Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983

by Tim Lawrence

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.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, New York, Gay, Cultural, Queer

600 pages, Hardcover

Published September 30, 2016

Reviews

[audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Featuring a cyborglike depiction of St. Sebastian with lasers shooting out of his fingertips and eyes, so blending the iconography of suffering, righteousness, and pleasure with male beauty, the artwork for the opening party [of The Saint] signaled how the venue's name did more than establish a connection to the St. Mark's Baths. Just as Sebastian was martyred for his Christian beliefs, so the gay male dancer who refused to forsake his homosexuality could experience a form of dance-floor redemption, where the ritual of sacrificing one's body to the rhythm carried the prospect of transcendence... The party peaked when [DJ Alan] Dodd introduced the first strains of Donna Summer's 'Could It Be Magic, cueing Ackerman to cut from bright light to an artificial dawn. 'All of a sudden, we were out in the stars,' recalls bookstore worker and until that night 12 West regular Michael Fierman. 'For miles around, there were nothing but stars. Everyone gasped. For the twenty seconds of the piano chords, before the drum kicked in, everyone was frozen and in awe.'

...Ackerman adjusted the star machine in sync with the introduction of the drum. 'As the song took off, the galaxies began to rotate,' Holleran recounted. 'There was nothing to do but scream, throw your up your hands, and keep screaming. The floor looked like a bacterial culture, the spores the space travelers discover in Alien.'

Y'all, I was not ready. At all.

So. Just under 500 pages of text alone, exclusive of the notes, discography, and bibliography sections. Massive amounts of photos, club playlists, and super interesting details.

There are exhaustive lists of clubs, along with details about all the different types of music and events at those clubs, and who put them on, and who showed up, and who the DJ was, and what they played. Nearly every chapter has a discography of some sort, and every chapter has photos from the events.

But there are also chapters on the art movements in New York at the time, and how they intersected with the club scene. And chapters on the rise of hip hop and how that intersected with the club scene. And chapters on disco and how what it was doing intersected with the club scene. Mentions of art films that arose from the club scene. There is even a verrrry detailed chapter on the rise of various different technically complicated sound systems, and how that intersected with the club scene.

As a result, this is not just a long book but an incredibly energetic one.

Throughout it all are notes on the music of the time, with artists, songs, and album notes, and as a result, I am now deeply enamored of 40-year-old obscure no-wave and artpunk bands such as Tuxedomoon, Liquid Liquid, The Contortions, 3 Teens Kill 4, and Pulseallama.

(Possibly most importantly, the author is really good at describing music in text form. Music doesn't automatically translate to text; it's hard to capture sound in a readable form, and the author does this very, very well. If he didn't, no part of the book would have worked.)

This sort of thing can keep me happily occupied for days.

One of the things I very much appreciated about this book is that the author does not shy away from the ways in which this incandescent art world was also rife with racism and sexism. And he brings receipts. Not just in one particular chapter, but at recurring intervals in ways that make sense as naturally recurring spots to examine those topics. That club described in the quote at the start of this review, The Saint? Yeah, that club had a strict men-only membership policy. And as it was protected as a space for gay men to enjoy themselves away from the world, it somehow managed to become a deeply white men-only space. Le plus ça change...

If I had to quibble (and you know I do), there are so many people in this book that I kept forgetting who was who, and the author kept forgetting to remind me. In the quote from the Saint, I still can't figure out who Holleran is, and I had to go back and read that section to figure out which bits to quote. So there's that.

And while the author makes a good-faith attempt to look at racism and sexism, there are depictions of club nights that in retrospect are clearly problematic, included without commentary.

The 'Putt-Putt Reggae Party' [at Club 57] featured a miniature eighteen-hole-golf-course-cum-Jamaican-shantytown made out of refrigerator boxes. 'Iran, Iraq and Iroll' satirized the stalled Iran hostage crisis as Scully DJ-ed in a headdress made out of a U.S. flag. 'Ladies Wrestling Night' featured raucous battles, faux coaches, and camp refereeing. The 'Bongo Voodo' event combined chicken cursing, secret rituals, and frenzied ceremonial dancing.

I was also a little confused by the fact that AIDS is covered in six pages out of the 500. It feels like given both the subject matter and the timeframe that it needed more space to explain, to explore, and to grieve. There's a collective refusal to take time for grief in this modern world that continues to be a problem.

But that is not the main thing I took away from this book.

Overall, I got this entirely immersive view of three years in a revolutionary art movement that has passed, in spaces that no longer exist, with lots of people who are no longer here. Every art movement should have a book like this, crafted from oral histories and interviews and primary sources that consist of not just traditional texts but of music, and pop-up art installations. Because that's really what was happening at a lot of the clubs in New York at that time -- by design.

