Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983

Author: Tim Lawrence
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373920
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Book Description
As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, New York's party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city’s subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and film. Interviewing DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, and dancers, Tim Lawrence illustrates how the relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes became marked by their level of plurality, interaction, and convergence. He also explains how the shifting urban landscape of New York supported the cultural renaissance before gentrification, Reaganomics, corporate intrusion, and the spread of AIDS brought this gritty and protean time and place in American culture to a troubled denouement.

Love Saves the Day

Author: Tim Lawrence
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385112
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 523

Book Description
Opening with David Mancuso's seminal “Love Saves the Day” Valentine's party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s—from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell’s Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America’s suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark, and Miami. Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making, and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era’s most powerful djs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin—as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fueled dance music’s tireless engine. Love Saves the Day includes material from over three hundred original interviews with the scene's most influential players, including David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Loleatta Holloway, Giorgio Moroder, Francis Grasso, Frankie Knuckles, and Earl Young. It incorporates more than twenty special dj discographies—listing the favorite records of the most important spinners of the disco decade—and a more general discography cataloging some six hundred releases. Love Saves the Day also contains a unique collection of more than seventy rare photos.

"You Better Work!"

Author: Kai Fikentscher
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819564044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
The first in-depth study of underground dance music.

Hot Stuff

Author: Alice Echols
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393338916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Book Description
Alice Echols reveals the ways in which disco transformed popular music, propelling it into new sonic territory and influencing rap, techno, and trance. She probes the complex relationship between disco and the era's major movements: gay liberation, feminism, and African American rights. You won't say "disco sucks" as disco thumps back to life in this pulsating look at the culture and politics that gave rise to the music.

Assembling a Black Counter Culture

Author: Deforrest Brown
Publisher: Primary Information
ISBN: 9781734489736
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
In this critical history, DeForrest Brown, Jr "makes techno Black again" by tracing the music's origins in Detroit and beyond In Assembling a Black Counter Culture, writer and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr, provides a history and critical analysis of techno and adjacent electronic music such as house and electro, showing how the genre has been shaped over time by a Black American musical sensibility. Brown revisits Detroit's 1980s techno scene to highlight pioneering groups like the Belleville Three before jumping into the origins of today's international club floor to draw important connections between industrialized labor systems and cultural production. Among the other musicians discussed are Underground Resistance (Mad Mike Banks, Cornelius Harris), Drexciya, Juan Atkins (Cybotron, Model 500), Derrick May, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Detroit Escalator Co. (Neil Ollivierra), DJ Stingray/Urban Tribe, Eddie Fowlkies, Terrence Dixon (Population One) and Carl Craig. With references to Theodore Roszak's Making of a Counter Culture, writings by African American autoworker and political activist James Boggs, and the "techno rebels" of Alvin Toffler's Third Wave, Brown approaches techno's unique history from a Black theoretical perspective in an effort to evade and subvert the racist and classist status quo in the mainstream musical-historical record. The result is a compelling case to "make techno Black again." DeForrest Brown, Jris a New York-based theorist, journalist and curator. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music and is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign.

Menergy

Author: Louis Niebur
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197511074
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
"Menergy tells the story of a "post-disco" recording industry in San Francisco between the years 1978-1984. For most of America, disco died in 1979. Gay men, however, continued to dance, and in the gay enclave of the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco, enterprising gay DJs, record producers, and musicians started their own small dance music record labels to make up for the lack of new, danceable music. These independent labels' music did more than copy what the larger industry had been doing, however. Instead, the upstart companies built upon the musical experiments their roster of local musicians and producers had been exploring over the last several years, developing a distinctive style of its own. Known as "high energy," the music reveled in electronics, fast tempos, disco and DJ culture, and, above all, gay liberation as it had emerged over the previous decade in the Castro neighborhood by so called "Castro clones" (a gay subculture of exaggerated masculinity with a strong presence in the city's nightlife). The sound, like the new revolutionary ethos, derived its aesthetic from San Francisco's unique configuration of elements, but immediately this music had a reach far beyond the Bay, with Megatone Records, Moby Dick Records, and other labels achieving worldwide success with San Francisco artists such as Sylvester, Patrick Cowley, Paul Parker, Lisa, Loverde, and Jolo, creating the world's first gay-owned, gay-produced music for a dancing audience"--

