Steven Blush

When Rock Met Disco by Steven Blush is a fun read that offers a lot of good information with some very weak analysis from the author, but still well worth reading.

One of the strengths of this book is the background leading up to the disco explosion. Like any history, there has to be context, you can't, for example, write a book about the US civil war and ignore the lead up to it. Similarly, setting the stage for how disco came to be popularized, along with some rock background, is essential to discussing the places these two genres met. So yes, the first part of the book establishes that context. Without it you would just have anecdotes and stories without any point whatsoever, though it appears some readers would prefer just such a work. Oh well.

As a walk down memory lane it was a fun book. I turned 20 in 1978 so I remember this period very well. I grew up mostly with rock, though always listened to some of everything, from my father's jazz and swing to my older sibling's early rock. Pop radio during my youth played a bit of everything and my sister was especially into artists like Wilson Pickett so while I usually bought rock albums starting with Revolver, I appreciated a wide range. Disco, for me, was something to listen to at a club, not something I bought very much of.

My biggest issue with this book is the way Blush buys into, and amplifies, the stories where the rock audiences supposedly hated disco. The most publicized comments were always the ones that seemed confrontational, and of course marketers created events that played it up, like burning albums at a baseball game. But speaking from experience, there were many more listeners who didn't like disco but also didn't have that kind of intense hatred of it either. But it doesn't make good copy, so they get ignored to make incorrect overstatements.

Coupled with questionable at best assessments of music makes his critical aspects of the book rather weak. The number of good but not spectacular songs that he hyperbolically calls an artist's most compelling and moving is just nonsense. If he had stated that he found them to be moving it wouldn't be so bad, but he states these things as if they are facts, which shows just how weak his actual music background is. There is a big difference between knowing what happened in the music world and being able to make knowledgeable assessments, and he fails miserably at the latter.

The quotes and the historical aspects of the book make it easy to recommend, with the warning that he is not actually knowledgeable in music itself, just its history. And even that relies heavily on the largely media-created hatred between music fans.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (más)