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- [00:04]
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- [00:31]
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- [01:37]
Ryan Purcell
Determined to break the disco juggernaut he believed was killing his career, James Brown declared war on the mellow dance music sweeping the Nation with his 1976 release, Get up off of that Thing by Polydor Records. Brown had said the song came to him in the middle of a dispiriting gig at a Florida night spot where the audience seemed determined to sit through his set. Frustrated, he began yelling, get up off that thing and dance till you feel better. The resulting recording, which opened with Brown declaring, I'm back, found the singer throwing down the groove and the Gauntlet. Mr. Dynamite was on a mission to take back America's airwaves and the dance floors from disco. For Brown, the song was about releasing pressure by unleashing the hardcore funk that he believed disco was pushing to the margins of popular music. Get up off of that Thing was a reclamation for Brown. There was nothing smooth, cool or synthetic about this track, just Brown's boasting and an especially lively example of the jive talk that usually passed between Brown and his backup band, the JB's, including the jabs at the Ohio Players and Barry White, who one band member derisively called Barry White Boy. It is a hard edged jam so funky that Brown predicted it would jolt the disco crowd to its feet and to its senses. When it was released, Get up off that Thing climbed no higher than number four on the R and B charts and barely cracked the disco top 20. It demonstrated that as badly as Brown wanted to turn the clock back to those days when his music dominated the charts, by 1976, the ground underneath him, the ground that he had so skillfully negotiated, had shifted. I'm Ryan Purcell.
- [03:11]
Christy Soares
And I'm Christy Soares, and this is Soundscapes.
- [03:25]
Ryan Purcell
Soundscapes is a bi weekly podcast about the sounds of the 70s that have shaped New York City history. Alice Echols is a celebrated professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of four amazing books have shaped our understanding of the long 1960s. Today, we're going to be talking about her book, Hot Disco and the Remaking of American culture, released by W.W. norton in 2010. In this book, Alice Echols probes disco's hotness, by which she means disco's upending of American racial rules and gender and sexual conventions. Music is often understood as merely reflecting societal change. But in Hot Stuff, Alice Eccles demonstrates that music can itself enact change. Aside from authoring critical books that shape our understanding of history, Alice Echols has appeared in various news outlets, including The History Channel's 1969 series, ABC's 20 20, and BBC's documentary Southern Discomfort, a documentary about the life and times of Janis Joplin. She has appeared on multiple radio programs, including most notably NPR programs On Point, morning edition, and Studio360. And I am so excited to invite Alice eccles to Soundscapes NYC to talk about disco in 1970s New York. Hey, Christy, how you doing?
- [04:41]
Christy Soares
Hey, Ryan. I'm doing great. Very excited about today's episode with Alice Echols.
- [04:49]
Ryan Purcell
Oh, I'm very excited too. And it sounds like we both come at her work from different angles, but her scholarship is very foundational to the things that we're working on now.
- [04:58]
Christy Soares
Absolutely. I think her 2010 book Hot Stuff is frankly still the best meditation on the way that race and gender are shaped by and shape disco music. Um, but tell me how you met her, Ryan.
- [05:10]
Ryan Purcell
Well, I first met her in grad school, but I didn't meet the person. I read the book, um, and that just really like, set me on this trajectory of studying popular music in the historical perspective. But I actually met her in Los Angeles in October earlier this year for the Urban History association conference where she wasn't actually talking about disco in a presentation, but in fact, talking about the Free Angela movement in 1972. Yeah.
- [05:36]
Christy Soares
And we're going to get into that a little bit in this conversation with her and kind of talk about the way that the activism around Angela Davis might or might not relate to the disco movement.
- [05:47]
Ryan Purcell
So she gave this paper about the Free Angela movement, and I approached her after the panel. I told her about the concept of this show and how amazing it would be to have her on the show, and she was very excited to participate.
- [05:58]
Christy Soares
That's phenomenal.
- [06:00]
Ryan Purcell
So this conversation really illuminates the wider breadth of her work, from the studies on Disco in 2010 to now. Her studies on the black freedom struggle.
- [06:09]
Christy Soares
Absolutely. One of the things that I love about this conversation that we're going to hear is the way that she was talking about disco as a musical genre that sort of doesn't really hold together as a genre. It rubs up against funk, soul, danceable, R and B, other forms of black music as well.
- [06:27]
Ryan Purcell
And that brings to mind one of these key quotes from that book Hot Stuff, where she says, as one peels back the layers of sound that make up disco, one discovers some unlikely sources and curious syncretisms. And I think that's certainly true when we talk about this relationship between disco and funk. There's a lot of gray area and flow between these seemingly segmented genres.