Kings of the Garden

Author: Adam J. Criblez
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501774476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
In Kings of the Garden, Adam J. Criblez traces the fall and rise of the New York Knicks between the 1973, the year they won their last NBA championship, and 1985, when the organization drafted Patrick Ewing and gave their fans hope after a decade of frustrations. During these years, the teams led by Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Bob McAdoo, Spencer Haywood, and Bernard King never achieved tremendous on-court success, and their struggles mirrored those facing New York City over the same span. In the mid-seventies, as the Knicks lost more games than they won and played before smaller and smaller crowds, the city they represented was on the brink of bankruptcy, while urban disinvestment, growing income inequality, and street gangs created a feeling of urban despair. Kings of the Garden details how the Knicks' fortunes and those of New York City were inextricably linked. As the team's Black superstars enjoyed national fame, Black musicians, DJs, and B-boys in the South Bronx were creating a new culture expression—hip-hop—that like the NBA would become a global phenomenon. Criblez's fascinating account of the era shows that even though the team's efforts to build a dynasty ultimately failed, the Knicks, like the city they played in, scrappily and spectacularly symbolized all that was right—and wrong—with the NBA and the nation during this turbulent, creative, and momentous time.

Dance Music

Author: Tami Gadir
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501346423
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
For some people, at some times, in some places, on some drugs, dance music can be a gateway to transformative, even transcendent experiences. With the help of skilled DJs, dancers can reach euphoric states, discard their egos, and feel social barriers dissolve. Dance floors can be sites of openness, subversion, and even small-scale acts of political resistance. At a minimum, dance music lightens the burdens of contemporary life. At its best, dance music offers glimpses of better worlds. Yet even where dance music communities are built on principles of resistance and liberation, they nevertheless share the grittier realities of the rest of the world. Dance Music makes the case that dance music is ordinary and that something exceeding the social and spatiotemporal bounds of the dance floor is required for the transformative promise of dance music to be realized.

The Bodies of Others

Author: Selby Wynn Schwartz
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054090
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
The Bodies of Others explores the politics of gender in motion. From drag ballerinas to faux queens, and from butoh divas to the club mothers of modern dance, the book delves into four decades of drag dances on American stages. Drag dances take us beyond glittery one-liners and into the spaces between gender norms. In these backstage histories, dancers give their bodies over to other selves, opening up the category of realness. The book maps out a drag politics of embodiment, connecting drag dances to queer hope, memory, and mourning. There are aging étoiles, midnight shows, mystical séances, and all of the dust and velvet of divas in their dressing-rooms. But these forty years of drag dances are also a cultural history, including Mark Morris dancing the death of Dido in the shadow of AIDS, and the swans of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo sketching an antiracist vision for ballet. Drawing on queer theory, dance history, and the embodied practices of dancers themselves, The Bodies of Others examines the ways in which drag dances undertake the work of a shared queer and trans politics.

Can't Slow Down

Author: Michaelangelo Matos
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0306903350
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
A Rolling Stone-Kirkus Best Music Book of 2020 The definitive account of pop music in the mid-eighties, from Prince and Madonna to the underground hip-hop, indie rock, and club scenes Everybody knows the hits of 1984 - pop music's greatest year. From "Thriller" to "Purple Rain," "Hello" to "Against All Odds," "What's Love Got to Do with It" to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," these iconic songs continue to dominate advertising, karaoke nights, and the soundtracks for film classics (Boogie Nights) and TV hits (Stranger Things). But the story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves - until now. Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-eighties pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. Big acts like Michael Jackson (Thriller), Prince (Purple Rain), Madonna (Like a Virgin), Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A.), and George Michael (Wham!'s Make It Big) rubbed shoulders with the stars of the fermenting scenes of hip-hop, indie rock, and club music. Rigorously researched, mapping the entire terrain of American pop, with crucial side trips to the UK and Jamaica, from the biz to the stars to the upstarts and beyond, Can't Slow Down is a vivid journey to the very moment when pop was remaking itself, and the culture at large - one hit at a time.