Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey

"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."Bill Brewster is the author of 'Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey', published 2000 under ISBN 9780802136886 and ISBN 0802136885.