Disco Days: a Social History of the 1970'S

Disco Days: a Social History of the 1970'S
Author: Richard T. Stanley
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2015-06-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1491767960

By 1972, President Richard Nixon had reached the heights of political power and popularity, only to self-destruct due to his role in a third-rate burglary called Watergate. Nixon resigned in disgrace, and, for the first time in history, Americans came to be led by an unelected President and Vice President -- Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. But Americans had much more on their minds than mere politics -- movies, TV, sports, earning a living, etc. Hollywood motion pictures, including The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars, captured their imaginations, while weekly TV shows such as All in the Family and Happy Days made them laugh, and Monday Night Football kept their competitive juices flowing. To no ones surprise, UCLA continued to win NCAA basketball championships, and such schools as Alabama, Arkansas, Michigan, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Penn State, Texas, and USC remained dominant on the gridiron. And professional sports, thanks to such super-stars as BIllie Jean King, Kareem Abul-Jabbar, Henry Aaron, Jack Nicklaus, Muhammad Ali, Al Unser, and Terry Bradshaw, became more popular than ever. But who could have predicted at the beginning of the decade that a young high school dropout named John Travolta and a band called the Bees Gees would become the kings of Disco Dancing? Or that a peanut farmer from Georgia would be elected President during our Bicentennial Year?

The Reagan Years: a Social History of the 1980’S

The Reagan Years: a Social History of the 1980’S
Author: Richard Stanley
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1532037716

Ronald Reagans legacy as president is nearly unparalleled in American history due to his domestic and foreign policy leadership. Reagans contrarian insistence on advocating limited government and supply-side economics drew much bipartisan criticism, causing the Great Communicator to take his argument that lowering taxes would encourage economic growth directly to the people. The result? Congress granted $750 billion in tax cuts in 1981. The Reagan Revolution had begun. By mid-1983, the nations economy was booming. On President Reagans first day in office, the Iran Hostage Crisis finally came to an end. Fifty-two American embassy personnel held hostage by a defiant Iran during the last four hundred-plus days of the Carter administration were freeda definite win for all Americans. But Reagan soon was widely criticized for insulting Russias leaders by calling the Soviet Union the evil empire. Later, Reagan was criticized at home and abroad for challenging Soviet premier Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Reagans most criticized proposal of all, however, was his insistence on developing his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)space weapons to defend America from incoming Soviet nuclear missiles. Domestic critics dismissed his proposal as a Star Wars fantasy (but the Soviets feared SDI). By December 1991, it was clear that Reagans Star Wars fantasy helped cause the bankruptcy and total collapse of the Soviet Union, bringing a peaceful end to the decades-long Cold War.

Love Saves the Day

Love Saves the Day
Author: Tim Lawrence
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2004-02-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822385112

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.

Black Women's Liberation Movement Music

Black Women's Liberation Movement Music
Author: Reiland Rabaka
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2023-10-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1000966798

Black Women’s Liberation Movement Music argues that the Black Women’s Liberation Movement of the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s was a unique combination of Black political feminism, Black literary feminism, and Black musical feminism, among other forms of Black feminism. This book critically explores the ways the soundtracks of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement often overlapped with those of other 1960s and 1970s social, political, and cultural movements, such as the Black Power Movement, Women’s Liberation Movement, and Sexual Revolution. The soul, funk, and disco music of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement era is simultaneously interpreted as universalist, feminist (in a general sense), and Black female-focused. This music’s incredible ability to be interpreted in so many different ways speaks to the importance and power of Black women’s music and the fact that it has multiple meanings for a multitude of people. Within the worlds of both Black Popular Movement Studies and Black Popular Music Studies there has been a long-standing tendency to almost exclusively associate Black women’s music of the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s with the Black male-dominated Black Power Movement or the White female-dominated Women’s Liberation Movement. However, this book reveals that much of the soul, funk, and disco performed by Black women was most often the very popular music of a very unpopular and unsung movement: The Black Women’s Liberation Movement. Black Women’s Liberation Movement Music is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and researchers of Popular Music Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender Studies, and Sexuality Studies.

Turn the Beat Around

Turn the Beat Around
Author: Peter Shapiro
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2015-06-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1466894121

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. In Turn 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 Around is the most comprehensive study of the Me Generation to date.