There's a whole subplot in the book about a) who owned which clubs, b) how long they owned them for, and c) which clubs they moved on to after that. It should be dry and boring, but it's not, because to some extent it's a great way to explain the ephemeral nature of what was happening at the time.

If you Spotify, someone went through and assembled a comprehensive playlist of every song* in the book, and even with the songs that are no longer available (grayed out in the list), it runs 94 hours long.

And somehow, that's not nearly long enough.





*Regardless of what it says on the label, the list does not actually have every song in the book. I know this because I am now obsessed with a band called Gray, formed by Jean-Michel Basquiat and filmmaker Michael Holman. The band is apparently notable for live performances in which they played a shopping cart. I am absolutely going to find this noise and put it on the radio.

The shopping cart in question: : https://www.audreyhoman.com/wp-conten...

[V. Briceland · Rating 5 out of 5]

While my peers were considering their career aspirations, in the early half of the nineteen-eighties I spent my college days in a sleepy Southern town studying copies of the Village Voice and nurturing a secret and more frivolous goal: to move to New York City and hang out at Club 57 and Danceteria. Tim Lawrence's examination of New York club culture during a period that was a remarkable do-it-yourself cultural renaissance, obviously, appeals to the kid in me who exerted so much effort in studying the club lineups and culture of a city far from my immediate reach.

Lawrence takes care to explain how New York's musical sound, from 1980 to 1983, grew into a kaleidoscopic fusion that danced across and drew from multiple genres—disco, punk, dance, rock, rap—in a way that both expressed and celebrated the city's remarkable diversity and complexity. Party-seekers could enjoy the experimental post-punk venues of Club 57 and the Mudd Club just as easily as they might the slicker dancefloor of The Saint, while the DJs who kept the music pumping moved seamlessly from downtown to uptown and into the areas of the Bronx where nascent rappers and breakdancers honed their skills. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor covers a vast array of homegrown artists who propelled themselves to the cultural vanguard during the period, from Ann Manguson and Keith Haring and Basquiat, to boundary-pushing musicians such as David Byrne and the Tom Tom Club, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Blondie, Kid Creole, ESG, Afrika Bambaataa, and a very young Madonna, and studio names such as Larry Levan, Shep Pettibon, Bob Blank, Arthur Baker, and Michael Zilkha. Sadly, it was a giddy high destined to crash, when Manhattan's property developers pushed clubs and club-goers out of their reclaimed spaces, and the city exited a long depression into a period of exponential growth in land values. (It's no coincidence that Lawrence's golden period ends in 1983, when Trump Tower was erected.)

It's amazing that for such an ephemeral topic, and for a scene and era in which so many club-goers were decimated by the AIDS crisis just coming to the forefront, Lawrence has been able to do so much. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor reconstructs its topic through recollections, interviews, and remaining documents into a vital and vibrant social history. Yet despite its academic rigor, the book remains eminently readable. Most exciting of all is Lawrence's regular and periodic inclusion of set lists for various DJs and the clubs in which they played. In our current age of instant access to music, the ability to construct extended playlists of such seminal tunes is something of a vivid flashback to a brief and fleeting time of sheer musical joy . . . and something of a blessing.

[Bookforum Magazine]

"Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 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 real-time 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."

-Simon Reynolds on Tim Lawrence's Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 in the Fall 2016 issue of Bookforum

To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/

[Andrew Schirmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific study of downtown NYC dance/art/music/culture ferment 1980-83. Tim Lawrence (author of previous books on Mancuso's Loft and Arthur Russell) wisely dispenses with theorizing (until the epilogue) and hero-worship, letting the stories come together patchwork. What a time it was.

[Michael Dipietro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find this subject matter/era super compelling, but the writing style not very compelling. Could have used a really ruthless edit. Or, as is, I'd advise approaching it almost more like a reference book. I loved the parts of this that discussed a really interesting narrative or the process of creating an influential song, but a lot of it is all over the place and drops names and venues at such a whirlwind pace it's really hard to follow. Can't really beat having so many DJ playlists incorporated directly into the text though.

[Blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book exceeded my expectations. It's more than an in-depth look at the overlapping influence of DJs, artists, and music of NYC 80-83. It's 500 pages that weaves those subjects in and out of Reaganomics, gentrification, AIDS, sound system particularities, studio creativity, and competitive venue inventiveness that was unprecedented and will probably never be seen again. It was just as vivid as every trip I've taken to NYC. Read it!

