The Secret History of Disco

[DudeAsInCool]

TURN THE BEAT AROUND: The Secret History of Disco. By Peter Shapiro. (Faber & Faber, $26.) It's more than just the much-maligned genre that gave us ''Funkytown,'' the Village People and a movie in which Gene Kelly roller-skated with Olivia Newton-John: in Shapiro's effusive and engaging musical history, disco is the Fiorucci-clad bastard child of any number of 20th-century cultural movements, from Nazi Germany's Swing Jugend to Britain's Northern Soul scene to the post-Stonewall gay movement of downtown Manhattan. Disco also proves to be a laboratory of innovation second only to the American space program, yielding early antecedents of such present-day musical devices as the mash-up and the 18-minute-long dance remix. Though the thematically organized chapter structure can sometimes result in confusing chronology, Shapiro's no-rhinestone-unturned approach makes for highly entertaining reading, including short profiles of such dance floor icons as Chic and Giorgio Moroder and an exploration into the origins of disco's ubiquitous ''whoop! whoop!'' sound effect, all before the music meets its fate at a ''Disco Demolition Derby'' night at Chicago's Comiskey Park in 1979. Try to resist the temptation to turn directly to the book's discography to see how many of the albums it cites are in your own collection.

- D.I.

(Dave Itzkoff is an editor at Spin magazine and the author of ''Lads: A Memoir of Manhood.'' Alan Light is the editor in chief of Tracks magazine)