‘Work that Body’: Disco, Counterculture and the Promise of the Transformation of Work

One of the most popular music genres of the 1970s, disco is regularly portrayed as a work-shy culture rooted in escape, hedonism and narcissism that ultimately contributed to the rollout of neoliberalism. However, disco can be better understood as phenomenon that recalibrated the meaning of work as well as the demographic makeup of the people who got to carry out its work. Growing directly out of the countercultural movement, the early 1970s party scene that inspired the rise of disco became an expressive home and often a place of work for a cross-class rainbow coalition of people of colour, queers and women. With DJs at the fulcrum of the culture, the work generated within disco broke with the hierarchies, routines and structures of the industrial economy, pioneering a form of work that was more obviously creative, flexible and pleasurable as well as precarious. Although aspects of the culture would be coopted between 1977-79, disco’s collective, democratic, pleasure-oriented praxis mapped out a progressive rather than a regressive version of post-Fordist labour.