Experiencing disco, hip hop, house, techno, drum 'n' bass and garage, Discographies plots a course through the transatlantic dance scene of the last last twenty-five years. It discusses the problems posed by contemporary dance culture of both academic and cultural study and finds these origins in the history of opposition to music as a source of sensory pleasure. Discussing such issues as technology, club space. drugs, the musical body, gender, sexuality and pleasure, Discographies explores the ecstatic experiences at the heart of contemporary dance culture. It suggests why politicians and agencies as diverse as the independent music press and public broadcasting should be so hostile to this cultural phenomenon.

"Impossible Dance is a highly accessible, original and engaging account of the complex and often heavily theorized debates around the body, identity and community. Focusing on gay, lesbian and queer club culture in the 1990s New York City, this is the first book to bring together vital issues such as dance culture, queer community, sex culture, HIV identity and politics. Based on four years of field work, the book takes readers on a journey from the streets of New York City into the dance clubs and onto the dance floor. Detailed interviews with club-goers capture their perspectives on how they stage their self-fashioning through dancing. Fiona Buckland argues that such dancing embodies and rehearses a powerful political imagination, laying claim to the space and to one's body as queer."--Publishers Weekly

Few narratives in pop encompass Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Madonna, Duran Duran, Diana Ross, Johnny Mathis and Led Zeppelin. This story is one of them. Chic, led by former Black Panther activist Nile Rodgers and down-home family man Bernard Edwards, are one of the most underrated and pivotal acts in African-American musical history. As artists, they created a discrete R&B sound that just happened to coincide with the disco movement. At the height of their fame, they either released or produced a string of era-defining records but when disco collapsed, so did Chic's popularity. The group quietly called it a day in 1983. However, Rodgers and Edwards individually produced some of the great pop-dance records of the 80s, working with David Bowie, Robert Palmer, Madonna, Duran Duran and ABC, among many others. Everybody Dance puts the rise and fall of Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, the emblematic disco duo behind era-defining records "Le Freak," "Good Times," and "Lost In Music," at the heart of a changing landscape, taking in sociopolitical and cultural events such as the Civil Rights struggle, the Black Panthers, and the U.S. oil crisis. There are drugs, bankruptcy, uptight artists, fights, and Muppets but, most importantly, an in-depth appraisal of a group whose legacy remains hugely underrated.

Wedged between the idealism and activism of the 1960s and the avarice of the 1980s, the 1970s tend to be allocated a slender role in American cultural and social history. Only now have scholars begun to examine the suspect decade--perhaps in part because it has seemed too close, at least for many who lived through it, and in part because cultural critics have rendered it synonymous with cultural stagnation and overall frivolity. Ironically, in everything from retro fashion to interior design to music, American culture today is heavily influenced by this decade so routinely scorned by the academy. Proceeding from the idea that the preoccupation with nostalgia veils the decade's true cultural significance, the essays in Disco Divas reveal that the 1970s, far from being an era of cultural stasis, were a time of great social change, particularly for women. Disco Divas argues that 1970s popular culture provided an arena in which women's roles could be negotiated in new ways and, through individual chapters on topics ranging from film, music, television, and advertising to cheerleaders, teen-idol fans, and second-wave feminists, demonstrates how these roles were renegotiated. The great cultural shifts of the 1960s were still reverberating in the 1970s, and American society, while holding onto the ideal of the nuclear family and the white picket fence, had to come to terms with these shifts. This tension created a time of intriguing, if complicated social opportunity for women; the essays here chart the history of the women's movement from a genuinely liberating movement to a tool of corporate profits. Offering commentary on the sources of our fascination with the period, Disco Divas is an ambitious tour of how the mass-mediated popular culture of the 1970s shaped public perceptions of women and the actuality of women's lives.

A long-overdue paean to the predominant musical form of the 70s and a thoughtful exploration of the culture that spawned it Disco may be the most universally derided musical form to come about in the past forty years. Yet, like its pop cultural peers punk and hip hop, it was born of a period of profound social and economic upheaval. InTurn the Beat Around, critic and journalist Peter Shapiro traces the history of disco music and culture. From the outset, disco was essentially a shotgun marriage between a newly out and proud gay sexuality and the first generation of post-civil rights African Americans, all to the serenade of the recently developed synthesizer. Shapiro maps out these converging influences, as well as disco's cultural antecedents in Europe, looks at the history of DJing, explores the mainstream disco craze at it's apex, and details the long shadow cast by disco's performers and devotees on today's musical landscape. One part cultural study, one part urban history, and one part glitter-pop confection,Turn the Beat Aroundis the most comprehensive study of the Me Generation to date.

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.