[Darren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brings the exciting period to life well but collapses into minutiae as if the author was determined to include all details of his research. I wish it had been half the size.

[Domenica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I vacillated between three and four stars on this one. Let's just say 3.5 stars. Anyway, this book is exhaustive and packed with details about who orchestrated what parties, who was seen at parties and the many small and large art and music projects and genres that all crossed paths in the NY 80's underground. As other reviewers have noted, a lot of the included details didn't seem all that necessary. Yet, I can still appreciate just how much detail is here, even if some sections went on a bit. However, the book is entirely worth it for the playlists from former DJs alone.

The most exciting part to me were the sections about the development of 80's r&b and electro-funk and the focus on artists that are still under-appreciated - the Peech Boys, D-Train, Nona Hendryx, Gwen Guthrie, Visual, etc. Most pivotally, he lays out his thesis that the conditions of pre-real estate boom NY led to an environment in which musical genres and disciplines were barely constrained (although separations by race were still a thing, especially at clubs like The Saint.) He also gets into how much people like Ronald Reagan, mayor Ed Koch and *ugh* Trump made way for the gentrification that pushed artists and musicians out of the city in the 80's.

[Simon Armatage · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF... uhh basically 500 pages of "hey remember the 80s? they were super deep, man." every five minutes it's like, this dj sneezed in 1982 and changed music forever. dude like, chill... yes, the scene was important. yes, the downtown energy was insane. no, i did not need a dissertation on every third-rate loft party.

it's like he tried to turn every nightclub flier into a sacred text. i mean look i love the research, love the quotes, but holy hell, editing is not a crime!! not every anecdote needs its own spotlight, my man.

three stars because i did actually learn a lot. but reading this felt like getting cornered at a party by a dude who knows too much about literally everything and thinks you care as much as he does (good god that's probably what others feel when talking to me)

[John Kilvington · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a slog. I really wish the author hadn’t decided to shove every piece of information he thinks he knows about NYC music and clubs between 1980 and 1983 into one volume. There are maybe 4-5 good ideas for books in here buried under some questionable writing, poor (no?) editing, and tons of nonsense about things like speaker technology that have nothing to do with what I thought this was all about.

[Niall O'Conghaile · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very worthy follow up to my all-time favourite non-fiction book, Love Saves The Day, Tim Lawrence continues his Herculean task of meticulously documenting the birth and growth of modern dance music culture in New York City. This book is dense and packed full of information (as well as seemingly endless inspiraiton for YouTube playlists), and while I did have to put it down at points to digest it all, at no point did the writing ever falter or did I ever want to stop reading.

I was quite familiar with this period of musical history already, so for me the most enlightening chapters were those focussed on the flourishing graffiti scene and its effect on both the downtown post-punks and the Brons-based hip-hop artists. It was also great to read so much about The Saint, a hugely important and historic landmark for gay culture that often gets overlooked in favour of Paradise Garage, but also sad to find out how much racial and gender bias was involved in the club.

The only possible criticism I could have is that this time round the writing felt a bit more dry and less gossipy (though there is still plenty of that). Perhaps because Love Saves The Day was focussed more on a network of gay men that knew each other intimately? Life And Death..., by contrast, has a broader outlook with some much-needed social and political contexts. Very highly recommended.

[Ben Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough dissection of the explosive early 80s NY art and music scenes. As ever with this kind of thing, the players’ initial giddy euphoria gives way to their eventual disillusionment and death but wow, what a ride they had along the way. Tim Lawrence’s research is extensive and the book heaves with first-hand accounts of the party to end them all.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lawrence's detailed book catalogues the history of dance clubs, and the downtown scene in NYC from 1980-1983. For anyone interested in the music of the period, the dance clubs or the art scene that intersected with the music scene it is an important read. As he relates the scene in NYC during this period is remembered as one of those ebullient moments when creativity was at its peak.

"Life and Death aims to contribute to the "archive of the ephermal" evoked by the late Jose Munoz..." xi

"It was only during 1983 that another set of more anxiety inducing fears started to take shape as real estate inflation began to rocket, rents started their mountainous climb, and Wall Street headed skyward, which conspired to transform the city into a less democratic space." xiii

"Arson is the cremation ritual of a diseased housing system," lamented the Village Voice in June 1980.
"In housing, the final state of capitalism is arson." With heroin dealing taking root in the Lower East Side it was no wonder that some believed the city amounted to a study in nihilism, as was the case with punk vocalist Lydia Lunch, who described it as a "filthy spectre" constructed out of "blood-soaked bones." 3

"I thought that Marx was right when he said that history repeats itself but only as a farce." 131

