About The Show

Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a podcast from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert, both of them authors, academics, DJs and audiophile dance party organisers. They’ve been friends and collaborators since 1997, teaching together and running parties since 2003.

Tune in, Turn on and Get Down to in-depth discussion of the sonic, social and political legacies of radical movements past and present, from the 1960s to today. Starting with David Mancuso's NYC Loft parties, we’ll explore the countercultural sounds, scenes and ideas of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In our first three series, we’ve looked at David Mancuso’s Loft parties in downtown New York, the wider economic, political and cultural landscape of late ‘60s United States, the emergence of dancefloor culture as we now recognise it, DJing, drugs, Dub, macro-economics, Michael Manley, Marlena Shaw, Fela Kuti, Hi Fi sound, race, empire, sound engineering, liberation, and a hell of a lot of parties.

“No podcast I've ever listened to has had the impact of Love is the Message. It has encouraged me to revisit some of the recesses of my record collection (in some cases for the first time in many years, and connect with the music more deeply, thinking about it in a wider cultural and geopolitical context... Anyone with even a passing interest in cultural studies and dance music in all its forms should revisit again and again.” Apple Podcasts review

Support the show

Part of the reason we started this podcast was in order to share the academic and personal knowledge we’ve acquired from over 20 years of teaching, listening, reading and partying. We believe that access to the story of dance, music, soundsystems and counterculture should be available to everyone, which is why we are committed to keeping our main series free and without advertising.

However, if you like what we do, want us to keep going, and would like to support the LITM project - as well as access lots of extra supporting episodes - please consider becoming a patron on Patreon. For a small monthly contribution you can allow us to keep making the show (and believe us, there’s a lot we want to cover) as well as receive patrons-only shows.

We’ve recorded mini-series on Afrofuturism, lectures on Fordism and Post-Fordism, read book excerpts, long-form interviews with fantastic guests, informal conversations about what we’ve been listening to lately, and more.

We really appreciate your support - thanks!