Last Night a Dj Saved My Life (Paperback) ~ Bill Brewster (Autho... Cover Art

Last Night a Dj Saved My Life (Paperback)

By: Bill Brewster (Author) and Frank Broughton (Author)


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Review

"One of the book's many incidental values is that in documenting the history of the D.J. it also documents the rise and fall of various underground dance music cultures. This is an especially welcome undertaking in the case of disco, an often maligned genre that in its pre-Studio 54 commercial-blitz phase was a utopian experience for the largely minority, largely gay crowd who patronized places like New York's Paradise Garage. The authors are more equivocal regarding the effect on the D.J. of techno and its offshoots. The music heard in clubs today--whether you call it drum-and-bass, house, trip-hop or any other of the subcategorical tags under which it's blowing the roof off a given dump on a given night--is usually sample-based and electronically composed, and is therefore a D.J.'s product as well as his province."

Excerpt

Forgetting, for now, the witchdoctor, the bandleader and all the disc jockey's other illustrious prototypes, what we're asking is: Who first played recorded music to entertain a group of people?
Thomas Edison, who invented the cylinder phonograph in 1877, hardly conceived of putting music on it, and in any case his equipment could only just be heard by a single person, let alone a group. Emil Berliner, who gave us the flat-disc gramophone in 1887, would still probably fail on the volume test. A decade later the radio waves were tamed, but it would take another full ten years before Marconi's equipment was able to send more than Morse's dots and dashes. However, when the gramophone and radio signal were finally combined, we find our first DJ candidates.

First line

Who was the very first DJ?

Publisher's note

The definitive history of the DJ, the taste maker and trendsetter who has become the most important shaping force in popular music.

Annotation

British dance music fanatics Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's smart, savvy, and often scholarly history of the DJ and the interplay between dance music and popular culture begins with a reference to the shamanic role of the disk jockey as a leader of celebrations of almost religious intensity. (One of the most successful 1970s New York discos, the Sanctuary, was originally a church, with the DJ operating from a pulpit.) In LAST NIGHT A DJ SAVED MY LIFE, Brewster and Broughton chronicle the DJ's rise, from early 20th-century radio shows to 1980s Manhattan discos like the Paradise Garage, run by the legendary Larry Levan. The authors display a real empathy towards both their subject and their many interviewees, including dance music writer Vince Aletti, who provides valuable insight into the rise and fall of '70s disco, and Chicago house music pioneer Frankie Knuckles, glimpsed at a 1981 Chicago warehouse dance party. Indiscriminate sex and favored club drugs like pot and LSD play their part, too, but Brewster and Broughton's rich narrative is mostly music-driven, conjuring the sweat of generations of dancers and the fertile musical imaginations of their DJs.



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