- [06:49]
Christy Soares
I love that quote. And that kind of leads us to the format of this episode. Whereas in previous episodes we've had a soundscape in the middle, in this episode, we're going to listen to various musics with Alice throughout as a way of kind of analyzing them rhythmically and also talking about how these genres take on a larger meaning about what is and is not black music.
- [07:11]
Ryan Purcell
It's going to be a lot of fun. Shall we get into it, Christy?
- [07:14]
Christy Soares
Let's go.
- [07:22]
Ryan Purcell
Alice Echols. When I first came up with the concept for Soundscapes nyc, I knew two things. First of all, I had to have a season at disco. And second of all, in that season, I had to get Alice Echols on the line. So I'm so happy to have you here. How are you doing?
- [07:36]
Alice Echols
I'm fine. It is. It is great to be here. I'm coming off of a couple of busy days, and I haven't been until this event. I haven't really been thinking that much about disco. So it's good to be back in the land of the thump.
- [07:58]
Ryan Purcell
So we last met the Urban History association at the famous biltmore Hotel in October 2025. In Los Angele. And at that conference, you were presenting on something that deviates from the work that I would like to talk about here, but in fact, a very highly politicized trial in 1972. Can you talk a little bit about what you're presenting at the Urban History association conference?
- [08:19]
Alice Echols
Yeah, sure, sure. At the Urban History Conference I was talking about. We were all trying to, on our panel, find some way to connect this to urban history. Because it really was like so many efforts it sort of, you know, cobbled together because we all wanted to present on the same panel. But mine was about the Angela Davis trial in California, in San Jose, when many, many people thought, including her strongest supporters, was just assumed that she would be found guilty of very heavy charges. It turned out that she was acquitted. And I was studying this because I've just finished a book which is called Black Power, White Heat From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic. And what really got me to write this book was that I think one of the more contentious issues in progressive politics over the past few years has been allyship. You know, people have had profound disagreements about it and if it even works. And it occurred to me during these debates that they were taking place with very little understanding. I thought of how allyship or solidarity has really happened on the ground in the past. This is a book that really looks at the collaborations and the alliances that were formed between black and white activists and their supporters in the freedom movement in the 60s. I look at two groups that bookend that era. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, better known as sncc, and the Black Panther Party. The book is really about how it played out. First in sncc, which was really committed to interracialism, and then once with the rise of black power, which had a lot to do with how it didn't play out particularly well in certain ways. It played out well in some ways, but not in others. In SNCC and the changing fortunes of Solidarity, which are interesting because I think that a lot of people assume that with the rise of black power, there wasn't much by way of collaboration between, in particular, black and white activists within the Black Panther Party. However, there were quite extensive collaborations that I write about. How solidarity of this sort came to fall apart has a lot to do with how controversial it was within the movement. You know, there were many black nationalists who were critical of the Panthers for their willingness to work with white activists and to take money from white people. And also, of course, it fell apart because of the FBI. But something that's never really been scrutinized to the extent that I do in this book is the role played by the discourse of radical chic that was advanced by the journalist Tom Wolf with such great effectiveness. So the book ends, however, on a more hopeful note, with the refusal of, time and time again, the refusal of white majority juries to convict radical black activists. Whether you're looking at the Panther 21, you're looking at Huey Newton, you're looking at Erica Huggins and Bobby Sealed, or Angela Davis, they're just not having it. And they're more skeptical of the district attorneys who are prosecuting these cases than the black radicals. How that happens is really a testimony to the defendants themselves, their lawyers, most of whom were white. Not entirely, but most of whom were white. The support committees, the defense committee committees that were trying to raise consciousness about the racism that had resulted in these people being brought to trial. You know, if you look at these courtrooms, and I don't think anybody's quite done it the way that I have, you can see them as sites of solidarity.
- [13:17]
Christy Soares
Fascinating.
- [13:18]
Alice Echols
Yeah.
- [13:19]
Christy Soares
So maybe we'll take a reverse chronological tour through your career. Can you kind of take us through your thought patterns and your interests that led you to the Angela Davis trial in 1972, I think, and kind of tell us how that might have evolved from the book that you wrote, hot Stuff, that we're here to talk about today.
