Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution’ on PBS, A Docuseries That Digs Into The Underground Origins And Lasting Legacy Of A Groove 

In the three-part docuseries Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, now streaming on PBS, directors and producers Louise Lockwood and Shianne Brown follow the turn of the glitterball from the gay and Black dancefloor underground of 1970s New York City, through disco’s popular rise, the backlash that was totally predictable, and the basis for what came next. Sit-down interviews with musicians, club DJs, gay rights activists, music critics, and others tell the story, and there is context from disco-affiliated artists old and new, including Candi Staton, Kim Petras, George McCrae, Jessie Ware, Nona Hendryx, Thelma Houston, and Honey Dijon.   

DISCO: SOUNDTRACK OF A REVOLUTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: Over scenes to come in the docuseries, Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution offers a few soundbites to that effect – “Disco has a history,” “a great force containing the seeds of its own destruction” – and also a clip of Kim Petras being asked how she’d define disco. To which she demurs.

The Gist: Disco wasn’t just made to appear on wax by some straight white male singer named Jagger. The four-on-the-floor beats of the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls era, the Bee Gees’ biggest hits, with their impossible hugeness, their impossible slickness – these are examples of disco at its late 1970s apex, when its popular breakthrough also signaled an inevitable turning away. And Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution gets into all of that with its second and third episodes. But in its first, the docuseries travels back to early ’70s New York City, when people, often from groups marginalized by society, coalesced around a dancefloor culture they had to build themselves.

“The establishment was serious about squashing this level of dissent,” journalist and radio presenter Mark Riley says in Soundtrack of a Revolution. “They knew it could bring about fundamental change, and that was something that they didn’t want to hear out of the hippies, didn’t want to hear out of Black people, didn’t want to hear out of gay people.” But despite the laws against dancing with a person of the same gender, those who wished to found a way, at loft parties, in underused warehouse spaces, in environments made safe for gay people, Black and brown people, and anyone who wanted to hear cool music that wasn’t being played on mainstream radio. Signal tracks from this proto-disco era highlighted by Revolution include Eddie Kendricks’ “Girl You Need a Change of Mind,” “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango, and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “The Love I Lost.”

As the New York scene expanded, the music gained in popularity, and even started charting, which is when the wider music business finally took notice of what was still not even officially called “disco.” But it was doing official sales numbers, which in turn began the mainstreaming of the sound. Would disco’s popularity become an impediment to the music’s traditional space for inclusion and representation, particularly of female and male Black singers, and the LGBT community? You bet. But that it “broke a lot of molds at the same time,” as Riley puts it, is celebrated in Soundtrack of a Revolution. The thing about disco and that classic kick drum beat – illustrated in the doc by legendary Philly drummer and Trammps founder Earl Young – is that it made dancing easy. “No matter where you were on the beat,” says LaBelle vocalist Nona Hendryx, “you were on the beat.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of: An underdeveloped side plot in season one of Daisy Jones & the Six had Daisy’s BFF following her DJ girlfriend to New York City and becoming a disco singer in the underground club environment described in Soundtrack of a Revolution. And disco is a big part of a lot of recent doc material, including The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart and Love to Love You: Donna Summer. 

Our Take: Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution is only the most recent doc to villainize the straight, white, and male executive class of record companies in the 1960s and 70s. (This is the same bunch who didn’t hear anything they could sell in the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and meddled with the iconic sound of Black American music coming out of a Memphis-based record label in Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.) As the big labels commoditized disco, they shaved away the contours and personal flourishes that made it vital in the first place, and in turn reduced the music’s ability to platform artists who were there at the beginning. Which is why it’s so refreshing that Revolution builds its storyline around their voices. It ably connects the movements for social justice in the late 1960s to the rise of gay rights in the 1970s, especially in New York City, which helped fuel a cross-cultural transition toward spaces where music and dancing could happen without fear of persecution.

For many of those interviewed in Revolution, their links to disco’s rise are deeply personal, and that lends a lot of vitality to the structure of the docuseries, which leans a little too heavily on stock talking head interview setups. But it’s perhaps because this is a series produced for PBS and the BBC that it can also feel more educational than something similarly created for Netflix or one of the other streamers. Of particular note are cutaways that feature the cover art and title information for a series of foundational disco hits. Why rely on a music streaming service’s disco algorithm when you can build your own kicking playlist from the sound on display Revolution? Mama ko mama sa maka makossa!

Sex and Skin: Can you feel the heat in the room? In Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, you definitely can. The loft parties and underground clubs that set the stage for disco’s popular rise are revealed here in deep dive archival footage full of joy and sweat.

Parting Shot: By 1974, as songs like “Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation and George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” moved from success in the clubs to chartopping performance, not even the record companies could ignore the popular rise of disco. “It integrated everybody,” McCrae says. “Red, yellow, Black or white. It didn’t matter. It made everybody happy.”   

Sleeper Star: Groundbreaking New York DJ Nicky Siano drives a large part of the narrative in the first episode of Revolution, including during one cool sequence where he does a technical breakdown of how he looped a portion of MFSB’s “Love in the Message” – “the groove, the good part, was two minutes and forty seconds” – and then added the whoosh of a jet plane sound effect. It’s like attending a dance music historian’s lecture on “waiting for the beat to drop.”

Most PIlot-y Line: Music critic Vince Aletti, writing in Rolling Stone in September 1973, gave shape to the burgeoning movement coming out of the New York club scene. “It’s called discotheque rock…It’s a call to get down and party…The underground, where the hardcore dance crowd, Blacks, latins, and gays, was.” 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution emphasizes the beats and songs that built a classic sound, and the communities, often marginalized or under-represented, who did the hard work – and all of the dancing! – to bring it to life by the light of a turning glitterball, before the music ever went slick and mainstream.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.