Echols’ history of disco best in pieces

book-cover-hot-stuffAlice Echols‘s Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture is a frustrating book. At times, Echols writes masterful pieces that show usually obscured facets of their subjects. However, there are other points in the books where the editorial oversight feels slapdash and distracts from the overall work to the point of distraction.

First, the good. Echols particularly soars in the chapters “Saturday Night Fever” and “One Nation Under A Thump.” The first, tracing the evolution of the film of the same name from the “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday” essay to cultural phenomenon, demonstrates that the movie is more than a simple film about disco and dancing. The film has “full-bodied characters” and “narrative tension.” At the same time, Echols acknowledges the criticisms that Saturday Night Fever led to a watering-down and mainstreaming of disco, officially moving it to the “silly fun that gets people up onto their feet and dancing” that it is today.

From there, Echols moves into “One Nation Under A Thump,” which documents the rise of anti-disco, revealing much of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering done by radio stations that led to the grandiose demonstrations by those such as Chicago DJ Steve Dahl.

Unfortunately, to get to these two masterful chapters, which are excellent works of journalism, one must get through the previous 150-some pages of Hot Stuff, which is a frustrating mess. The biggest issue is that the book repeatedly reintroduces things – Klute, Gamble and Huff, Eddie Kendricks’ “Girl You Need A Change of Mind” – in each chapter, as if they’d not been mentioned before. It’s an editorial error that pops up over several chapters, which makes the book read as a collection of pieces, rather than a cohesive work.

That lack of cohesion is much the same with the in-chapter sidebars. While they are more convenient to the reader and easily accessible when they’re placed as they are within their contextual loci, it doesn’t stop them from being jarring interruptions that further disrupt the narrative flow.

Taken as a collection, Hot Stuff lends new critical import to the disco genre, and does much to elevate it beyond its current status as wedding reception fodder. As a cohesive piece unto itself, it needs work.

Read all of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture at Google Books.