- [13:44]
Alice Echols
I've always been interested in progressive politics, the social change movements of the 60s and how they came to be. And I've long believed that culture is a key piece of it. There are so many other writers who have been on this same path. And I think about George Lipsitz, I think about Robin Kelly, I think about Tricia Rose, and the list is a very long one. But I think that for me, growing up outside of Washington, D.C. and becoming kind of political, politically interested and active as a high school senior, I'm not saying that I was any kind of heavy duty activist. I wasn't. But I did get involved in a group that was trying to, it said, fight racism in the white suburbs of D.C. that is its own story and is part, in some sense, how I got to the point of writing this book. Black Power, White Heat. We become, as historians, scholars, we can. It can be difficult to break out of kind of current historiographical paradigms. And so, for instance, when I was working on this book, Black Power, White Heat, I mean, part of what I was pushing back against was the idea that interracialism was kind of bound to fail And I don't think it's that simple. I think it was always going to be difficult and it was always going to be very fraught. But. And so. And if I go back to my very first book, which was my dissertation during to be bad, one of the things that I was doing in that book was challenging the kind of predominant dismissal of radical feminism, which is now such a completely. I mean, it's so very different from what radical feminism was when it was being put forward in 67, 68, 69, 70. Very, very different kind of thing. But I was really trying to challenge the dismissiveness of it and to show that this was a radical movement that was itself anti capitalist. You know, it was usually understood as just being anti male. Right. And kind of stupidly so. And that, you know, there was some really important thinking going on in it. And part of what I do in this, in that book is to show the roots of radical feminism and women's liberation more generally in black power. Because what black activists were saying to white activists was, get out of here. We've had enough of you work in white communities. And white activists did take that seriously. That's how you get to the draft resistance movement. That was a deliberate attempt to try to organize young white men. That's how you get to women's liberation. It's like, oh, I see. Okay, so we're supposed to organize around our own oppression students today, and for this has been true for a couple of decades, find that concept difficult. How can you talk about white college students as oppressed? But there was this moment in the 60s, which is so interesting, when people understood working on behalf of others who were more oppressed, as liberal, as patronizing. And what you really had to do if you were going to be radical was to look at your own stakes in change, your own reasons for opposing the system. I've been in some ways thinking about black power and white radicalism and women's liberation and change and culture and how culture both moves it and reflects it for a very long time.
- [18:28]
Ryan Purcell
Your book Hot Stuff 2010, really changed the way I thought about American history. I was really captivated by what you call the stereographic approach to this study. And one of the questions I want to ask you is, what makes music a unique window through which to understand the 1970s?
- [18:48]
Alice Echols
Well, I mean, I think. I think music. I mean, I think if you go back to the. To the late 50s, early. Well, if you go back to them, I mean, God, you know, it's impossible to say if you go back to what's that point? You know.
- [19:08]
Ryan Purcell
Right.
- [19:10]
Alice Echols
But I mean, obviously, you know, if we look at. If we look at the emergence of what is called rock and roll, which, you know, many black artists would argue was R and B maybe, you know, with a touch of country in it. I mean, I know this is all very controversial, but, you know, if you look at that music, I mean, it did have an effect. I mean, there were cities that were passing ordinances against the playing of rock and rol have rock and roll concerts in, you know, the, you know, in the LA city limits. So it was out in El Monte, I think, where the concerts were allowed. I mean, there was a political backlash from segregationists to rock and roll. And if you look at what was happening in the 60s with soul music, you know, very much like disco in the fact that not. I mean, there is some music which is explicitly political, for sure. More so as we get into the late 60s and the early 70s with Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder and James Brown and one can go on and on. And of course, earlier with Sam Cooke and, you know, with Curtis Mayfield and with the Staple Singers, you know, all, you know, there was some wonderful political music, but a lot of it was much more operated much more through a kind of indirection the way that disco did. You know, Dancing in the Streets, I think it was. It may have been Marvin Gaye who said he thought that was the most effective political track that was ever recorded in Motown's history. You couldn't prove it was incendiary. Right. But dancing in the streets at that particular moment when there were urban rebellions was in many ways political. Likewise, I would say that one of the arguments that I do make in Hot Stuff is that disco. You know, there's been something of a debate about the relationship between disco and the gay liberation movement. I think, as I say in the book, that it is very hard to disaggregate what was happening on, you know, on the dance floors of bars and clubs and what become discos in the late, very late 60s and early 70s from politics, because dancing, same sex dancing was not allowed. And so, you know, how do you make the distinction? I mean, how do you really say, well, that's not political, but to your point of the stereographic, I mean, I think I came to this book as a historian who has written at the edges of lesbian and gay history. You know, I did it in daring to be bad. It's very central to Hot Stuff. But I teach and I have taught LGBTQ history for a long time and So I brought my sort of understanding of that history to this book. And so if you're thinking about taking a stereographic approach, this is a term I borrowed from the historian Nancy Cott. I'm talking about, as you say, trying to map both the oral, both the musical shifts and turns and the cultural ones.
