The determined rhythms of jazz, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll were disseminated though new media technologies. Media scholar Marshall McLuhan contends that, "[r]adio was inseparable from the rise of jazz culture as TV has been inseparable from the rise of rock culture." In addition to the utilization of communicative media technologies, disco music used the digitized technologies of drum machines, synthesizers, and samplers, as primary instruments in the actual creation and production of the music itself. Many note that disco music was essentially up-tempo soul and R&B recordings popularized in African American and Latino gay urban clubs during the early 1970s.

The hegemonic force of rock ‘n’ roll reluctantly gave way to the new, different and digitized rhythm of disco as it gained popularity in the mid to late seventies with its brief ascendance in the popular music charts throughout the United States. Mainstream America’s previous concerns over alleged sinister erotic beats in blues, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll now applied to disco music.   Concurrently, disco’s elevation of electronically programmed beats along with its irrelevance to the guitar infuriated many rockers. Debates surrounding the inauthenticity of disco music also fueled the rock establishment’s fire. The public distaste over watered down disco music culminated in the much-publicized ‘Disco Sucks’ campaign of 1979 in Chicago’s Cominsky Park where disco met its commercial ruin. But the music did not die. It returned to the black and Latino gay dance clubs where disco’s revenge was sanctioned through house music, interestingly enough, in Chicago, the very city that showcased disco’s spectacular demise.

There are many histories that acknowledge various tenants of house music's cultural production, consumption, and subsequent dissemination and they are crucial in expressing diverse narratives and documentation.  Diva Delight focuses on a particular genealogy of house as traced through underground African American and Latino gay clubs in Chicago, New York, and New Jersey as places of refuge from homophobia and racism. The disco music of the 1970’s is often cited as the progenitor of house music. House music is characterized by the continuous 4/4 beat, the use of new music technologies (drum machines, turntables) and motifs of love and freedom. The articulation of house lyrical texts is mediated through, though not exclusively, African American women as house divas.