After Dark

After Dark
Author: Noel Hankin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9781736614914

Mid-town Buppies, big-time mobsters, fabulous dancing queens, and unscrupulous promoters all come together in After Dark, a first-hand account of the birth and growth of the disco movement in the 1970s. Disco music has earned an unflattering reputation for being garish and flashy; however, it was the voice of a generation that spoke using the power of dance to unite people. Now, for the first time you can hear the compelling, never-been-told story of the rise of the New York disco scene. In the late 1960s, a group of college students formed a social club called "The Best of Friends" (TBOF) and learned to monetize their love of dancing and music by building a multi-million-dollar network of discotheques. Their innovative DJing techniques transported dancers into a carefree state of euphoria that paved the way for "Saturday Night Fever," Studio 54, and the nationwide explosion of disco in the late '70s. TBOF discotheques attracted everyone from CEOs to mailroom clerks, from Rick James to Elizabeth Taylor, and from big-time mobsters to FBI agents. This unprecedented collection of humanity made it impossible to know what excitement would unfold each night. What the partners in TBOF did know is that After Dark, they had to be on their toes.

Hot Stuff

Hot Stuff
Author: Alice Echols
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2011-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393338916

Alice Echols reveals the ways in which disco transformed popular music, propelling it into new sonic territory and influencing rap, techno, and trance. She probes the complex relationship between disco and the era's major movements: gay liberation, feminism, and African American rights. You won't say "disco sucks" as disco thumps back to life in this pulsating look at the culture and politics that gave rise to the music.

A 1970s Childhood

A 1970s Childhood
Author: Derek Tait
Publisher: The History Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2011
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0752463446

Do you remember glam rock, flares, cheesecloth shirts, and chopper bikes? Then it sounds like you were lucky enough to grow up during the 1970s. Who could forget all the glam rock bands of that era, like Slade, Wizard, Mud, and Sweet, or singers like Alvin Stardust, Marc Bolan, and David Bowie? What about those wonderful TV shows like Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, Kung Fu, and Happy Days? Fashion included platform shoes (we all had a pair), flared trousers, brightly patterned shirts with huge collars, and colorful kipper ties. And everyone remembers preparing for power cuts and that long, hot summer of 1976? So dust off your space hopper and join us on this fascinating journey through a childhood during the seventies, with hilarious illustrations and a nostalgic trip down memory lane for all those who grew up in this memorable decade.

Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Volume 8

Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Volume 8
Author: David Horn
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 586
Release: 2012-03-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1441148744

The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music Volume 8 is one of six volumes within the 'Genre' strand of the series. This volume discusses the genres of North America in relation to their cultural, historical and geographic origins; technical musical characteristics; instrumentation and use of voice; lyrics and language; typical features of performance and presentation; historical development and paths and modes of dissemination; influence of technology, the music industry and political and economic circumstances; changing stylistic features; notable and influential performers; and relationships to other genres and sub-genres. This volume features over 100 in-depth essays on genres ranging from Adult Contemporary to Alternative Rock, from Barbershop to Bebop, and from Disco to Emo.

To Disco, with Love

To Disco, with Love
Author: David Hamsley
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2015-11-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1250068460

Over 250 Disco-era album covers-from sexy to silly, elegant to outrageous-that brings alive a time when fashion, politics, and sexuality all converged in harmony on the dance floor. Paging through To Disco, with Love is like catching Saturday Night Fever all over again. From Diana Ross and Donna Summer gazing fiercely from their chart topping albums to the Village People's trademark costumes and the Bee Gee's blinding white jumpsuits, To Disco celebrates the days when the dance floor ruled the world. Gathered together and presented chronologically, these striking covers tell the story of a moment in time when art and photography, music, and dance changed the world. We see a rapid evolution, from the early days when Disco's roots were firmly planted in Soul, Latin, and Jazz, all the way to the digital revolution of the 1980s. Like fleeting moments caught in the strobe, these covers vibrantly capture our takes on fashion and beauty, wealth and status, sex, race, and even God. As the hair gets bigger, bell bottoms wider, and platform shoes steeper, the vibrancy and energy of this moment in music history is brought back to vivid life. Accompanied by insightful, spirited descriptions that showcase the evolving trends in photography, illustration, and design, To Disco, with Love charts the history of the music and the industry during its groovy heyday.