- [22:50]
Christy Soares
Lets talk about the role of disco in black culture with regard to this question we're circling around, which is the idea that disco, the critique, I guess, that disco was politically empty. And in your book you mentioned various artists, but one of them is Nile Rogers, who of course is from Chic, but also a former Black Panther who said that Chic's hit Good Times was ironic. So that people who think of disco music as politically vacant are essentially missing the irony in some disco songs. So what do you see as sort of the, I don't know, triangulation, I guess, between disco, black culture and black cultural politics?
- [23:36]
Alice Echols
I think Nile Rogers is one of the more one of the most astute commentators. Besides being a wonderful musician and music producer. He's such an astute observer and he indeed was. So was Chaka Khan when she was in Chicago, a member of the Black Panther Party. And I think one of the things that a number of black people who were involved in the making of disco have talked about is the assumption that the music was completely empty and vacant and regressive even. And I think, I mean, there's a lot to be said there. I think the black, you know, the black music making community was divided. I mean, it would be dishonest not to admit that it was divided on the question of disco. You know, at the same time that you had somebody like Nile Rogers who was kind of defending the music, you would have very, I mean, you would have somebody like James Brown and not even somebody like James Brown. You would have James Brown dissing it at the same time that he was trying himself to have a disco hit. You know, he. He couldn't really make disco music. It just wasn't a good fit for him. You have a few years later, Chuck D of Public Enemy saying this was the most artificial shit I've ever heard. You have Nelson George also, who's a very, very talented critic, music critic of R and B and soul music, also dissing it. So even George Clinton, right, who was sort of disco adjacent, at least One Nation Under a Groove was a song that he claimed he was trying to cash in on the, the disco boom. And yet most black Americans, I think, didn't see it as a cynical play for money. You Know, they. It was hugely popular. It was. And not. I mean, here's the thing. Not especially among white people. It was a huge hit in black communities. And yet, you see, there. There is this tendency that I think people have, both black and white critics of disco, to imagine that disco was kind of cooked up in corporate backrooms, you know, at, you know, Columbia and CBS and all the. You know, in truth, the major labels hated disco. And one of the reasons. And they didn't put any real resources towards disco. That was one of the reasons that. But I think to get to Nile Rogers exasperation with people who didn't see the irony in good times, these record companies did nothing to push these folks out who were interesting people as personalities. Grace Jones, who could be a bigger personality, right? Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards, Sylvester. I mean, these are all performers who could have been. Whom the record companies could have made substantial stars, and they didn't. And so it became this kind of collective indictment of disco while they don't produce personalities. And it's really people who sell music, right? It's the personalities. So I think. I think, yes, black. I think black communities were definitely divided about disco. There were not a whole lot of, certainly black music critics who were that fond of it. But I think one of the issues with disco and with black masculinity, I mean, this is just. This gets very, very complicated, is that I think if you listen to. And I know we have a couple of tracks that are set up to be played, and if you think about the kind of masculinity that is put forward in disco music and the music that leads to disco. And here I'm thinking about Isaac Hayes. I'm thinking about Barry White, whose ground is largely prepared for him by Isaac Hayes. Probably not something that Isaac Hayes appreciated very much. You think about Philly Soule, you think about the Stylistics and the Spinners and all of those groups that are working with PIR and Tom Bell, you know, and they're putting forward a kind of music, a kind of sound that is pretty different from the music that James Brown got famous with.
- [29:12]
Ryan Purcell
Okay, let's listen to some of this music. This is the theme from the blaxploitation film Shaft by Isaac Hayes, recorded in 1971 by Stax Records.
- [29:37]
Alice Echols
Who's the black private dick Does a sex machine to all the cheeks? Shaft.
- [29:43]
Ryan Purcell
You're damn right. So listening to the theme from Shaft, I can't help but notice how soft the instrumentation is and how sexy the music sounds. I mean, it's a Real contrast to the aggressive rhythms that James Brown was fashioning during this period.
- [29:57]
Alice Echols
This is music that is smoother, it's silkier. There's lusher orchestration in the case of Isaac Hayes, but in particular, Barry White. It's music that is concerned with black women and women's satisfaction sexually, more broadly. There's a funny quote in my book from a female nightclub owner who set about a Barry White concert that the raps that he would get into were like women's liberation. My sense is that those Barry White concerts, I don't know if it's fair to say they were predominantly female, but there were a lot of women in the audience and who at a certain point in time would, you know, they just love Barry White. They would tear off their panties and throw them on stage, right? But anyway, this female nightclub owner said, well, you know, I mean, he really did get into this rap. And he would say to men in the audience, you know, do you really know how to love your women? And let's just say that was never really the concern of James Brown. James Brown was, you know, was much more about male sexual desire. And, you know, he was hugely influential. And with these. These performers, these blackmail performers, who sort of are the forerunners of disco, and to some extent, disco artists themselves, they. They take a very different tact. And it's much more sort of female friendly. I think it was the critic Thulani Davis who wrote about this as a time when men's rhymes could sigh. So there is this real kind of tenderness, which of course, then eventually will give way to something that's more akin to James Brown with the kind of rap that is not there at the beginning, but does come to be there. You know, I think one of my favorite stories was. I think it was in Public Enemy. They would play their latest tracks to try to figure out what women hated, and that would be what they would go for, right? And so it was a kind of male centric move away from the sort of female centric disco.
