In Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, Alice Echols has produced a study which attempts to ‘place disco within a discussion of feminism, deindustrialization, globalism, and the ongoing struggles for racial justice and greater sexual expressiveness’ (p. xxvi). Interestingly, Echols begins with a bit of autobiography, describing her brief career as deejay at the Rubaiyat in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the tail end of the disco years. Had she remained in Ann Arbor for the rest of the book, Hot Stuff would have provided a welcome alternative history of the period, a case study in musical currents, but Echols moves on to explore the broader cultural history of disco, charting the rise of gay club culture in New York, the occasionally indelicate negotiations between its demographic contingents, disco's commercial takeover, and its aftermath. It is familiar in places, unfamiliar in others, and on the whole has much to recommend it.
My problem with Hot Stuff is not one of content, but rather of format. As much as I enjoyed the stories Echols told, I also found them frustrating to the point of exasperation. Specifically, I love a good footnote. Footnotes are fun places to go when you want to learn more, or want to know who said something, or maybe simply to indulge in the author's tangents or flights of fancy. I prefer my footnotes at the bottom of the page, but that's just me. I've learned to embrace the end-of-chapter notes and even those long lists of notes tucked away at the end of the book just before the index. But what Hot Stuff has is no footnotes whatsoever: no friendly little numbers perched on punctuation, no suggestion of ‘yes, but there's more …’. What Hot Stuff does have in abundance is the wild goose chase. Take, for example, the following:
Although [Saturday Night] Fever featured few people of colour, its message was unambiguously antiracist. Indeed, Nile Rodgers of the disco group Chic considered Fever ‘genius’ for the way it dealt with racism. (p. 191)
Interesting. Where did Nile Rodgers say that? To find the reference, the interested reader must flip to the fully 61 pages of notes at the end of the book, listed by page number, then scan down the sea of incipits until something familiar strikes her eye. In this case:
191 ‘genius’: Nile Rodgers quoted in Shapiro, Turn the Beat, 204–5.
Fair enough. But what's Turn the Beat? Well, check the index. But there is no index. So does the reader then scan back over the preceding 51 pages of notes to find the first mention of Shapiro, Turn the Beat? Or does the reader – by this point rather weary of chasing wild geese – simply curse and move on?
My experience of reading Hot Stuff actually made me wonder whether I was catching a glimpse of the future of academic publishing, and the thought of it made me shudder. But just to ensure that I hadn't misjudged the intended audience for Hot Stuff I checked the publisher's website to see how it was being marketed. There, on the W.W. Norton Stock List of Music Titles, Echols' Hot Stuff appears between Ross W. Duffin's How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony: And Why You Should Care (2008) and Alfred Einstein's eternal Music in the Romantic Era (1947). Norton clearly view this book as an academic offering, yet the decision – authorial or editorial – not to use any recognisable or functional system of references is bewildering. Would they have published Duffin's or Einstein's books without footnotes? Doubtful. So what is it about a study of disco that warrants this kind of haphazard indifference to academic rigour?
I have certainly read, and enjoyed, book-length studies of popular music topics written by non-academics. I can think of two recent, rather enormous tomes on protest music, for example, which hid their research in their nether regions; but they were journalistic studies, aimed at a mass market, and published by larger commercial presses. The intended readership of those books might just not be that interested in dates of interviews, or of the availability of previously published research. The academic readership of those books might find the format unfamiliar, but might also be familiar with existing research, so no harm done. What bothers me about Hot Stuff is that Alice Echols, Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, has published academic studies before. She has clearly done some research on disco. She has things to say in explanatory footnotes, as is manifestly evident by the book's 61 pages of addenda. Yet the absence in the text of any visual reminders of her research, and the often breezy way in which she presents her material, renders Hot Stuff a reading experience more akin to that of a rather banal novel: the reader is introduced to characters, whose words are sometimes in quotation marks, other characters make some interesting music that other people dance to, a great plague sweeps across the land, yet the music lives on. Then there are 61 pages of notes.
It pains me to say so little about the substance of Hot Stuff, because the opening autobiographical section promised so much. Alice Echols' work is always engaging, her insights always perceptive. I would welcome a companion volume on the Rubaiyat, but would be ready to beg for footnotes, and an index, and a discography. Surely that's not asking too much, is it?
