The oracle that still answers to the human name “Brian Eno” has made a lot of good calls in his career, but none so prescient as his reaction when he first heard Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”

“This is it!” he exclaimed to David Bowie. “Look no further!” They were in a studio in Berlin, taking a few tentative steps into the future of music. On the record he was waving around, though, Eno had just heard that future — music that was going to “change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.”

The oracle was off by a couple of decades: disco’s greatest track, like the genre itself, is still turning on people and blowing up soundsystems more than forty years later.

DISCO OFFERED A BRIEF GLIMPSE OF A FUTURE WHEN CULTURE WAS TRULY OPEN, DRIVEN BY OPENLY GAY AND LGBTQ+ SINGERS AND PRODUCERS THAT DIDN’T HAVE TO RETREAT INTO A CLOSET, AND BLACK ARTISTS WHO FRONTED BANDS RATHER THAN “INSPIRING” THEM.

Maybe it was only these two very unconventional pop stars who were excited rather than terrified by the prospect of this sound taking over the world. Because disco was the sound of the future. It was a cultural anomaly, a brief glimpse of a future when culture was truly open rather than hiding behind euphemisms and set dressing, driven by openly gay and LGBTQ+ singers and producers that didn’t have to retreat into a closet, and Black artists who fronted bands rather than having their music sanitized in the whitewash of a new generation of Pat Boones.

And just as quickly that glimpse into the future was slammed shut — violently.

PBS has acquired the rights to a new documentary series which presents a self-described “revisionist” look at disco’s fleeting dominance. Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution was produced by BBC Studios and originally aired in the UK in December 2023. The series will make its American broadcast premiere starting on June 18, 2024 on PBS.

The three part series (full descriptions of each episode below) is by no means a nostalgia trip or collection of oldies. One of a number of new documentaries and media that correctly re-frame disco from a story of sex, drugs and bad jokes to a revolutionary movement that birthed and paved the way to contemporary culture, Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution properly frames this story in terms of the people who made and continued to identify with it even after a backlash made it lethal to do so. The opening episode, titled Rock The Boat, portrays the sound emerging “basic desire for inclusion, visibility, and freedom among persecuted Black, gay, and minority ethnic communities of New York City. It tells the remarkable story of how a global phenomenon began in the loft apartments and basement bars of New York City, where a new generation of DJs and musicians, like David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Francis Grasso, and Earl Young (The Trammps), pioneered a distinct sound and a new way of spinning records.”

Each episode follows the basic “rise and fall” narrative of most contemporary documentary series, though with the upshot that these people actually get it. Episode 3 doesn’t end with Disco Demolition Night, the racist and homophobic riot in Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979. Figures like Ron Trent, Robert Williams, Marshall Jefferson and Jamie Principle narrate the story of the second coming of disco in the very city that tried to bury it.

Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution was produced by BBC Studios and will air starting Tuesday, June 18 2024 with new episodes following on Tuesday, June 25 and Tuesday, July 2 2024. Stars include Vince Aletti, Steve Ashkinazy, Bill Bernstein, Jocelyn Brown, Carmen D’Alessio, David Depino, Lisa Farrington, Nona Hendryx, Thelma Houston, Marshall Jefferson, François Kevorkian, Ana Matronic, George McCrae, David Morales, Tom Moulton, Colleen Murphy, Kim Petras, Mark Riley, Allen Roskoff, Alex Rosner, Michelle Saunders, Jake Shears, Nicky Siano, Candi Staton, Jeanie Tracy, Barry Walters, Dexter Wansel, Anita Ward, Jessie Ware, Sharon White, Victor Willis, Earl Young, Jamie Principle, Robert Williams, Ron Trent and MNEK.

Episode 1: “Rock the Boat”
Premieres: Tuesday, June 18
The opening episode of the series looks at the roots of disco – how it emerged from a basic desire for inclusion, visibility, and freedom among persecuted Black, gay, and minority ethnic communities of New York City. It tells the remarkable story of how a global phenomenon began in the loft apartments and basement bars of New York City, where a new generation of DJs and musicians, like David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Francis Grasso, and Earl Young (The Trammps), pioneered a distinct sound and a new way of spinning records.

Episode 2: “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”
Premieres: Tuesday, June 25
Set against the backdrop of Black power and sexual liberation, the second episode takes viewers to the high watermark of disco in the mid ’70s. As disco conquers the mainstream, it turns Black women and gay men into superstars and icons. It is a world where the drag queen Sylvester was king, and Black women found a powerful new voice – one that fused Black Power with a call for sexual freedom. It was the birth of the “disco diva” from Gloria Gaynor and Candi Staton to Donna Summer and Thelma Houston. However, mainstream success by The Bee Gees’ soundtrack album “Saturday Night Fever,” The Rolling Stones’ “Miss You,”Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy,” and Studio 54 took disco further and further from its roots of inclusivity and freedom, as straight, white men started to embrace and repackage the sound.

Episode 3: “Stayin’ Alive”
Premieres: Tuesday, July 2
The final episode documents the wellspring of resentment from white, straight, male-dominated, rock-loving middle Americans, as they targeted disco for its hedonism, femininity, and queerness. A vocal “Disco Sucks” movement began to gain momentum, culminating in the “Disco Demolition Derby” at Comiskey Park Stadium in Chicago, where organizers destroyed thousands of disco records in front of a baying audience of baseball fans. In addition, the hedonism and sexual liberation embodied by disco found itself stopped in its tracks by the AIDS crisis. Pushed out of the mainstream, the pioneers of disco retreated and regrouped. Cult disco DJ Frankie Knuckles left New York for Chicago, where he remixed disco breaks with R&B to produce a new genre of dance music – house. He and other disco pioneers kept disco alive as it evolved into world electronic dance music.