- [32:48]
Ryan Purcell
All right, let's cut to the music. Here's James Brown, the Big Payback, released by Polydur Records, 1973.
- [32:56]
Christy Soares
I'm mad get down with my godfriend.
- [33:02]
Ryan Purcell
That ain't right.
- [33:05]
Alice Echols
Wow. Payback is a thing you got to see.
- [33:25]
Christy Soares
All right, let's stop there.
- [33:26]
Alice Echols
What.
- [33:27]
Christy Soares
What stands out to you, Alice, as you're listening?
- [33:30]
Alice Echols
Well, you know, it is kind of interesting. This is 1973, and listen, I mean, I'm a sucker for just about any James Brown song. There are a few Exceptions, but pretty much, you know, it's riveting stuff. But let's be real, it's 1973 and, you know, he's been doing very similar sounding music now for about eight years. You know, there's not a huge progression in what he's producing. It's not like Stevie Wonder, right? It's, you know, where Stevie Wonder is, you know, creating a musical revolution. You know, he's doing such interesting stuff. And so I think it makes sense that there. I mean, I think somebody like James Brown, you know, he hated disco, as I said, at the same time that he was trying to figure out how we could possibly have a disco hit. And his one big attempt to have a disco hit too Funky in Here really failed. I mean, it really showed just his limitations at moving into that genre he couldn't successfully do it. Really pissed him off. And he. He really did not like Barry White. I mean, he was clearly very threatened by Barry White's success. But both of them, I mean, I mean, it is pretty fascinating because, I mean, he. Brown really sort of insinuates in one song that Barry White is popular because he's kind of white, you know, that he's doing. He's sort of playing to a white crowd. But I think that Barry White's biggest fans were probably people and women in the black community. He also, I think, had a big fan in Dinah Shore. I think she devoted a whole hour of one of her shows to Barry White. But I think that somebody like James Brown probably figured that, you know, he was being sidelined because of the fact that his music was really kind of authentically black in a way that disco wasn't. Because that's one of the critiques of disco, was that it was, you know, like black muzak, vacuous mush. It was, you know, it was beige. And yet, you know, some of its biggest fans were black people. It's. It's. But in any case, we listened to Barry White, who I'm. I think we should listen to now. And you know, it's a very, very, very different sound. And one that I think if you were James Brown, you would be like, oh my God. How was, you know, incomprehensible that James Brown would ever go to this territory? You know, he just. It just constitutionally probably unable to.
- [36:52]
Ryan Purcell
Okay, let's cut to the music. Here's Barry White in the Love Unlimited Orchestra. Love's Theme by Grand Gala Records, 1973.
- [37:06]
Alice Echols
Sam.
- [37:34]
Christy Soares
You know, it's such an expansive song. I couldn't figure out where to cut it, because it grows and it grows and it grows.
- [37:41]
Alice Echols
It's.
- [37:42]
Christy Soares
And whereas James Brown's song is contracting and contracting and contracting, you know, this.
- [37:47]
Alice Echols
Is a song that was the first big, you know, number one disco hit. And, you know, so it's about the same time as the Payback by James Brown. And it's. I mean, there's a. I mean, listen, there are so many songs that are like this. You could listen to Love is the message. You know, it's. It's in the. In, you know, in the sense that, I mean, you talk about it, I think, Christy, correctly, as, you know, the sort of music of James Brown is kind of contracting, you know, sort of feels distilled, right? It just digs in deeper to itself. This is just like, as one of the people I quote in the book says, it's like being on a dance floor and being sort of blown around by these big fans, right? It is really this very blowsy, kind of expansive sound. Orchestral. Yes. And, you know, a lot of people hated. Has to be said, a lot of people loved it. Obviously, it became a number one hit, but, you know, to a lot of people, it felt like the strings were like these soaring, saccharine strings, you know, Ugh. The repetitiveness, the bloated quality. I mean, it. John Peale, who was the leading British music critic, wrote about it. He was so funny. I mean, listen, I love the song, but still, he's very funny. And he says that to his ears, it came across as a cross between Theme from A Summer Place, which you both are too young to know, but it was recorded by the Percy Faith Orchestra. This was back in the days of top 40 radio. Right. So it was a top 10 hit sometime, like about 10 years earlier, but to him, a cross between that and Isaac Hayes, Shaft. And he said that to him, the only sonic element that was recognizably R and B was its Wawa chank, which he said he had borrowed. It was like. He borrowed it from Shaft. He's like, little. This little bit of noise from Shaft.