"Meanwhile Jim Fouratt believed the music station [MTV] helped establish a culture in which participants started to want to experience something "they'd already seen on TV" rather than heat out in the spirit of adventure and discovery." 445

"Growing out of punk's encounter with art, the Mudd Club, Club 57, Danceteria, Pyramid, and Area forged a novel form of art-punk partying. Meanwhile the Saint carried the white gay scene to unprecedented levels of synesthetic dance-floor immersion. If the 1970s reinvented the parameters of party culture, then, the early 1980s scaled new levels of immersive socio-sonic possibility." 459

"Everybody was very much on the same page," argues Anna Magnuson. "That's why we were all down there. The place was such a cauldron of frenetic activity and a lot of people were having similar ideas at the same time." 463

"Tensions rose as crack consumption reached epidemic proportions in the city during 1984-a development that led to a doubling of homicides for black men aged fourteen to seventeen." 467

"With Reagan's support for deregulation, competition, and individualism making it difficult for the downtown scene to enter into a cycle of renewal, onetime commodities broker Jeff Koons became the next figure to break through after hhis 1988 show Banality presented large scale porcelain sculptures of figures such as Michael Jackson...that referenced the pop art/kitsch prerogatives of the Mudd Club, Club 57 and Danceteria-yet did so without their irony, humour, and political intent." 479

[Trevor Morrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally I had this down as a four-star review, but as I wrote this, it bumped it to a three. Let's get to the good: it really is THAT exhaustive of a reference to so many different influential musicians, venues, labels, DJs, artists etc, whether they be seismic to music as a whole today, or more of a wellspring of inspiration. It was thrilling reading about venues and parties of this incredibly formative period of NYC's past, complete with photos and playlists pulled from actual DJ setlists, and with dancer testimonials on what parties were really like back then. The microscope was placed on a wiiiide 1980-83 petri dish, and we covered each microorganism on it.
This level of detail however is what ultimately sinks the book down quite a bit. The author's need to pile the names of every single individual associated with a certain party, whether it be, again, a musician, or a DJ, or an artist, what have you, was incredibly tiring and made getting through large chunks of this a slog to get through. There were countless bloated paragraphs that I learned to immediately glaze over once I saw more than two proper nouns listed together. There were also many tangents that seemed very out of place, shoehorned into random sections.
Agreed that this could have used a hearty edit, along with a few spelling mistakes here and there in the latter half of the text. If this was half or 3/4s as long, it would have been a much more enjoyable reading experience. For now, think of this like a text book, rather than a casual nonfiction read.

[Steve Erickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Lawrence says in his intro, this is a great sequel to Will Hermes' history of 1970s New York music. It struck me that the scene he describes was open to new possibilities because it was full of genres that had apparently peaked but were actually evolving (disco, punk) or weren't quite formed yet (hip-hop.) As a result, Africa Bambaata could hang out at punk clubs and wind up inspired by Kraftwerk, while the rock band Liquid Liquid borrowed from sources as different as Bo Diddley, Latin music and No Wave (and eventually got sampled on Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines.") Instead of rock stars, much of New York nightlife at the time was based around nights hosted by DJs like David Mancuso and Larry Levan who only became legends in retrospect. Lawrence sees a political significance in this which was rarely articulated in the early '80s, but seems glaring in the hyper-gentrified New York of 2018. Nevertheless, when artists like Madonna, the Beastie Boys and Michael Jackson (whose "Beat It" may have been inspired by the dance-metal hybrid of Material's "Bustin' Out") drew from this scene but became huge stars in Middle America to people who knew nothing about it, the path to our present capitalist dystopia was probably set. Lawrence's epilogue emphasizes that life in New York in the early '80s was just difficult enough to scare away gentrifying stockbrokers and careerists but AIDS hadn't yet kicked in to full devastation and hard drugs had a limited impact.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

this is LONG, long buk: here is som quotes:

"the SOHO artists were interested in real estate, not art"

"the general hardcore rollerskating crowd were quite ethnic, but (steven greenberg) wanted it to be a white club, so he put a red rope outside & kept a lot of them outside"

"the 'black department,' of course, were only interested in 𝑔𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑜𝑛.. "

"but I knew I had to be good because shit would be thrown at me if I wasn't - if you were a woman you had to work twice as hard" --(DJ) sharon white

"𝘯𝘰 𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘵; 𝘯𝘰 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺" [NY Post]

"we shined as Individuals after 6 AM"

"they seemed drugged the whole time"

"we ended up losing at least five members to the disease" (AIDS/HTLV3)

"white gay dancers on both coasts were stuck in a musical time warp"

