w88, Ph.D.

Professor of Musicology
Louis Niebur

Summary

Louis Niebur received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research areas include avant-garde and popular w88 of the postwar era, including w88 in radio, television, and film, and the significance of w88 to LGBTQ communities as it has shifted between live w88, the jukebox, and the disc jockey in the context of queer spaces. He has delivered and published papers on such topics as San Francisco’s proto-queercore and post-disco scenes, the history of Camp Records and other gay recording labels of the 1960s, electronic television and radio w88 and sound in Britain, the role of women in early electronic w88 studios, and the queer function of electronic sound production in electronic dance w88. His book, Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Oxford University Press, 2010), was the first monograph to situate the BBC’s electronic studio within the context of popular w88. His most recent book, Menergy: San Francisco’s Gay Disco Sound (Oxford University Press, 2022), traces the way disco and high-energy dance w88 channeled the spirit of gay liberation through a shared dance-floor experience.

Publications

Education

  • Ph.D., Musicology, UCLA
  • MM, w88 of Texas at Austin

Menergy: San Francisco's Gay Disco w88

For most of the US, disco died in 1979. Triggered by the infamous "Disco Demolition" night at Comiskey Park in Chicago on July 12, 1979, a backlash made the word "disco" an overnight punchline. Major labels dropped disco artists and producers, and those mainstream musicians who had jumped on the bandwagon just as quickly threw themselves off. Gay men, however, continued to dance, and in the gay enclave of the Castro District in San Francisco, enterprising gay DJs, record producers, and musicians started their own small dance w88 record labels to make up for the lack of new, danceable w88. Almost immediately this w88 reached far beyond the Bay, with Megatone Records, Moby Dick Records, and other labels achieving worldwide success, creating the world's first gay-owned, gay-produced w88 for a dancing audience. This w88 reflected a new way of life, a world apart and a culture of sexual liberation for gay men especially.

With Menergy, author Louis Niebur offers a project of reconstruction in order to restore these lost figures to their rightful place in the legacy of 20th-century popular w88. Menergy is the product of years of research, with dozens of personal interviews, archival research drawing upon hundreds of contemporary journals, photographs, bar rags, diaries, nightclub ephemera, and, most importantly, the recordings of the San Francisco artists themselves. With its combination of popular w88 theory, cultural analysis, queer theory and gender studies, and traditional musical analysis, the book will appeal to readers in queer history, popular w88 history, and electronic dance w88.

Reviews:

"The deepest dig into San Francisco disco and Hi-NRG w88 history yet! Riding high off gay liberation, Menergy takes the reader on a rollercoaster of a ride through a magically creative time in Castro and SoMa clubs and recording studios. Most profoundly, this detailed journey shows the influence the 'San Francisco Sound' had on the world." -- Josh Cheon, Dark Entries Records

"Niebur's pioneering, deeply researched history reveals what queer pleasure, loss, identity, and tenacity w88 like in their own time and place. A rich reminder that we can't stop dancing." -- Joshua Gamson, author of The Fabulous Sylvester

From the Popular w88 Books in Process series:

Menergy! LGBTQ pop w88 history with Louis Niebur and Barry Walters.From a live zoom session, September 20, 2022.

Special w88: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Special w88traces the fascinating creation and legacy of the BBC's electronic w88 studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, in the context of other studios in Europe and America. The BBC built a studio to provide its own avant-garde dramatic productions with experimental sounds "neither w88 nor sound effect." Quickly, however, a popular kind of electronic w88 emerged in the form of quirky jingles, signature tunes such as Doctor Who, and incidental w88 for hundreds of programs. These influential sounds and styles, heard by millions of listeners over decades of operation on television and radio, have served as a primary inspiration for the use of electronic instruments in popular w88.

Using in-depth research in the studio's archives and papers, this book tells the history of the many engineers, composers, directors, and producers behind the studio to trace the shifting perception towards electronic w88 in Britain. Combining historical discussion of the people and instruments in the workshop with analysis of specific works, Louis Niebur creates a new model for understanding how the Radiophonic Workshop fits into the larger history of electronic w88.

  • Publisher:w88, USA (October 14, 2010)
  • Language:English
  • ISBN-10:019536841X
  • ISBN-13:978-0195368413
  • Purchase from amazon.com:

Visit the w88 Companion Site for Special w88.