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NYC Rock
This book tells a story, making the connections through rhythm & blues, folk and funk, disco and punk, to the contemporary cutting edge, tracing a musical evolution spanning five decades that is a microcosm of rock'n'roll itself.
- GenresMusic
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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About the author
Mike Evans
47 books12 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 11, 2022
I started reading this with excitement - though a bit dated in terms of its end point, as it was published in 2003, the evolution of music has long been a passion of mine.
But sadly the book doesn’t hold up - there is no comprehensive look into how the music progressed and how rock and roll evolved through the influence of the New York scene. It’s simply a basic chronology of name dropping and background info, but doesn’t really make a point.
And there are many glaring omissions - no Kiss? No Twisted Sister? No Anthrax?? It also completely ignores the hardcore scene (Cro-Mags, Sick of it All, etc.)
Another issue is that the author counts any band who ever spent time in NYC as a NYC band- for example, the B-52s, no matter how many weekends they played in NYC clubs, are NOT a NYC band. I can see making a point of how the scene attracted important bands of their times and had a lot of outside bands even take up residence, but stop devoting sections to do many bands that have no actual roots in the city.
The little section devoted to hip hop is atrocious - the history is incorrect, and making bizarre statements like calling Public Enemy a ‘gangsta rap’ band shows the lack of knowledge the author has in the genre. And to say that it had little influence on rock is to ignore the 90s - yes it ran parallel because it was a separate genre, but it also influenced all forms of rock sub genres, with bands from Tage Against the Machine to 311 to the Gorillas and solo artists like Kid Rock embracing it. It also went the other way - OutKast, NERD, etc., had a lot of rock influence in their music - much in the way that Public Enemy and Ice-T did before them, with samples of everyone from Slayer to Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath. And the Beastie Boys were always very rock influenced - and not just from the days of their punk backgrounds. As their music evolved into a form of alternative hip hop, they embraced several other genres to cross over into their music and rock was often Front and Center.
Perhaps it didn’t affect NYC as much as elsewhere, but that for me ignores musical evolution as a whole, which the rest of the book doesn’t do.l - it even has a chapter on DISCO which tied far more deeply into synth pop and electro than it ever did to rock.
And in the contemporary section, the 10 years or so up to 2003, when the book was released, the author goes out of his way to desperately find relevance in the city’s output, leading to a Strokes love fest that would ultimately prove fatal as they disappeared from relevance, starting shortly after publication. And the remainder of the artists and bands named in that time period, other than one or two like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol, are indie artists, many of whom have had little to no impact on the music sphere outside of their own little cult followings, and most of whom aren’t really rock. It’s just a who’s who of indie musicians in NYC from the mid-90s to early 2000s.
In the end it devolves into a walking advertisement for contemporary NYC groups - half of which aren’t even NYC groups, just naming all of them and saying how well received they are - many of which aren’t even rock-related.
As a result the book backfires - it goes from justifiably glorifying the legions of innovators who were responsible for forming entire rock sub genres, from the 50s through the 80s, then leaves you with a bunch of ‘and these indie bands were great and so well received critically and then broke up.’ The decline and fall of the NYC scene - there has been little coming out of NYC in the last 20 years of so that has had any real influence on rock music.
As a total aside as well - there are some glaringly awful typos - Girls Versus Boys? Liz Fair? How can I take an author seriously when he can’t even get the artists’ names right?
But sadly the book doesn’t hold up - there is no comprehensive look into how the music progressed and how rock and roll evolved through the influence of the New York scene. It’s simply a basic chronology of name dropping and background info, but doesn’t really make a point.
And there are many glaring omissions - no Kiss? No Twisted Sister? No Anthrax?? It also completely ignores the hardcore scene (Cro-Mags, Sick of it All, etc.)
Another issue is that the author counts any band who ever spent time in NYC as a NYC band- for example, the B-52s, no matter how many weekends they played in NYC clubs, are NOT a NYC band. I can see making a point of how the scene attracted important bands of their times and had a lot of outside bands even take up residence, but stop devoting sections to do many bands that have no actual roots in the city.
The little section devoted to hip hop is atrocious - the history is incorrect, and making bizarre statements like calling Public Enemy a ‘gangsta rap’ band shows the lack of knowledge the author has in the genre. And to say that it had little influence on rock is to ignore the 90s - yes it ran parallel because it was a separate genre, but it also influenced all forms of rock sub genres, with bands from Tage Against the Machine to 311 to the Gorillas and solo artists like Kid Rock embracing it. It also went the other way - OutKast, NERD, etc., had a lot of rock influence in their music - much in the way that Public Enemy and Ice-T did before them, with samples of everyone from Slayer to Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath. And the Beastie Boys were always very rock influenced - and not just from the days of their punk backgrounds. As their music evolved into a form of alternative hip hop, they embraced several other genres to cross over into their music and rock was often Front and Center.
Perhaps it didn’t affect NYC as much as elsewhere, but that for me ignores musical evolution as a whole, which the rest of the book doesn’t do.l - it even has a chapter on DISCO which tied far more deeply into synth pop and electro than it ever did to rock.
And in the contemporary section, the 10 years or so up to 2003, when the book was released, the author goes out of his way to desperately find relevance in the city’s output, leading to a Strokes love fest that would ultimately prove fatal as they disappeared from relevance, starting shortly after publication. And the remainder of the artists and bands named in that time period, other than one or two like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol, are indie artists, many of whom have had little to no impact on the music sphere outside of their own little cult followings, and most of whom aren’t really rock. It’s just a who’s who of indie musicians in NYC from the mid-90s to early 2000s.
In the end it devolves into a walking advertisement for contemporary NYC groups - half of which aren’t even NYC groups, just naming all of them and saying how well received they are - many of which aren’t even rock-related.
As a result the book backfires - it goes from justifiably glorifying the legions of innovators who were responsible for forming entire rock sub genres, from the 50s through the 80s, then leaves you with a bunch of ‘and these indie bands were great and so well received critically and then broke up.’ The decline and fall of the NYC scene - there has been little coming out of NYC in the last 20 years of so that has had any real influence on rock music.
As a total aside as well - there are some glaringly awful typos - Girls Versus Boys? Liz Fair? How can I take an author seriously when he can’t even get the artists’ names right?
February 9, 2014
It's a bit of a once over lightly. Much of the text is quotes from other books and magazine articles.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews