Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
Part I. 1980: The Recalibration of Disco
1. Stylistic Coherence Didn't Matter at All 11
2. The Basement Den at Club 57 30
3. Danceteria: Midtown Feels the Downtown Storm 48
4. Subterranean Dance 60
5. The Bronx-Brooklyn Approach 73
6. The Sound Became More Real 92
7. Major-Label Calculations 105
8. The Saint Peter of Discos 111
9. Lighting the Fuse 122
Part II. 1981: Accelerating Toward Pluralism
10. Explosion of Clubs 135
11. Artistic Maneuvers in the Dark 155
12. Downton Configures Hip Hop 170
13. The Sound of a Transcendent Future 184
14. The New Urban Street Sound 199
15. It Wasn't Rock and Roll and It Wasn't Disco 210
16. Frozen in Time or Freed into Infinity 221
17. It Felt Like the Whole City Was Listening 232
18. Shrouded Abatements and Mysterious Deaths 239
Part III. 1982: Dance Culture Seizes the City
19. All We Had Was the Club 245
20. Inverted Pyramid 257
21. Roxy Music 271
22. The Garage: Everybody Was Listening to Everything 279
23. The Planet Rock Groove 288
24. Techno Funksters 304
25. Taste Segues 314
26. Stormy Weather 320
27. Cusp of an Important Fusion 331
Part IV. 1983: The Genesis of Division
28. Cristal for Everyone 343
29. Dropping the Pretense and the Flashy Suits 369
30. Straighten It Out with Larry Levan 381
31. Stripped-Down and Scrambled Sounds 400
32. We Became Part of This Energy 419
33. Sex and Dying 430
34. We Got the Hits, We Got the Future 438
35. Behind the Groove 449
Epilogue. Life, Death, and the Hereafter 458
Notes 485
Selected Discography 515
Selected Filmography 529
Selected Bibliography 521
Index 537
Tim Lawrence is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London and the author of Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 and Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992, both also published by Duke University Press.
"Lawrence goes into remarkable depth to portray this world which,
during its few short years, gained expansive popularity and had a
significant impact on art, film, literature, and culture. His
meticulous research, with details on the leading figures, trends,
events, places, and music that made it all happen, also provides
critical/analytical commentary on the social backdrop of the times,
the genesis of the emerging and eclectic music/dance styles, and
the essence of this artistic renaissance. In addition to the
well-selected photographs, notes, and bibliography, set lists,
discographies, and a filmography add to the title's impressive
breadth. Cultural historians and those familiar with the 1980s
milieu will find this informative and insightful."
*Library Journal*
"Through a comprehensive and lushly detailed text stuffed with
original photos from dance floors, DJ booths, and parties, Lawrence
imparts the mood, the music, the faces and the places from that
remarkable era, with a nostalgic nod to nights where 'a new kind of
freedom was set to rule the night.' ... Dance music historians will
want this book for reference, while others who recall these days
with a sense of longing will close its covers and dream of the days
when nightlife amounted to a line of cocaine, a Madonna remix, and
a dark, packed dance floor in a basement club in the Village."
*Bay Area Reporter*
"Life and Death provides the most intensive mapping of this brief
era of New York subculture we've yet seen. The book's strength is
its depth of research, drawing on the realtime journalism of
the era as well as many new interviews. The detail is fascinating,
as Lawrence salvages ephemeral events, forgotten people, and lost
places from the fog of faded memory."
*Bookforum*
"Exceptionally accessible (the author’s passion for his subject
shows through on every page; it’s easy to imagine how his knowledge
and genuine interest opened many a door and got people talking,
telling tales recorded here that might not otherwise have seen the
light of day), the raw, new energy of the city is accurately
captured and conveyed. No small feat.... Seriously, when’s the last
time you read a book you could actually dance to?"
*Lambda Literary Review*
"The focus here is clearly music. Mr. Lawrence even includes some
D.J. playlists for the listener to investigate. But Life and Death
is more expansive than that — it takes you deep into a time and
place, the good-old-bad-old-days of pre-Rudolph Giuliani New York,
which many have valorized for some time now. If the 1970s have been
thoroughly examined, the early ’80s have been left relatively
unexplored, and while Mr. Lawrence provides a lot of minutiae, he
also delivers a story with some sweep."
*New York Times*
"[I]f you have no abiding love for New York, disco, hip-hop, studio
techniques, or fast and dirty real-estate shuffles—there must be
such people, statistically—perhaps Life and Death on the New York
Dance Floor will not hold you. But if you care for any of those
things, and even if that concern borders on the obsessive, you will
benefit from Lawrence’s investigations."
*The New Yorker*
"The cast of characters in the book can be staggering, the
exhaustive accounts overwhelming — Lawrence interviewed or
corresponded with more than 130 people, and he makes room for their
voices — but that's part of the point: He wants a crowded and
motley party. This is a scrupulously researched, marvelously
detailed history."
*Village Voice*
"[A] compelling tale, beautifully told. As one who was fortunate
enough to have landed in New York during this timeframe, Lawrence
does a cracking job capturing a time when even listening to the
city’s black radio stations at noon could change your life. It was
a surreal, magical period of ground-breaking activity which now
seems hard to believe could actually happen at the same time in the
same city. Finally, here’s the proof."
*Record Collector*
"[O]ffers fresh detail and insight on the clubs, DJs, parties and
recordings that emerged from the scene. He even offers DJ playlists
from different clubs."
*Wall Street Journal*
"Tim Lawrence's Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor
1980-1983, the definitive history of that fabled time in the city,
is already taking on the status of a sacred text."
*Paper Magazine*
"Reading Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor as a clubber in
the city is to reflect not only on what’s been lost over the past
three decades, but on how the sounds, events and characters at the
center of Lawrence’s story still influence NYC’s nightlife. . . .
[W]hat Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor makes acutely
obvious, as both volume and prism, is not just the cultural value
of the city’s party scene, but how it also serves as a moral
compass – and how it still can."
*The Guardian*
"Life & Death defines New York's unnamed era of invention. When Boy
George was nicking from the cloakroom at Blitz, and everyone else
was at The Batcave, this is how it ran in NYC. With hundreds of
interviews, deep research and enlightening playlists, it's almost
as invigorating as being there."
*DJ Magazine*
"Lawrence has mustered convincing evidence for the case that
Madonna was not the most important cultural creation of early 1980s
New York. . . . Lawrence is most convincing when he documents the
remarkable variety and genre-blurring fecundity of sounds available
to tuned-in city dwellers, a diversity that was even more bracing
when contrasted with the monotonous airwaves stifling the rest of
North America."
*TLS*
"Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor is a remarkably intense
piece of 'community history writing.' It breathes life into an
iconic historical epoch and sociocultural scene without ever
retreating into nostalgia or naive celebration. In fact, there's
something unexpectedly electrifying about reading Lawrence's
exceptionally well-researched historical studies. It is the
sensation of remotely yet meaningfully becoming part of something
hitherto only secretly known. One becomes slowly yet unequivocally
aware of how that specific era's cultural and sociopolitical
conditions, so thoroughly reconstructed in these works, resonate
with the current sense of cultural and political impasse."
*The Wire*
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