Love is the Message: Dance, Music and Counterculture

Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a new show 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. With clubs closed and half their jobs lost to university cuts, they’re inevitably launching a podcast.

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy begin the first of a three part series-within-a-series connecting the dots between Motown and Salsoul. We start with Fordism, Antonio Gramsci's term for both the industrial practices of Henry Ford and the wider post-war settlement in which they occurred.

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley.

Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm - Rocket 88

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod.

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy continue their two-part look at early DJ practices. They consider the role played by the personality-focused radio DJs of the late '60s, interrogating the relationships between these radio jocks, the party DJs, and the record companies, and the conditions that led to the establishment of the NYC Record Pool.

Tim and Jeremy also take an in depth look at other aspects of DJ culture, including early mixing techniques, beat juggling and turntablism, as well as charting the history of the first dancefloor-focused remixes. Finally, they consider whether the figure of the DJ - branded, mobile, and able to process large amounts of musical information on behalf of a paying public - prefigures the ideal neoliberal subject.

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy turn their attention to the wheels of steel, and the inhabitants of late 1960s and early 1970s New York who played them. We hear about the overwhelmingly Italian American young men who first pioneered the scene, the various public discotheques in which they performed, and the numerous technical innovations which advanced the craft.

In this week's episode Tim and Jeremy are tuning in and dropping out as we talk all things Acid. We hear a history of the psychedelic movement within the Anglophone world, taking in the accidental maiden trip of chemist Albert Hoffmann, the activities of Timothy Leary at Millbrook and the Merry Pranksters on their Magic Bus, and The Beatles' musical rendering of the classic trip.

In the first episode of our new series looking in depth at the transformative decade of 1965-75, Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert discuss the pivotal position of New York City in the 1960s. They contrast the emergent New York with the fading Paris as centres of cultural and political life, taking in such important assemblages as the Greenwich Village Folk scene and Andy Warhol's Factory. Tim and Jeremy also discuss the contrasting schools of Jazz during the period - free, bebop and cool - and consider how the changing demographics of the city, forever a melting pot, led to the introduction of salsa to the New York audiences. The episode also takes in the various manifestations of the aesthetics of minimalism across the city, and ties it all back to David Mancuso's ear for the perfect lyric.

This is an excerpt of a full length episode currently only available to patrons. To become a patron and support what we're doing from £3 per month, head to www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod.

In this final episode of our introductory series, Jeremy and Tim dig into why the 1970s was such a crucial decade for political, social and musical innovation. Challenging the negative image of the ’70s so popularly held, they discuss the crucial importance of the era's global anti-colonial movements, and its liberation struggles around gender, sexuality and race, which found expression in music through punk, disco, afrobeat, reggae and proto-rap.

In this week's episode, Tim and Jeremy are discussing love as the central affect of countercultural dance practice. They talk about the heteronormativity of the post-war period and the queerness of many male '60s pop singers, the religious antecedents to both the anti-war and the psychedelic movements, and the embrace of love as a universal force in both rock and jazz music of the period. They describe a continuum of dancefloor experience that runs from spiritual rapture to eroticised mating ritual, and place the collective experience of shared ecstacy through dance along that time. Finally, Tim and Jeremy recount the special place David Mancuso held for songs about love, and reflect on how Coronavirus has deprived us of that special type of dancefloor friendship.

Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert are authors, academics, DJs and audiophile dance party organisers. They’ve been friends and collaborators since 1997, teaching together and running parties since 2003. With clubs closed and half their jobs lost to university cuts, they’re inevitably launching a podcast.

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley.

Become a supporter by visiting our Patreon at patreon.com/lovemessagepod