Disco inferno.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Briefly Noted - Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture - Brief article - Book review

The first wave of disco revisionists battled decades of pop mythology by arguing that a) far from being pure fluff, disco could be extremely experimental, b) far from being a flash in the pan, the genre influenced everything from post-pun k to turntablism, c) the early disco subculture bore little resemblance to Saturday Night Fever or Studio 54, and d) a lot of the opposition to disco was fueled by homophobia and racism.

Alice Echols' excellent Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (Norton) takes all that for granted. Then it pushes back, asking what we nonetheless can learn...