Love is the Message: Music, the Dance Floor and Counterculture
A unique intellectual project, Love Is the Message maps the relationship between music, social change and the world. Beginning with the opening of the NYC Loft on Valentine’s Day 1970, the podcast moves forwards, backwards and sideways across time and space, listening to and analysing transformational music from the USA, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe and beyond, from the colonial era to the present. “Tune in, turn on and get down” with co-hosts Jeremy Gilbert and Tim Lawrence, both of them acclaimed authors as well as audiophile dance party hosts/DJs who worked side-by-side with David Mancuso.
There’s one big party going on all the time. Sometimes we get to tune into it. The rest of the time there’s Love is the Message.
Current Series: New York City, 1977
What could be more iconic than NYC in 1977? It’s the year of the Summer of Sam and the blackouts, when Studio 54 opens and Saturday Night Fever is released, when Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer record "I Feel Love" around the same time that Kraftwerk come out with "Trans Europe Express”. On the dance floor side of things, Tim and Jeremy tell the story of the initial opening of the Paradise Garage as well as, over in Chicago, the Warehouse. They keep track of developments at the Gallery and the Loft as well as ongoing innovations in remix culture. They also ask if the commercialisation of disco gave punk its meaning.
Series 1: Introduction
Counterculture, the 70s, the dance floor, love and the Loft
Series 2: USA 1965–1975
DJs, disco, Fordism to post-Fordism, feminism and funk
Series 3: Afro-Psychedelia
Consciousness-exploding tropical music from the colonial era to 1975
Series 4: New York City 1975-76
The melting pot city at the center of the world
Series 5: Conversations
Tim and Jeremy talk with leading academics and writers
Series 6: 1977 in NYC
A pivotal year in a precarious place.
Patrons Episodes
We’re committed to keeping the main series of the show free and available to everyone. However, for those who choose to support our work through a monthly Patreon subscription, we’ve created a large and ever-expanding selection of bonus material by way of thanks. This includes lectures on Marxism, Fordism, and Deleuze and Guattari; book readings and extended meditations on complimentary topics; conversations about what we’ve been listening and playing recently; and explorations of related scenes and musical moments that don’t quite fit into the main thrust of our LITM episodes.
See a full list of the patrons episodes here.