- [40:18]
Ryan Purcell
So in a previous episode in this season, we talked at length about the disco demolition night in Comiskey park in Chicago in 1979. And one of the things we walked away with from that conversation was that, you know, this anti disco backlash was really a social backlash triggered by insecurities and white masculinity. But are you saying now that this anti disco backlash was just as much aesthetic as it was social?
- [40:41]
Alice Echols
Oh, yeah, I do think so. I mean, I think it's again, I mean, that's a. They're so closely connected. And I think, you know, if you're looking, I mean, so there are. For certain black listeners, this. This music does seem empty and pretentious. You have to remember it follows from a period. It is happening right on the heels of a very political moment in black music that included the music of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone and many others that often songs, hit songs that crossed over. I mean, Stevie Wonder was a huge crossover success, but that really ventured a political critique. You think of the Isley Brothers Fight the Power around the same period. I think it was 75. And then you get this. And so for many people it's like, well, what is this? This sort of celebration of love? Why should we celebrate love? What is there really? What is there to celebrate? So for many people, and this is the way that some critics have written about it and some historians, this was a sign of the fact that America's black population had entered into either a period of resignation or assimilation or accommodation or something. But it wasn't necessarily good. I would read this differently myself. I think that, I mean, I will come back to your question, Ryan. I see it as the effort of a group of black musicians and producers to break out of a certain expectation of what they should sound like. With Stevie Wonder, who said he really resented being called like a black musician, right? It's like and only. And being confined to only work in a particular genre, it's like, why should that be? And so I think that for people like Barry White, Isaac Hayes, Gamble and Hough and a lot of producers in particular, they wanted. I mean it was like now. I mean it's like now we can. And I think now probably refers to the fact that there is a big enough and a successful enough group of black consumers to buy the product to be able to float hits. Now we can make music that breaks with those kinds of ready made assumptions about what black music should be sound like. Why can't we make music that soars the way that that does? Why can't we make music that to our ears at least sounds sophisticated? You know, why do we have to sound like James Brown or Sam and Dave? I mean, and it's very interesting that Isaac Hayes comes from a background of having worked very closely with Sam and Dave. I'm a soul man. And then he develops this idiosyncratic music in which he's covering songs by Glen Campbell. The country singer is clearly influenced by Burt Bacharach. I mean, it's this fascinating sort of shift. But to me, it's a shift that says the sort of contours of black masculinity and what's allowed to black music producers and musicians has expanded. Now, to other people, it could sound like, well, expanded, but at the expense of what? Something that, to some people, is more authentically black. And so this, I think, is a debate that is very much happening in this period. And as for why there's such a visceral reaction against disco. And from, let's just be truthful, from people who agreed about nothing else. I mean, from Jesse Jackson to Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell, from the evangelical wing of the Christian right to. Well, I guess of the right, to civil rights leaders from, you know, from the left as well as the right. And so I think, you know, you were asking Ryan about how much of it was aesthetic. I think it was aesthetic. But I also think that it's helpful, especially when thinking about the white critical response to it, which was so negative, to think back to an incident that the music historian and writer Elijah Wald writes about in his History of Robert Johnson and the Blues Escaping the Delta. It's a great book. And he writes. He's. So he's writing about an interview Wald is that he had done with Dave Van Ronck, who was one of the pioneer white blues revivalists. And this would have been in the early 60s. And so Van Ronck is talking about having arrived at a blues festival in New England and he was late. He didn't know who was on the bill. And so he, you know, it was his term. You know, it was his time to go on stage. You know, he didn't know who was there. And he ended his show, as he always did, with his version of Hoochie Coochie Man. And, you know, Dave Van Rock describes it as full of aggressive macho bluster. And he exits to wild applause. This is presumably a mostly white audience, but so he exits the stage and he finds, to his embarrassment, standing there, Muddy Waters. Now, Muddy Waters was the song's originator, right? And he was like, muddy Waters was a gentleman, right? He was always a very kind person. So he turned to Van Rock and he said, that was very good, son. Putting his hand on Van Rock's shoulder. And then he added, but, you know, that's supposed to be a funny song. And so I think that one of the things that happens in this. Well, I mean, you could say it's centuries long, is that there is this fundamental misunderstanding about black masculinity And I think, you know, the fact that Van Ronck understood that song as being one, which was, you know, really about, you know, masculinity and being a macho man. And, you know, its originator saw it as satirical. I mean, he thought it was funny. I mean, it gets at this, you know, what I would call a mistranslation or a misunderstanding in which black men are understood by some white men as sort of embodying the phallic in a way that they don't, you know, this is a projection and also embodying a kind of non domestic sort of masculinity, right? Outsider, non domestic, you know, something that they envy. And that, again, is largely a white projection onto black men. But it means that when, you know, we are moving from James Brown to Barry White, there is a section of the white listening community, in particular, white rock fans and the critics who write about white, who write about, well, increasingly white rock. It is increasingly white who just can't go there. It doesn't fulfill their fantasies and their points of identification.
