"I was a Long Island kid that graduated college in 1976 and moved to Greenwich Village. Two years later, I was working The Mudd Club door. Standing outside, staring at the crowd, it was "out there" versus "in here" and I was on the inside. The Mudd Club was filled with the famous and soon- to- be famous, along with an eclectic core of Mudd regulars who gave the place its identity. Everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, and Robert Rauschenberg to Johnny Rotten, The Hell's Angels, and John Belushi: passing through, passing out, and some, passing on. Marianne Faithful and Talking Heads, Frank Zappa, William Burroughs, and even Kenneth Anger— just a few of the names that stepped on stage. No Wave and Post- Punk artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers living in a nighttime world on the cusp of two decades. This book is a cornucopia of memories and images, and how this famed wicked downtown club attained the status of midtown and uptown. There was nothing else like it— I met everyone, and the job quickly defined me. I thought I could handle it, and for a while, I did. "—Richard Boch

When and how did pop music earn so much cultural capital? This text investigates five key moments when popular music and avant-garde art transgressed the rigid boundaries separating high and low culture to form friendly alliances.

As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, New York's party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city’s subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and film. Interviewing DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, and dancers, Tim Lawrence illustrates how the relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes became marked by their level of plurality, interaction, and convergence. He also explains how the shifting urban landscape of New York supported the cultural renaissance before gentrification, Reaganomics, corporate intrusion, and the spread of AIDS brought this gritty and protean time and place in American culture to a troubled denouement.

This title provides a group portrait of some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, including Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Grandmaster Flash and Bob Dylan.

From celebrated stylist Maripol this ultimate 'who's who' of the early 80s art, music and fashion scenes in downtown New York captures highly stylish, utterly inspiring and ultra vivid polaroid. As an image maker and stylist for Madonna during her 'Like a Virgin' days, Maripol relentlessly documented the movers and shakers of the early 80s through the lens of her instant Polaroid SX-70. This collection is for those with long memories and vast vinyl collections and also for the people who weren't there to see it firsthand.

An anthology of personal documentaries of place and time by key figures in the art world from the 1970s to the present.