in Ocean of Sound, Toop gives disco a surprising amount of due--as one of the first culturally-widespread instances of music becoming dissociated from the musicians or artists who created it -- the key figure is the DJ and the key qualifier of success is for the music to blend together seamlessly -- to blur the distinctions between songs effectively, to create a kind of meta-song (hypersong?)
akin to what I'm trying to do with information prose -- blurring my own words with those of others
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addendum 2023, on re-read: "Disco mixing, the merging of records by a DJ, denied the musician as performer, denied the integrity of any individual performance, denied the problems of mixing musical styles or cultural difference, denied the conclusion of a work" (43)
"Gradually, the DJ became the artist. Gradually, the song, the composition, was decomposed. [...] [D]isco began to work on the principle of decomposing songs into modular and interchangeable fragments, sliced and repatced into an order which departed from the rules of Tin Pan Alley. This new order was desgined to suit the nocturnal rhythms of a participatory, ecstatic audience"(43-4)
"Songs became liquid. They became vehicles for improvisation, or source materials, field recordings almost" (44)