- [49:45]
Ryan Purcell
Over the course of your career, your scholarship really runs the gamut from Daring to Be Bad, a classic study of radical feminism in the 1970s, to the life and times of Janis Joplin. But how do we get from hot stuff in 2010 to now, your more recent work on the black freedom struggle, particularly regarding the Free Angela movement in 1972?
- [50:03]
Alice Echols
I would have to say that black critics who've written about disco have written about it, as I said, in very different ways, you know, and some of them very, very critical. Some of them would not see disco as having much of a connection to the freedom movement, much less to black power. I think it's there. I mean, I think it's there in the sense that, you know, these are artists and producers who feel that they have the power at that point to make music that, in my view, is the music they want to make. I don't think anybody is putting a gun to Isaac Hayes's head, telling this was his personal project. A lot of people didn't understand what he was doing when he did Hot Buttered Soul, which was before Shaft, this very idiosyncratic record. I don't think anybody was putting a gun to Barry White's head and saying, you know, you have to make this, you know, crazy symphonic, you know, elaborate music. I think this was what they wanted to make. And in fact, one of the more interesting little factoids that's in Hot Stuff is the fact that according to Fred Wesley, who worked with James Brown, in this period, he was obsessed about making sophisticated music, and he wanted to put harps on everything. And so I think that actually this desire to transcend where you've been and to transcend the music that I'm not saying anybody was forced to play, but that was the kind of cultural expectation and forging a new path was in and of itself a sign of some progress that had been made, you know, and some connection to that movement.
- [52:10]
Christy Soares
And if anyone was forced to make disco music, it was actually, you know, Ethel Merman in the late 1970s. So when disco sort of becomes, in some ways a victim of its own success, and white artists are actually forced into this mold in an effort to cash in. But I think the point that you're making about not just black artists, but black producers cannot be overstated. The amount of black folks at the lower ranks, not always the upper ranks of these record companies. So disco is essentially black music that is accused of being anti black.
- [52:45]
Alice Echols
Exactly. It is exactly right. And sometimes by black people, I mean, we, you know, we have to, I think, grapple with that. I mean, it's a very confusing thing. I think one of the more interesting elements to the story, to me, is that if you. If you think I'm. I want to go back to Nile Rogers, who's one of my favorite characters in this. And Nile Rogers finds himself as Dashik, basically dumped by their record company, even though they've been the most reliable hit makers. But when disco crashes, they are effed. And it takes David Bowie approaching him to produce the album that is let's Dance, that has. Let's Dance on it. Right. And David Bowie gave interviews afterwards saying that a number of his friends said, hold it, you're going to work with Nile Rogers? Isn't he that disco producer? Why would you do that? Now, he ends up having a tremendous hit from. From that.
- [53:59]
Ryan Purcell
Alice, absolutely love this conversation, especially where we're breaking down music. And it's also such an honor to get to talk with one of my favorite historians of all time. I really appreciate your ideas and your work. Thank you so much.
- [54:10]
Christy Soares
Thank you. Thank you so much, Alice. We really appreciate you taking us through not just this time period, disco, but its antecedents, and I would say even perhaps some resonances with our contemporary political and musical moment as well. Is there anything else that you think we should think about that we haven't touched on?
- [54:30]
Alice Echols
Yeah, I mean, I think one of my favorite ways of breaking through this is, you know, a lot of people would say, well, you know, disco and funk were like, completely different. And yet there are. I forget who it was. It might have been fred Wesley Jones Jr. Who in fact said that disco was funk with a bow tie. And I think that that does get at it actually rather well. But there's another example, which is that I forget who it was who attacked Disco lady, which was a song by. Very popular song by. I think he had been a Stax artist, Johnny Taylor. Very sort of sinewy cut. It was an interesting cut. And again, I can't remember who it was that basically said it was just music for white people, black music for white people. Yet it turned out that the musicians playing on it were P. Funk people, the people at the very epicenter of Funko.
