Love Saves The Day - dance culture 70-79 anybody read this?
Burns
2,227 Posts
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979
Anybody read this? Finished last week. Great insight into the catalyst of disco, and dance DJs.
A lot of record related chapters of 12"s and the first "legit" remix by Walter Gibbons.
Tons of knowledge being dropped on Tom Moulton, and early start of house with F. Knuckles.
I liked the DJs current discography of a certain year at a club, all common hits.
Seems like all the major club hits had orchestration, nothing too deep made the DJs list I saw.
Nice pictures, but I wanted more.
Odd that the book was written by a Brit, but it gives a different insight and direction.
Fans of Larry Levan need to read.
Anyone?
Anybody read this? Finished last week. Great insight into the catalyst of disco, and dance DJs.
A lot of record related chapters of 12"s and the first "legit" remix by Walter Gibbons.
Tons of knowledge being dropped on Tom Moulton, and early start of house with F. Knuckles.
I liked the DJs current discography of a certain year at a club, all common hits.
Seems like all the major club hits had orchestration, nothing too deep made the DJs list I saw.
Nice pictures, but I wanted more.
Odd that the book was written by a Brit, but it gives a different insight and direction.
Fans of Larry Levan need to read.
Anyone?
Comments
I appreciate the level of detail and a few sections here and there (the in-depth stuff on David Mancuso, Steve Dahl squirming, etc.), and the photos are great, but almost without exception everything in this book was covered with more verve, better perspecitive, more wit, and better writing in the absolutely unfuckwithable (and also Brit-written [by an erstwhile soulstrutter, no less]) Last Night A DJ Saved My Life. There are huge sections of Love Saves The Day that are really just bookkeeping, and that made me wonder why I was still reading; I kept slogging faithfully through all this minutia, holding out for insights that for the most part never arrived. I agree that the charts are a nice touch, but they're just a touch.
The book that Tim Reynolds wrote after this one, the Arthur Russell book, has far less general interest, but has a lot more heart.
I've heard mixed things about Peter Shapiro's disco book but haven't read it myself.
There's also Vince Aletti's "Disco Files" from 2009 http://www.amazon.com/Disco-Files-1973-78-Vince-Aletti/dp/0956189601/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296804094&sr=1-2
...as well as Alice Echols recent "Hot Stuff": http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Stuff-Remaking-American-Culture/dp/0393066754/ref=pd_sim_b_2
I liked Shapiro's book. The Aletti is cool but it could use an index.
I was slogging thru myself on the later chapters especially on the relationships between many people I had not heard until this book and the disco sucks section, very repetitious it felt, I was hoping to find that golden detail I never knew of. Least there was some record nerdery throughout the book.
I did like the insight, and creation of "Love to Love You Baby" between Moroder & Summers.
Ha, I never knew that. Makes sense though.
I first met him at an academic conference and we were small-talking for a few minutes and he kept complimenting me on "the book" and it took me a few beats to realize, "oh, you think I'm Jeff Chang."
...
Note: this happens enough times that it's become a running joke between Jeff and I. Alas, it's only happened in reverse once, but c'est la vie.
Wait - you're NOT Jeff Chang?
From the sound of it, I can skip Love Saves... if I've read Last Night.... I read the second edition, and one of the points they made that was mind-melting was that everything from '89 onwards was new material - they had to be told that DJing culture didn't end with D.I.S.C.O.
To their credit, they obviously listened and learned, as all of the book was highly entertaining and informative.
I have to confess that when Can't Stop first came out, for a minute there I thought Jeff Chang was Jeff Mao. I think my thought process was something like: "Well, the 'Mao' must just be part of the 'Chairman Mao' pen name, and now he's busting out his government name for the 'serious' work, like your man C(h)ris Bridges."
I'm a big fan of ego trip??, but not a big fan of that book, so I was real happy to realize I was wrong (no asterisk for ego trip!). Happy enough to not worry about whether or not this incident means that maybe I'm a racist? Hmmm.
Anyway, I remember the one faux_rillz saying that the Peter Shapiro book was kinda butt, and the little bit that I read down at the Powell's seemed to bear this out. I'd like to hear the folks that like this book speak on it further.
....
?? How big? A few years back I bought a copy of some shitty magazine that had Michael fucking Showalter on the cover (holding the Biz puppet on his lap) just because there was some short thing on ego trip therein. The only redeeming aspect of the whole transaction turned out to be the twentysomething young miss who rang me up taking a long look at the cover and saying, in all seriousness, "Dang, Biz Markie is looking turrible these days!"
Finished early, did you?
Hey, if I start losing interest, I get to doing my business and then break out.
Did I?
I honestly have no recollection of my reaction to this book.
