Turn the Beat Around

Disco emerged from the fall-out of the Black Power Movement and an almost exclusively gay scene in a blaze of poppers, strobe lights, tight trousers, hysterical diva vocals and synthesized beats in the late sixties. Drawing on the music of Sly Stone and Parliament- Funkadelic, and the ethos of pleasure-is-politics, disco was the first musical form to explore the relationship between the machine and the body, and consequently became the progenitor of house, hip hop and techno. As such, and as a genre, disco radically redefined the sensibility of the seventies to the extent where reactionary rockers felt the need to launch a paranoid 'Disco Sucks' campaign at the end of the decade. Featuring artists like Chic, Sylvester, Donna Summer, Larry Levan and Frank Grasso, as well as a discussion of the clubs and labels that defined the period, Turn the Beat Around illustrates how and why disco changed the face of popular culture for ever.