Dance, dance, dance

I've hit a string of solid books this summer, and the latest is one I bought on impulse a few years ago and almost gave away without reading. Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, by Peter Shapiro, is one of the best books about music that I've read in the past several years, and the reason isn't so much the subject matter or the insights the author has about his subject (though though those are both interesting), but the way he describes the music he writes about.

I'll start with my only real criticism of the book: the structure. I know that there are ways to structure a non-fiction narrative other than by chronology, but in a book that purports to be the history of a popular music movement, direct movement through time would seem to be the clearest way. There are problems with chronological order, I know, as history can be messy, and using some other organizing pattern might bring to light interesting insights. Shapiro begins with the earliest days of public dance halls which used recorded music rather than live bands (small town America of the first half of the century, clubs in Nazi Germany that played forbidden swing and jazz music), and moves quickly through the glory days of the glamorous European discotheques of the 60's, but the real story begins in the gay clubs of the post-Stonewall era (early 70's) like the Mineshaft and the Anvil, where as much sex was going on as dancing. Still, this is where the disco sensibility (sex, drugs, total abandon) and the disco style (long pumping waves of music with songs segueing into each other with no break between) were born.

After this, the book becomes more or less thematic in focus, looking at various subgenres like Eurodisco, Hi-NRG, and soul disco—interestingly, he identifies mainstream R&B artists like The Temptations and Eddie Kendricks as early purveyors of what became the disco sound. All the info here is very interesting, but because the timeline gets a little hazy, how it all fits together is less clear. The disco craze era, epitomized by the Bee Gees and Donna Summer, is covered fairly quickly, and after the chapter on the death of disco (1979-1980), he discusses how disco went underground, ignoring how it also went on to influence mainstream dance music from Michael Jackson to hip-hop, right up to current genres of house, trance, and electropop.

Still, the book is well worth reading, both for the sheer number of songs, artists, and personalities he covers, and for the descriptions of the early gay discos (lots of sweat and "spunk" and cocaine and Crisco, though the squeamish can relax--there are no explicit descriptions of sexual activity) and the music. Here’s how he describes a 1966 soul song, Eddie Holman’s "This Can’t Be True," which he claims as a forerunner of the Philly soul sound: "Holman’s helium falsetto against a background of dangling guitar phrases laced with cavernous reverb, a dragging bass line that reached down to the center of the earth, a slow shuffle drumbeat that recalled doo-wop rhythms, and backing vocals not far removed from the countrypolitan productions of Eddy Arnold … reinvented the sound of male vulnerability.” He also gives a fabulous reading of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" (one of my own favorite disco classics) which takes up 7 or 8 pages. This book has made me want to listen to the music it describes, and that’s a strong recommendation.