Peter Shapiro is as a rule kinda butt, though. Especially when he tries to speak on rap music.
and not to derail the thread, but "can't stop won't stop" is dry as fuck, sucking all the life out of what has been described elsewhere as an incredibly vibrant movement. it spends too much time talking about the politics of teenagers when it should be talking about their art...
Don't see how you could skip Love Saves The Day, its dedicated to an era of music, culture, and society than just the DJ.
More of a history lesson of time than just Disco. Some filler, but hey I learned something from it. I'll be listening to Walter Gibbons with more of a weirder ear than usual.
That's a new one. Most people fault his coverage but this is the first critique ive read about the prose. I thought the South Bronx chapters were gripping.
'last night a dj saved my life' is cool (skip the later chapters on rap) but its SO much broader than lawrence's book -- it is more narratively insightful i suppose, but i kinda enjoyed the way lawrences book was just a disco nerd-out
i liked 'cant stop wont stop' when i read it a few yrs ago but i need to read again. also im curious what james didnt like about it
Jeff Mao is pretty much the only Chinese American I've met in the U.S. with the surname of "Mao". This only makes his nom de plume all the much cooler (unless of course you hated the Chinese Communist Revolution).
But yeah, when the Rap Pages DJ issue came out, I was tripping off the fact that they got two Chinese American dudes named Jeff to guest edit it, both of whom were writers/record collectors/DJs, involved in important independent hip-hop projects (Solesides and ego trip), just on different coasts. Brothers from another mother (except for the whole Mao = Red Sox lifer, Chang = Sox hater thing).
Can't Stop's material on the early South Bronx scene is as good and dynamic and magnetizing as you could hope for, and does exactly what I want all music writing to do: it delivers its factual presentation with the kind of pacing and momentum that, even as you're taking in the concrete information, also conveys perfectly the abstract energy of the thing. A lot of shitty music writing can't work that balance, and can only keep one ball in the air at a time--it's "Okay, here's a breathless, impressionistic passage to remind you why this stuff is exciting. Okay, now here's a massive bolus of names and numbers and citations to make you wonder why the fuck you're here," rinse and repeat--but for a nice long stretch, Can't Stop acheives just such a balance, where the energy drives the information and the information frames the energy and it makes and sustains this really electrifying, organic circuit of thought and feeling, and it's impossible for even a crank like me to read those chapters and not get caught thinking that hoariest of thoughts: Damn, this must have been what it was really like.
But after that, it's pretty much done. It's as if the book feels that it's made its point, shown its heart, and can now get down to the business of scholarship. There seems to be an assumption that that initial explosion is enough to energize the rest of the book by association and is enough to offset the many many many pages of bookkeeping that follow. It is not.
My secondary beef is similar to what neil_something mentioned: Too much focus is placed on politics and sociology and assorted phenomena that are ancillary to hip-hop, with too little effort made to fold them into the bigger picture and connect their essential energies. I've said this before, but I've always felt that it was telling that so many people came away from the book excited about reggae soundsystems or 80 Blocks From Tiffany's or whatever, while relatively few came away excited about hip-hop.
So much for keeping it to a minimum, but there it is.
And while I'm here: I tend to reject the idea--which I've seen presented a few different places--that Love Saves The Day is a more serious book than Last Night A DJ Saved My Life. Or, rather, I think that's only true in the most narrow, academic sense. Again, while I appreciated the detail of the Lawrence book (and it bears repeating that the photos he got are really something else--that picture of five-year-old David Mancuso and his bunkmates huddled together like scared little owls and praying at their bedsides in the orphanage where he grew up is fucking heavy), its lack of insight and connection is so pervasive that it's hard for me, as a reader, to consider it any kind of real success. Lawrence may have exhausted more real estate in his pursuit, but I still maintain that more perspective on and a better, truer understanding of American dance music culture between the years of 1970 and 1979 can be had by reading the Brewster and Broughton book. To me, that's serious.
Maybe I just picked a bum page, though--I don't know.
Also, have you started in on Dan Charnas' book yet? Curious how you think he achieves (or doesn't) that balance you mentioned.
And you said Reynolds and I assume you meant Lawrence but was that Simon Reynolds you were thinking of? And if so, what'd you think of his books?
I put that in, special for you.
I haven't copped it yet, but the bit I've read makes me think that it will be uninterestingly written but very informative. I'll probably read it mostly on the strength. Just the other day I noticed his name somwehere deep in the production credits for DJ Kool's "Let Me Clear My Throat." Dude got around.
Sorry--fixed. I've read some Simon Reynolds things, but none of his books. The fact that no details are coming to me makes me think that I probably don't feel too strongly about him either way.
really want to read 'rip it up and start again' even tho im not really into uk post punk at all