Three books, two articles, two conference papers, several lectures and sleeve notes, one headache
[Last updated: 16.11.2006 23:36]
I'm up to my neck with teaching at the moment, which has generally been
fun, but wasn't when I had to deal with a homophobic incident during a
discussion on music and discourse the other day. Serves me right or
trying to illustrate my point by describing hip hop as a discursive
space of hyper-masculinity.
Meanwhile, on the writing front, project numero uno is to wrap up a solid draft of the Arthur Russell biography, after which I'll get going with the eighties dance book, and after that I'll probably be writing a history of italo disco. In fact I got started on the italo research earlier this summer thanks to the kind offer of Maurizio Clemente, the publisher of Love Saves the Day in Italy, who wants the italo book and offered to put myself, Enrica, Carlotta and Ilaria up in a nice apartment in Rimini for a fortnight so that I could start to interview some of the key players. It must have been my first semi-freebie since I was in journalism. Fantastic! I ended up spending the mornings splashing around with the kids and Enrica, and then the afternoons interviewing the groundbreaking DJs of the italo scene, which somewhat misleading came to be dubbed the "Afro movement". Semantics aside, I was pretty blown away by the leftfield turn taken by the likes of Daniele Baldelli, Mozart, Rubens and others when the supply line of US dance music was cut off in the early 1980s. (Yes, that was not a typo, Mozart and Rubens were italo DJs. Don't tell me you didn't know.) For those of you who are interested in hearing more, Baldelli is playing at Horsemeat Disco in South London this coming Sunday. More info at www.horsemeatdisco.co.uk. I'll be there with my friend Elliott, who is visiting from New York this weekend.
As for the Arthur biography, I'm happy with the way things have been going, although there have been times over the last couple of months when it's slipped back to numero due, tre, even qualche volte quatro. I've had a bundle of new lectures to write this semester, and I've also had to cobble together proposals for EMP's "Waking Up from History: Music, Time and Place" conference, which is taking place next April, and UEL's "Cultural Studies Now" conference, which is scheduled for next July. On top of that I've been working on a couple of journal articles, one on Walter Gibbons for the Journal of Popular Music Studies and another on Arthur Russell for Liminalities. All of that, combined with an ongoing trickle of sleeve notes commissions, a couple of which should surface early next year, has made it difficult to surge on with the big books, even though that's what I really want to be doing.
In the midst of these swirling deviations, a couple of my journal articles have been published. A piece of Arthur Russell, and more specifically the way in which he "queered" gay disco, came out in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and a second piece on the shifting meaning of disco in the post-disco era appeared in New Formations. Thanks are due to my good friend and colleague Jeremy Gilbert, who set the New Formations piece up, and who also contributed an article exploring the theoretical resonances of Richard Dyer's classic essay "In Defence of Disco" in the same issue. Jeremy's article is well worth checking out. I will reprint the first few paragraphs of both of my articles on this site. If you're interested in reading more, please get in touch.
While I'm talking journals, I can't quite resist mentioning that Love Saves the Day was reviewed in the same issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies that ran my Arthur Russell piece, and the reviewer was really quite generous. "Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79, is an extraordinarily rich work that ought to transform the way we write the history of popular music," was his opening comment. Well, I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but it's nice to know that the book is getting positive reviews in the academic as well as the journalistic press.
Meanwhile, on the writing front, project numero uno is to wrap up a solid draft of the Arthur Russell biography, after which I'll get going with the eighties dance book, and after that I'll probably be writing a history of italo disco. In fact I got started on the italo research earlier this summer thanks to the kind offer of Maurizio Clemente, the publisher of Love Saves the Day in Italy, who wants the italo book and offered to put myself, Enrica, Carlotta and Ilaria up in a nice apartment in Rimini for a fortnight so that I could start to interview some of the key players. It must have been my first semi-freebie since I was in journalism. Fantastic! I ended up spending the mornings splashing around with the kids and Enrica, and then the afternoons interviewing the groundbreaking DJs of the italo scene, which somewhat misleading came to be dubbed the "Afro movement". Semantics aside, I was pretty blown away by the leftfield turn taken by the likes of Daniele Baldelli, Mozart, Rubens and others when the supply line of US dance music was cut off in the early 1980s. (Yes, that was not a typo, Mozart and Rubens were italo DJs. Don't tell me you didn't know.) For those of you who are interested in hearing more, Baldelli is playing at Horsemeat Disco in South London this coming Sunday. More info at www.horsemeatdisco.co.uk. I'll be there with my friend Elliott, who is visiting from New York this weekend.
As for the Arthur biography, I'm happy with the way things have been going, although there have been times over the last couple of months when it's slipped back to numero due, tre, even qualche volte quatro. I've had a bundle of new lectures to write this semester, and I've also had to cobble together proposals for EMP's "Waking Up from History: Music, Time and Place" conference, which is taking place next April, and UEL's "Cultural Studies Now" conference, which is scheduled for next July. On top of that I've been working on a couple of journal articles, one on Walter Gibbons for the Journal of Popular Music Studies and another on Arthur Russell for Liminalities. All of that, combined with an ongoing trickle of sleeve notes commissions, a couple of which should surface early next year, has made it difficult to surge on with the big books, even though that's what I really want to be doing.
In the midst of these swirling deviations, a couple of my journal articles have been published. A piece of Arthur Russell, and more specifically the way in which he "queered" gay disco, came out in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and a second piece on the shifting meaning of disco in the post-disco era appeared in New Formations. Thanks are due to my good friend and colleague Jeremy Gilbert, who set the New Formations piece up, and who also contributed an article exploring the theoretical resonances of Richard Dyer's classic essay "In Defence of Disco" in the same issue. Jeremy's article is well worth checking out. I will reprint the first few paragraphs of both of my articles on this site. If you're interested in reading more, please get in touch.
While I'm talking journals, I can't quite resist mentioning that Love Saves the Day was reviewed in the same issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies that ran my Arthur Russell piece, and the reviewer was really quite generous. "Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79, is an extraordinarily rich work that ought to transform the way we write the history of popular music," was his opening comment. Well, I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but it's nice to know that the book is getting positive reviews in the academic as well as the journalistic press.