DISCO! : Music, Image, Dance

DISCO! explores the many facets of disco culture as a historical cultural phenomenon with an immediate and ongoing global impact. The book is organised around three main areas -music, image, and dance - with which it surveys a broad range of both well-known and less familiar disco figures, spaces, texts, traditions and legacies. The volume includes twenty chapters and interviews that examine specific singers and groups; analyse various films and visual artefacts; investigate nightclubs and other spaces where disco happened or happens; explore the many meanings that have clustered around disco; and interrogate debates that revolve around disco.

DISCO! Music, Image, Dance takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring disco''s untold stories--sonic, visual, and kinetic--from its popular heyday to its many afterlives. The book attests to disco''s irrepressibility in cultural practices from the 1970s to the 2020s, tracing its histories and instantiations as these traverse geographies, affects, and memories, and exploring the reaches of disco as an expansive field of music, image, and dance. Illustrating how disco shows up in multiple and surprising ways across its times and spaces, chapters track the ubiquity of disco not only in relation to music and nightlife but also fashion, film, literature, poetry, dance, performance art, digital media, museums, exercise, activism, and community. DISCO! offers an expanded and necessarily ambivalent view of the value of disco-its embrace of both the ridiculous and the sublime, and its involvement in both progressive and reactionary social tendencies. Stretching disco studies towards a more capacious logic of valuation, contributors reveal disco to be as frivolous as it is urgent, as fanciful as it is (under)grounded, as much to do with oppression as liberation. DISCO! attests to the undisciplined and inclusive attention which disco, as a tentacular global cultural phenomenon, duly deserves and requires.