I Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents

Abstract

Is there an intellectual history of disco? If there is or will one day be, such history will surely not neglect Tim Lawrence's 2003 study, Loves Saves the Day.1 Nestled within what is broadly billed as a history of American culture in the 1970s—a phrasing that cannily duplicates the industry's own code-switching from to dance music at the end of the decade whose history Lawrence charts—is story at once more generi cally precise and geographically diffuse. It is the story of scene, style, and mode of self-fashioning whose suddenness of apogee and rapidity of fall has not been since repeated except, perhaps on smaller scale, by the premil lennial advent of rave culture. As with that latter nightlife movement (or was it moment?), the backlash against disco was so immediate it felt premeditated. The fear and loathing of disco seemed to result from the industry's determination to force an unwilling contact between the underground and mainstream in the name of crossover that, it turned out, only succeeded in crossing out the flavors most valued by those in the know, while failing to rid itself entirely of that odor most noxious to outsiders: the pungency of gender, racial, and sexual difference. The un happy hybridity of disco is still evinced in the uneasy status of its foremost cultural avatars—the Bee Gees and John Travolta, playing Tony Manero— white men occupying vocal registers and striking choreographic poses that usurp the disco diva and the gay man while at the same time infringing