".. there was this Pectoral Fascism going on"

"I didn't pay for a drink in four years" [patti astor]

"it seemed like there were 500 new bands that started that week" (brian Eno; 1980)

"PS1 was full of the glamour & the grotesque of the music scene"

"I wasn't just a Disco Bunny, I was also into Urban Dance Music .. "

'(Paradise) Garage wasn't Disco at all" --Afrika Islam

"disco had gone ... I was playing Black Uhuru, Lamont Dozier; D Train.. "

"but what they don't understand is that she's eating cake & we're crumb-snatching. fuck Reaganomics"

[Jim Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent microscopic view of the New York club scene in the early 80's. So much innovation was taking place so quickly that it really takes a book like this to put it all together and make sense of it. Punk, disco, post-punk, NO Wave, Hip Hop--it was all one big jumble at clubs throughout the city and a great deal of cross pollination resulted in one of the most vital times in music history. A combination of rising real estate prices, AIDS fatalities, and the success of the downtown arts scene ended up ruining something many thought would go on forever!

[Randall Sawyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

As much the story of NYC's transformation into its present state, this chronicle of the explosion of artistic fertility in the first few years of the 80s hits on multiple levels. The book focuses on legendary dance clubs, their djs and the evolving disco, art punk, and hip hop scenes and related music but also explores issues of race, class, sexual identity, and especially the politico and economic forces that shaped a magical time in culture.

[2257ad · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough account of early 80s NYC dancefloors and the social / economic factors at play. Lawrence writes with clear prose, not too dense nor overly theoretical until the very end of the book in which it is tied up nicely. Plenty of playlists documenting the sounds some of the major players at the time were repping helps to give context

[Tom Eubanks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obsessively detailed almost to the point of encyclopedic, but required reading for anyone interested in the nightlife and culture of 1980s nightlife. House music, Keith Haring, J-M Basquiat, boom boxes, Larry Levan and Paradise Garage, Afrika Bambaataa, all of it.

[Kevin Coaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed documentation of a 4-year period dominated by electronica, new romantics and the birth of Hip Hop.

[Mills College Library]

781.64 L423 2016

[Lem Oppenheimer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe at times a bit too in depth - but I was inspired and informed by reading this book.

[Edd · Rating 5 out of 5]

thorough as fuck absolutely bangs

[Caroline]

skimmed this

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of incredible research and info. Can get a bit confusing and repetitive at times, but a great in depth look at a time and place in history that I wish I could've witnessed

[Myron Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor provides much insight into the New York City club scene of the 1980s. Lawrence's original plan was to review the entire decade but considering how much has happened during 1980-1983 it was a wise move to narrow his focus to those years. A major difference between this book and its predecessor Love Saves the Day is that the previous book often seemed more focused narratively on David Mancuso, and to a lesser extent Nicky Siano. This book has more of a narrative focus on the various NYC musical scenes which emerged within NYC's clubs during the period without focusing on any particular personality, although Jean-Michel Basquiat almost dominates the narrative at times. With a narrower chronological but a more expansive club focus, readers get a clearer view of the changes were going through in the early 1980s. Between all of the musical changes, the response to the disco backlash, the beginnings of the AIDS crisis, and the beginnings of modern gentrification, a lot has happened within that four year period which is still being felt today. Through the lens of NYC nightlife you get an interesting look at the beginnings of a gentrifying New York that’s more hostile to the working classes and friendly the finance sector. Lawrence says a lot about the people who drove nightlife during this period but interestingly this was the last group of individuals who came of age in New York City that were born before The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. This is something that many readers may miss since Lawrence never really points this out but that act was a major factor in a demographic shift in NYC, which did change the nature of NYC nightlife. Yeah, he wrote a lot about the shift of emphasis on music and art to the increasing emphasis on elitist escapism but it is worth noting that the influx of more immigrants outside of Europe and Untied States territories also affected New York City as a whole and its nightlife.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent writing from Tim Lawrence, as always. This is a deep dive into the party scene in NYC; even as someone who has no connection to that scene, I found plenty to engage me.

It doesn't usually take me a whole month to read a book, but this one is pretty huge--too heavy to take in my carryon bag on a plane or my work bag, too bulky to hold up while I was reading in bed, so I only read it while sitting up on the couch at home.

[Kurt Reighley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thoughtful playlists alone make this a must-have for any fan of the '80s NYC club scene, but Lawrence's detailed reporting and insights add so much more. Clever and insightful, this is one of the best music/social studies books I've read in aeons.

[Tronikyouth · Rating 4 out of 5]

great document of the early 80's in NYC