- [55:43]
Ryan Purcell
So that comment really encapsulates something that I've been experiencing this entire season, which is that as musical styles that defy genre classifications emerge, they begin to bridge the segmented audiences that have been created by the commercial recording industry. And on the other hand, journalists and critics who attempt to classify these sounds can have a reciprocal effect on the way in which people understand these musics by creating those boundaries and segmenting audiences in return. So I just want to thank you for being here to help us understand that point, Alice. And I'm so grateful that we were able to connect on soundscapes.
- [56:16]
Alice Echols
Yeah, yeah. No, it was a lot of fun. I wish we could talk longer.
- [56:22]
Christy Soares
Alice Echols, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you.
- [56:26]
Alice Echols
Thank you. Thank you, Christy. Thank you.
- [56:28]
Christy Soares
Take good care. Bye, everybody.
- [56:31]
Alice Echols
Bye.
- [56:31]
Ryan Purcell
Bye. That was our conversation with historian Alice Echols. And I hope it was as fun for you to listen to as it was to record. Christy, what did you think?
- [56:53]
Christy Soares
I absolutely love that conversation. And I really love the way we got deeply into the music with Alice.
- [56:59]
Ryan Purcell
Absolutely. It felt like I was sitting there with a friend, just chit, chatting about music and the social context. But it was Alice Echols, of all people. You had some really key points in this conversation when we listened to and compare James Brown with Barry White. And I just want to kind of come back to that to understand a little more what you're saying. When we talk, we listen to James Brown, the big payback, 1973. You heard a condensing there, whereas we heard Barry White's Love Theme in the same year and you heard it expanding. Can you describe a little bit about what you're hearing there?
- [57:33]
Christy Soares
Yeah, I think James Brown by 1973, but also prior to that has really committed to this style of funk music that is really staccato short bursts of lyrics. The rhythm section mirrors that, and it gives the listener this feeling of sort of getting tighter and tighter. Right. The tightness of his phrasing, the sort of short bursts, gives this feeling of being brought in closer and closer. But Barry White is doing something entirely different. The string section on that classic track is kind of getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and it's expanding and it's expanding and it's getting louder and fuller. So in some ways, sonically, I think it's doing the opposite of what James Brown is doing. Which is interesting in the context of the different forms of black masculinity that Alice Echols argues they both embody.
- [58:25]
Ryan Purcell
I totally understand that, and I hear that, too. I also feel this. This pressure that builds with the funk sound, James Brown's funk sound, too, whereas Barry White's sound is kind of dissipating that pressure. So how does that track on to the various different presentations and forms of black masculinity associated with the music that Alice Echols attributes?
- [58:45]
Christy Soares
I think Alice was making an argument that James Brown is holding on to a form of black masculinity that is more intelligible in 1973, based on the previous forms of black music that had become popular in the culture. In other words, this sort of male centric, male pleasure, centric form of black masculinity. Right. The whole song is about him getting payback, whereas Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra are doing something different. When Barry sings in songs that have lyrics, he's talking about women's pleasure. So in other words, it's expanding, if you will, or exploding the forms of black masculinity that had been previously legible in popular music. And so it makes sense that they would sort of hate each other.
- [59:31]
Ryan Purcell
Well, it was an ultimate pleasure to break down those sounds and the constituent cultural and social meetings that carried with them through the 1970s.
- [59:39]
Christy Soares
Yes. And this kind of leads us into our next episode, which is our last episode with the wonderful, the one and only, DJ Sharon White.
- [59:48]
Ryan Purcell
Sharon White is awesome. And I'm so excited to present this recording for our audiences because it fits within the larger paradigm of this season, which is focusing on the forgotten women of disco and some of the forgotten meanings of disco. So it will come as a fitting capstone to this much larger story about disco in the 1970s in New York.
- [60:08]
Christy Soares
Absolutely. It's going to take up these strands that we've been talking about. Disco is black music. Disco is gay music. Disco is music sung by women. And bring it together in one black queer woman DJ who DJed at the biggest clubs of the era, Sharon White.
- [60:24]
Ryan Purcell
At this time I just want to give a few shout outs and and acknowledgements first to the Gotham center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate center, to the generous support of the Urban History association, and to Fordham Lincoln center, where I teach American Studies.
- [60:37]
Christy Soares
Thank you. Also to the Society for American Music and the University of Colorado's President's Fund for the Humanities.
- [60:43]
Ryan Purcell
Stay tuned to socials to hear about upcoming events and new episodes related to the podcast at Instagram. That's oundscapes NYC Soundscapes NYC See. I'm Ryan Purcell.
- [60:54]
Christy Soares
And I'm Christy Soares.
- [60:56]
Ryan Purcell
Until next time. The opening anecdote of this episode drew from Alice Eccles, Disco and the Remaking of American culture, released by W.W. norton in 2010.