian Bee Gees, was one of the biggest, monster selling hits of all times, and is likely to be found in many homes. So, get out your platform shoes, and dance, little man,while you can.

"Hot Stuff" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Echols' book interview ran here as the cover feature on March 29, 2010.

Aren't people supposed to be paid for writing reviews? I think the same goes for taking pictures. It's a service you are asking me to do for free, yet by"helping other customers" I am really just helping you make profit and getting nothing in return. Happy to write a review for compensation. The book looks Pretty good by the way but I haven't read it yet.

Echols writes an amateurish, pre-screened dissertation that is painful in some areas. She refers to the Italian-American singer Jerry "Vail" - it's Jerry VALE! That particular singer in the context and point she was trying to make: get it right! Echols infers an intended connection between The Bee Gees' "j-j-j-Jive Talkin'" with Bowie's "CH-ch-ch-Changes." I needed a shower after that small-time BIG MISS. And clearly she has a deep and ornery attitude against The Bee Gees - it's plain as day. This book fails as a chronicle of a movement or a collection that illuminates prevailing insights during and after Disco. The masterpiece "Flowers in the Dustbin" is the entertaining education piece that serves as a sociological study of the times, people and movements in American music. during a wide stretch of time."Hot Stuff" touches on nothing most of the time; it dispenses info as if out through a vending machine slot. I'm two-thirds through it and am reading on just for laughs. Pick it up for kicks, but don't expect to learn anything important.