By James Gavin – NewYork Times
Most of the lingering images of the disco era aren’t pretty: strobe-lit suburbanites doing the hustle, John Travolta’s white polyester suit and campy preening in “Saturday Night Fever,” mobs pushing and screaming to get into Studio 54. The music itself is easy to snicker at. Set to a clockwork thump, it ordered you to boogie-oogie-oogie or to shake, shake, shake your booty. Disco stormed the charts from 1973 through 1979, but many critics see it as the soundtrack of a vapid decade — a time in which self-indulgence replaced the lofty striving of the ’60s. [Read More]