Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco
by Peter Shapiro
Faber and Faber. 369 pages, $17.
AN AUTHOR who promises the “secret” history of anything sets the bar pretty high. There’s an implication that what waits between the covers is insider information previously known to only a few—there’s even a hint of the salacious. Of course, marketing departments love this kind of stuff. Most readers take such claims with a healthy dose of skepticism, so the author had better deliver. For the most part, Shapiro does. Turn the Beat Around is comprehensive, lively, and engaging. It’s grounded in solid cultural and social history that provides an illuminating context for the subject. Best of all, it’s fun!
What’s “secret” to some folks, of course, is old news to others, and no doubt many of those who were in New York City in the 1970’s—the time and place Shapiro identifies as the birthplace of disco—will not be surprised by much of what Shapiro chronicles. But they’re bound to enjoy the breadth, detail, and sheer nostalgia value of this book. Other readers will come away with a richer understanding of a unique moment in American popular culture. As Shapiro convincingly argues, an unprecedented and fleeting confluence of factors gave birth to disco, and the music became the soundtrack for a sexual revolution that we’ll never see the likes of again in this post-AIDS world.
Turn the Beat Around isn’t just the history of a music form: it’s a social and cultural history that pays particular attention to the contributions of gay men and to the broader transformation of sexual attitudes that occurred alongside the changes in music and entertainment. With the emergence of disco and the nightclub scene it engendered, gays and straights began to mingle in a way that they never had before. Shapiro also cites “the pill” as a driving force of the 70’s Sexual Revolution. Reliable birth control, after all, made it easier for people to accept that sex didn’t just have to be about procreation. And if straights could enjoy guilt-free recreational sex, it made it easier for them to accept the idea of gay sex.
Disco wasn’t just about getting it on, of course. It was also about art, money, and drugs. Shapiro considers all of this and, like the many skilled DJs he admires, he blends the tracks of the story—the politics, the myths, the gossip—into a pleasing harmony. He can call up cultural references with aplomb; he introduces his chapters with quotes from such disparate commentators as John Wayne, Theodor Adorno, Lillian Carter, and Lydia Lunch. He can poke gentle fun at the exuberance with which conservative writers like William Safire embraced disco, early on, as a triumphal return of “teamwork” and “responsibility” to American culture. He can dish out amusing footnotes (such as “The Story of ‘I Will Survive’”). Although there are times when Shapiro’s catalogs of disco hits and artists flirt with tedium, he tells a lively story for the most part.
Turn the Beat Around offers a kind of genealogy of disco’s ancestry and its progeny. Shapiro presents an extended evolutionary tree of popular music that begins with the military-inspired, post-slavery bands of late 19th-century New Orleans, extends to the famed Swing Kids of World War II Europe, and later weaves in such genres as soul, funk, Eurodisco, techno, punk, and hip hop. To those who know disco only through the hits that it produced in the 1970’s and 80’s, Shapiro’s book provides a helpful explication of the lesser-known songs, artists, and DJs that truly helped disco come into its own. More than that, though, this book helps define and even elevate a musical genre that many have long regarded as an annoying footnote.
Disco was widely derided in its day, perhaps even more than it was admired, and this resentment spawned an active “Disco Sucks” cottage industry of T-shirts and bumper stickers, clubs, and events. It all seemed to peak on the night of July 12, 1979, “the night disco died,” at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. A radio station organized a “Disco Demolition Derby” (designed to boost baseball game attendance) that soon devolved into a riot, with fans rushing the field and vandalizing the stadium, forcing the cancellation of the game. Shapiro acknowledges, as in his brief discussion of the silly roller disco craze, that some of this disco hating was understandable. He also doesn’t shy away from the racial and class politics that were, paradoxically, both perpetuated and transcended by disco. In the end, it’s fair to say that disco was as much a cultural movement as a musical one, and Shapiro discusses these complexities with thoroughness and an absence of pretension.
Disco has gained a measure of respect in recent years, with many disco standards even being played at sporting events, that bastion of macho American culture. If the likes of “We Are Family” can get sports fans on their feet, then perhaps disco has indeed crossed over into the mainstream. Readers who don’t need to be convinced of disco’s validity as music and as a feature of American (especially gay) culture will find a lot to like in this book.
