You Better Work!: Underground Dance Music in New York City (Music/Culture) [Paperback]

The author is obviously conversant with all the critical-theory tools and concepts that help to illuminate this kind of subject, and he uses them well here, yet he's produced a book that the average scenester (if there is such a person) could read and would probably approve of (the pomo academic dream come true, I guess).

Anybody with even a mild interest will find this book engrossing (I picked it up and couldn't stop), and I suspect that even long-time insiders will learn a few things. Kudos to Fikentscher for producing something this good on such a fascinating, diverse world.

Of the recent works of word or image dedicated to the spirit of the New York Underground, You Better Work! stands alone, in my opinion, as the first to conduct a thorough, scientifically sustainable analysis of a subcultural phenomenon whose rarified nature made it heretofore nearly impossible to grasp, save from within. Other works can speak of history and its major players with unquestionable authenticity, as does Mel Cheren's Keep On Dancin'. Fikentscher's offering, however, proposes an exacting dissection of Underground Dance Music (UDM) properly placed in the sociocultural time-space continuum and described with academic accuracy, all the while remaining reverently connected to the magic of the specific dancefloor experience that gives UDM its singularity.

UDM, and the invisible universe it materializes around itself and its dévotées, present a unique quandary to the academically-inclined thinker. UDM is at once quite quantifiably tangible in its elements and techniques, yet undeniably metaphysical in its manifestation and effect. The scientist's dilemna, then, is to draw the black-and-white line of academic discipline around the grey frontiers of a shadow world. Without an initiate's third eye, the accomplishment of writing this seminal work for the students of a nascent discipline would have been unattainable.

The advantage of being both an academic pioneer and a subcultural insider allows Fikentscher to paint his complicated picture within the perfect frame of reference-namely the sociocultural and (importantly) religious experience of gay African- and Hispanic-American men-as can only one who knows the subject matter firsthand. This "mind over market" approach means, in practice, that notions of musical immediacy and method of consumption are solidly deconstructed without minimizing the importance of context and real-time interaction in analyzing the deconstructed parts. The relevance and insight of such a study is only more poignant now, after the near-demise of UDM's vanguard subculture (and, subsequently, of its home city) in the last decade and the present resurgence both of community and dancefloor spirit within, as well as mainstream curiosity surrounding New York's gay underground of colour.

Both Fikentscher himself, and the roadmap through the history and psyche of a people-within-a-people that he painstakingly and respectfully lays out in You Better Work!, are special gifts to the academic world at large, and particularly the literati of the Underground. You Better Work! is the definitive comprehensive treatise for those academic minds that can bend around the deep afterhours disco and house beats of the New York Underground. It will be required reading for ethnomusicologists everywhere, and should be studied by all those who profoundly want to understand why club life is as essential to the Big Apple as its subways.

E. Kipling BRITTON
New York City, November 2001