In the 1970s, as the disco tsunami engulfed America, the question, "Do you wanna dance?" became divisive, even explosive. What about this music made it such hot stuff? In her incisive history, Alice Echols reveals the ways in which disco transformed popular music, propelling...
Disco may have presented itself as shallow and disposable--the platforms, polyester, and plastic vibe of it all--but Echols shows that it was inseparable from the emergence of "gay macho," a rising black middle class, and a growing, if equivocal, openness about female sexuality...