ABSTRACT
Few forms of popular culture receive the kind of opprobrium that has been lavished on disco music since its emergence in the seventies. Although innovations in American popular music, especially those associated with dancing, sex and African-Americans, usually provoke harsh criticism at first, most eventually achieve recognition and admiration. Jazz, rock 'n' roll, reggae and now rap all have not only devoted listeners but intellectual defenders; conspicuously missing from this canon, however, is disco. Historically, disco music was one element in the post-Stonewall project of reconstituting those persons medically designated "homosexuals" as members of a "gay" minority group, and of rendering them individually and collectively visible. The power of disco to re-create the self lies in the always implicit parallel between the beat and desire. The power of music to master the individual has, of course, been regarded as, by turns, useful and dangerous in Western culture from Ancient Greece onward.
