Rhino's four-CD
Disco Box is the most impressive disco retrospective yet assembled, featuring 80 tracks and exhaustive liner notes which chronicle the music's history, artists, innovations, and subsequent influence. Like many of the best Rhino anthologies of this sort,
The Disco Box is a mixture of acknowledged classics and neglected yet surprisingly high-quality lesser-knowns (although the emphasis here is more on the former). The result is an enormously infectious, entertaining package that makes the best case yet for the importance and creative viability of disco in its heyday. There are a couple of minor flaws -- most disco fans will be able to name a few absent favorites (none of the
Bee Gees' historically crucial Saturday Night Fever tracks were available for licensing, for example), and others may bemoan the lack of extended 12" club versions, which simply wouldn't fit into a compilation of this scope. At any rate,
The Disco Box is still as definitive and well-done an overview as we're ever likely to see, and even at four CDs, it's the perfect introduction.