Survive on the dance floor – Kommersant

Love Will Save the World: A History of American Disco Music 1970-1979, by Tim Lawrence, is published by White Apple Publishing House, which describes the formation of disco culture in the 1970s in great detail. Igor Gavrilov I read it and practically felt the connection between the concepts of “disc”, “disco” and “disco” with my fingertips.

Despite the fact that Tim Lawrence is a long-term and thoughtful researcher of American subcultures and, following the book “Love Will Save the World”, he published a number of equally important works on the American music scene, this text should be considered in a different row – among popular books that reveal complex arrangement of simple things. Lawrence’s book on disco makes the same impression as Peter McInnis’ History of Sugar or Christine Bahr’s Political History of Trousers. Rhythmic movements to music are as understandable and everyday things as sugar or trousers, but if a professor of cultural studies takes up the matter, there is no doubt: a whole world will open up to the reader.

The story in Love Will Save the World begins as early as the 1950s, and in the 1960s, night dancing in New York and other major US cities was a full-fledged industry with its own internal laws and conflicts. The main source of energy in it was the New York gay community. You should not immediately look for propaganda of forbidden love in the Russian version of the book: for Tim Lawrence, the Big Apple LGBT community is a purely functional unit, as much a part of a huge dance machine as the production of dance systems or the politics of DJs putting songs on the air. This is the most impressive trick of Lawrence. He explores the subtle connections between the characteristics of the gay community of the late 1960s, the design of audio systems and the technology of mixing tracks by DJs and gets answers to cultural and socio-political questions.

In one interview, Deep Purple lead singer Ian Gillan was asked if he was tired of singing “Smoke on the Water” every night for 40 years. To which the singer replied: “I just try every time to recreate the feeling of that evening when we performed this song for the first time, and no one in the hall knew it yet.”

So “Love will save the world” tells us that once there was a moment when a DJ put a song back to back with the previous one, without a pause, and before him no one did this, because there is an artistic integrity of the work. And another DJ once combined the coda of one song with the beat of another, and no one did it before him either. Tim Lawrence calls these “research combinations”. Another DJ once ventured to play Barry White at a disco for the first time. It seems to us that there has always been Barry White, and once it was a whole revolution. And the story of Gloria Gaynor began not with “I Will Survive”, which everyone knows today, but with “Never Can Say Goodbye” – the first hit that was promoted not by radio, but by disc jockeys. At the same time, the European disco, which literally plowed up the Soviet discos in the past, is not given as much attention in the book as one might expect. Although his influence on the dance floors, judging by the book, is quite comparable to the “British invasion” of the 1960s.

Tim Lawrence is extremely meticulous in describing all the revolutionary aspects of disco, including everything related to the economics of the process. Even the very possibility of replacing the ensemble in the institution with one guy with turntables has already radically changed the situation on the labor market. “It all came down to ‘deconomics’ – the cost of a DJ and a couple of his decks (i.e., turntables) compared to the cost of an entire group of musicians,” writes Lawrence. It is interesting to look through the prism of this revolution at all subsequent metamorphoses of the club market.

The figure of a DJ has not disappeared over the years, despite the fact that he has programs at hand that select music themselves and reduce beat to beat. Moreover, this figure has acquired a special brilliance, and many DJs have become real pop stars. However, the fact that the pioneers of club culture like David Mancuso, Nicky Siano and Frankie Knuckles were real artists is easier to believe than the compositional talents of today’s EDM heroes like David Guetta and Martin Garrix. The disco pioneers didn’t have big studios or production teams. There was only a huge enthusiasm and passion of collectors.

There are so many names and names of clubs in Tim Lawrence’s book that at first they dazzle in the eyes. But all this relationship between DJs, club owners, gay dancers, corrupt police officers, promoters, journalists and movie stars eventually builds up into a coherent picture where the social characteristics of the era, the racial and gender composition of the urban population, traditional values ​​and technological innovations lead to the birth of new culture and change the face of the industry.