How America's Working Class Died on the Disco Dance Floor [View All]

via AlterNet:



The New Press / By Jefferson Cowie

How America's Working Class Died on the Disco Dance Floor
A new book describes how working-class America hit the rocks during the turbulent '70s.


September 9, 2010 |Editor's Note: An epic account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the ’70s, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class presents the decade in a new light. Part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film and TV lore, Cowie's book makes new sense of the ’70s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from the optimism of New Deal America to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present. From the factory floors of Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit to the Washington of Nixon, Ford and Carter, Cowie connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the ’60s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan.

The following is excerpted from Jefferson Cowie's Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010):


In 1975, rock journalist Nik Cohn embarked on an underground tour of the working-class disco scene in Brooklyn with a black dancer named Tu Sweet. "Some of those guys," explained Tu Sweet, "they have no lives. Dancing is all they got." That idea sunk into Cohn, whose British roots gave a class edge to his understanding of pop music. "I'd always thought of teen style in terms of class," Cohn reported; "Rock, at least the kind that mattered to me, attains its greatest power when havenots went on the rampage, taking no prisoners. 'Dancing's all they got.' It sounded to me like a rallying cry."

His adventures at a club named 2001 Odyssey ended with a stellar piece of reportage for New York magazine about living to dance and dancing to escape called "The Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night." The theme of the piece was that only a select few were capable of rising above the "vast faceless blob" of humanity that does most of the nation's working and dying. Only a select few "faces" knew "how to dress and how to move, how to float, how to fly. Sharpness, grace, a certain distinction in every gesture." As Vincent, king of the 2001 Odyssey explained, "The way I feel, it's like we've been chosen." The New York article became the foundation for the most popular movie of the decade, Saturday Night Fever (1977). ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/books/148122/how_america%27s_working_class_died_on_the_disco_dance_floor/