Alice Echols: Hot Stuff

1. How does Alice Echols place herself within the history of disco?

Drawing on her experience as a dance DJ in the early '80s and her lifelong passion for popular music, Alice Echols, professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University, builds a convincing case for disco's lasting impact in "Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of Popular Culture."

Taking its title from a Donna Summer chart-topper as well as one of the Rolling Stones' early forays into disco, "Hot Stuff" is a thoroughly researched, scholarly credible and fiercely entertaining dissection of disco's origins and influence. Popular culture in general and disco in particular are topics Echols knows well, and "Hot Stuff" pulsates with a style as relentless as the music it analyzes and the personalities who brought that sound to the airwaves, clubs, boardrooms and bedrooms.

Echols sees disco as the anthem for three communities that, at the start of the '70s, were neglected, if not completely ignored, by mainstream music programmers: the black middle class, looking to build on the gains of the civil rights era; women, seeking an outlet for their increasing sexual awareness; and gay men, reveling in their newfound sense of community after striking back at police oppression at the close of the '60s (Carducci, 47).

2. Who does she respond to when she analyzes the history of the genre? How does she respond? What community is she a part of?

She credits black R&B artists for providing a sonic and political model for disco: James Brown, whose bass-heavy beats and repetitive raps would become familiar fodder for 12-inch singles; Isaac Hayes, whose confessional lyrics opened the door to Barry White's bedroom ballistics; and Sly and the Family Stone, who seemed to predict a dance revolution in 1969 with "I Want to Take You Higher" (in a ...