Things I learned from Hot Stuff

Alice Echols' Hot Stuff, recently out in paperback, is maybe my favorite music book ever. Instead of being a straight history of disco, it examines the genre in the various ways it reflected and helped mold '70s culture. There is something I didn't know on virtually every page (and I love disco enough to have already done a ton of research on it). Below is a list of the things that sent my pen underlining. I don't have much to add to a lot of these items because they are fascinating on their own. Book report time!

- White critics had a lot to say about what constituted true soul. Motown was considered watered down because of Berry Gordy's hit-making ambition, while the smooth sounds of Barry White and Isaac Hayes were too soft to be real, compared to the frequent cacophony of James Brown. Black audiences rarely agreed. The label and artists' legacies tell you everything you need to know about who won.

- Related: James Brown was, at one point, largely considered the epitome of masculinity. Consider his hairstyles throughout the years and tell me your mind isn't blown. (On second thought, it was Al Sharpton who most explicitly expressed this: "We look at James Brown, and we say, 'Hey, that's how I'm gonna be a man.'" That actually explains nothing besides Al's own hairstyle choices.)

- "...The crucial element that most critics missed about both blaxploitation and the nascent disco sound: they represented black people getting over." Regarding the former, see: Pauline Kael's multi-film savagery of the genre from the Dec. 2, 1972 issue of The New Yorker, "Notes on Black Movies," which misses this point entirely and doesn't for a second consider these movies (Shaft and Super Fly, among them) function other than how they offend her various sensibilities. I understand she was hired and revered for her point of view, but that doesn't mean others didn't exist. I've read less Kael than someone who does what I do should, but her tone there kind of turned me off exploring her work.

- "[James] Brown's problem was that he never melded the funky and sophisticated within one track, but rather kept them sequestered. Melding these qualities inside a cut was the genius of disco."

- "At one point gay men held the top three positions in the field of disco record promotion." For the first time, we ran shit. (Follow up via West End Records' Mel Cheren: "[Disco] was like musical monopoly and gay people ran the bank.")

- Pre-Stonewall institutionalized gay oppression was beyond disgusting. Some lowlights:

• "...The New York State Liquor Authority's policy...made it illegal for a restaurant or bar to serve liquor to a group of three or more homosexuals."
• "Even on Fire Island, which had a reputation as a 'carefree' gay resort, homosexual men who visited the cruising areas risked being rounded up by police who treated them like vermin. Chained together to a telephone pole that sat in the middle of the Fire Island Pines dock, the men waited until the police had made thirty or forty arrests..."
• And, of course, men dancing together was prohibited and policed strictly, so that early liberation's most practical application was on the dance floor. Those who lament the frivolity of gay culture and its foundation in the club don't really understand how life-altering dancing with someone you're attracted to could feel.

- "At the Paradise Garage disco, the bass was so thunderously earthquaking that to deejay [Bob] Casey it felt like it 'put your balls up your ass.'" REVOLUTIONARY, I TELL YOU.

- This really spoke to me re: my own interests and life investment: "Literary theorist D.A. Miller's work suggests the appeal of the shallow, if not the reason for its musical manufacture. Perhaps for gays, he argues, the realm of the superficial operates as a refusal of 'substance,' which is culturally inscribed  in heteronormative terms. Lives of substance involve solemn vows, and, of course, children." ...Which I'll never have, happily. Not while there are supercuts to be made, at least.

- The Village People were so fucking subversive that it not only excuses their big, cheesy sound -- it exposes its brilliance. Examples:

• "...Navy officials were so oblivious that they not only permitted Casablanca Records to film the Village People on one of their warships for the group's video of 'In the Navy,' they seriously considered using footage of that shoot as part of their own recruitment campaign."
• This is via my own research after reading about the Village People: their 1980 flop film Can't Stop the Music is one of the only (if not the only) PG-rated movies to feature full-frontal male nudity. And we aren't talking one cock. Multiple cocks. And not just that, but multiple cocks in an extremely homoerotic shower setting during the big "YMCA" number. NSFW screenshots are here. Did the famously homophobic and anti-penis MPAA even make it to the end of this movie, or were they under the same spell as the rest of America, mistaking the Village People's gay winks as just happy winks?

- "Worked out pecs came to be called 'disco tits.'" In the '70s, and now in my head for eternity.

- Sutherland, a central character in Andrew Holleran's alternately lovely and maddening, loving and racist Dancer from the Dance (which I began reading immediately after Hot Stuff and have been consuming rabidly), makes the argument for the inherent femininity of gay male culture. It has nothing to do with mannerisms, but the manner in which one presents himself to the world: the ideal is "being looked at," so that even the butchest queens are pursued, not necessarily pursuers. I don't know if I entirely agree with this (it undermines women's potential for sexual aggression, for one thing), but it's certainly perception-altering.

- Meanwhile, Echols examines gay macho (the 70's trend that found gay dudes dressing butch to a stereotypical extent) as a mindfuck. Was it a way of balancing society's expectations with gays' innate humanity (allowing gayness to be tolerated as long as it wasn't faggy), or was it more subversive, breaking the association of passivity and femininity with homosexuality, since so many man's men-seeming dudes were taking it up the butt? Who knows? It's so complicated! Echols ends the section with a quote from Guy Hocquenghem: "Our assholes are revolutionary!" Yeah, that sounds about right.

- "So many [regulars at New York's infamous hi-NRG club the Saint] were dying of what came to be called AIDS that in [the] first few months [of its emergence], it was known as the 'Saint's disease.'"

- American composer Ned Rorem unleashed this bit of brilliance in reference to the Beatles (quoted in the Bee Gees' section): "Genius doesn't lie in not being derivative, but in making the right choices instead of the wrong ones."

- The live percussion heard on the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive," "Night Fever" and "More Than a Woman" is all the same drum loop, and it may be pop music's first. Since the Bee Gees were known to produce "plastic soul," I can't imagine a more appropriate percussive backdrop.

- Regardless (or maybe because) of that, "How Deep Is Your Love" is the best of Saturday Night Fever's offerings. Just kidding. I didn't learn that -- I always knew it. This book just got me to listen to that soundtrack again. It was remastered a few years ago and it sounds better than ever.

- At the end of the Saturday Night Fever shoot, John Travolta and crew members filmed a mock wedding for to show off for Paramount execs, who were openly doubtful about the movie's potential. A grip played the groom, while John wore a wedding dress and played bride. That's either very comfortably heterosexual of him or straight gay. It teaches us nothing about John's actual, much-discussed sexuality, but it sure is innnnnnteresting.

- At the height of disco fever, a Casablanca exec estimated disco's economy at $4 billion. That is such an obscene amount of money, I bet that any poor little rich execs of today's music industry reading this book wept when they read that.

- "Investigators of the 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana discovered that the children had written down the names of recent disco hits in their notebooks."

- "Brazilians began to use neologistic verbs and nouns from the root 'Traovlta'--travoltar (to travolt), travoltice (travoltage)--to describe the condition of disco fever."

- I knew that the "disco sucks" sentiment had at least a subliminal sense of racism and homophobia, but I had no idea how overt it was. Two Detroit DJs formed a group called the Disco Ducks Klan and they at one point planned to don white sheets at a discotheque whose format was switching to rock. Meanwhile, the DJ Steve Dahl, who organized the Disco Demolition Night, made a point of lisping the word "disco" when he talked about it on air. That event, which turned into a riot, had the feel of a figurative lynching. But after that, disco lived on through boogie and house. And with the 4/4 beat being arguably the most commercial element a song can sport today, disco (or at least, a version of it) is more popular now than it has been since the '70s. We really showed them, didn't we?

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