Book Details
| Title: |
|
Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor |
| Author: |
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Tim Lawrence |
| Times Read: |
|
1 |
| Last Read: |
|
03.13.18 |
Other Books Read By This Author (0)
Notes History
| Date Read |
Note |
| 03.13.18 | An exhaustive account of what was going on in NYC from 1980 - 1983. I don't think I've read a longer, more involved book about such a specific subject. It took a while to read and sometimes felt like a college textbook rather than something someone would take on for pleasure, but now that I'm through it I feel like it's a great book and I really learned a ton about what the nightlife was like back then. In the great Venn diagram of my late 70s/early 80s NYC obsession, this one overlapped several other areas, most notably the birth of hip hop and early seminal DJs like David Mancuso at The Loft and Larry Levan at Paradise Garage. But what this book does is mash everything together to give a better contextual sense of day by day with the disco stuff, the art scene, new wave, no wave, hip hop, rock, and how everything swirled together in one homogeneous mixture. Really the only thing I didn't get a good sense of what the visceral experience of being in some of these clubs. The more salacious aspects of the lifestyle back then are largely avoided, with the barest mentions of which drugs were popular and how prevalent casual sex was back then, so as I read about these parties that would go through until noon, 2, 3pm the next day and have to wonder who these dancers were that could stay up that long. But from a largely academic standpoint, I think I got about as good of a sense of the scene as anyone who wasn't there can get. I love that the author goes so far as to list out typical songs that some of the DJs played and, in Levan's case, how they changed from year to year. Plus now I know what people are talking about when they mention places like Mudd club or Danceteria as well as how many of the other DJs of the time - people like Jellybean Benitez or Francois Kevorkian - fit into the bigger picture. Overall, it was a long dry detail-oriented read that left me feeling super informed and enlightened. I liked it a lot. |
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