Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture Paperback - 2011

"Echols's love of music, her acumen about popular culture, and her gifts as a leading cultural historian come together in this remarkable book. The book is fascinating, carried along by prose that is as sleek and slinky as its subject."-Christine Stansell, author of American Moderns"Hot Stuff describes the book as well as its subject: a thoughtful and sophisticated treatment of a significant but much-maligned music."-Tim Taylor, professor, Departments of Ethnomusicology and Musicology, UCLA"Echols aims for-and thoroughly achieves-a range of higher cultural insights. . . . Using encyclopedic knowledge of the eras' biggest stars, she shows how all sorts of musical disco styles played a 'central role' in broadening the contours of 'blackness, femininity, and male homosexuality' in America. . . . Revelatory."-Publishers Weekly"Without question, Alice Echols is one of America's best cultural critics working the beat between popular and academic cultures. With characteristic stylistic verve and scholarly acumen, Echols trolls the edges of our culture's underbelly to discern its central place in politics and economics. In Hot Stuff, she finds disco to be crucial for understanding what happened in 1970s America. Thus invariably, Echols provides a surprising take on familiar scenes by pointing out potholes and pitfalls of late twentieth-century American culture, exploring regions of experience previously overlooked or discounted. Her deepimmersion in the subjects of her research, thorough oral histories, and extensive archival investigation flesh out her absolutely original critical insights."-Paula Rabinowitz, author of Black & White & Noir