[ANPPOM-Lista] The New Yorker: Tim Lawrence's "Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor: 1980-1983"

Qua Set 28 23:27:46 BRT 2016

When Rent Was Cheap and Dance Music Reigned
By Sasha Frere-Jones
<http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/sasha-frere-jones> , September 27,
2016

Halfway through Tim Lawrence’s “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor:
1980-1983,” a six-hundred-page book about four years in the life of a dozen
New York City clubs, there’s a short chapter called “Shrouded Abatements
and Mysterious Deaths.” It describes two forces that began warping New York
City in the early eighties, neither of them musical, and it elegantly
explains how a period of artistic flourishing was squashed.

The first of these forces, chronologically speaking, was money. More
specifically, Lawrence points to a system of tax abatements pushed for by
the city’s mayor at the time, Ed Koch. Designed to keep big companies in
the city, these abatements transformed the New York real-estate market.
They also marked the forefront of a larger national change—Lawrence quotes
from William K. Tabb’s “The Long Default,” a study of the fiscal crisis of
the nineteen-seventies, which was published in 1982: “The shift to
neoconservative reprivatization that is proceeding rapidly under the Reagan
administration is, as we have said, merely the New York scenario writ
large,” Tabb wrote. (These abatements have lately been in the news again,
because Koch tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent Donald Trump from getting
one for Trump Tower. The *Times* reported earlier this month that, in the
years since, Trump “has reaped at least $885 million in tax breaks
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/nyregion/donald-trump-tax-breaks-real-estate.html?_r=0>
.”)

Two pages after that remark from Tabb, Lawrence quotes from one of the
first reports on an unnamed disease
<http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html>,
published by the *Times* in July of 1981. “The cause of the outbreak is
unknown, and there is as yet no evidence of contagion,” Lawrence K. Altman
wrote. “But the doctors who have made the diagnoses, mostly in New York
City and the San Francisco Bay area, are alerting other physicians who
treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem in an effort to help
identify more cases and to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy
treatment.”

Money and AIDS laid waste to most of the glories that Lawrence documents
before and after this slim chapter; you could plausibly go further and say
that the New York of the early eighties simply disappeared in the wake of
these two forces. As a New Yorker whose teen-age years overlapped with that
period, and who spent many weekends at the Danceteria on Twenty-first
Street, I may be biased in favor of that view. And if 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.

Lawrence is a professor of cultural studies at the University of East
London. His writing is conversational, and the pacing here is brisk,
despite the author’s tendency to repeat salient points about certain clubs
and characters. (You will know the difference between the sound system at
the Loft and that of Paradise Garage when you are done.) This is Lawrence’s
third book about roughly the same time period and topic, which is the kind
of valuable longitudinal commitment that academia facilitates. The previous
two, “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 contain detours away from the city, but all
three books carefully trace the growth patterns of dance music in New York
during the seventies and eighties.

One of the key points that “Life and Death” makes, through the aggregation
of eyewitness accounts, is that some genre terms actively confuse history.
“Dance” is really the only useful term available if you want to
characterize the social aspect of an American-pop continuum that piles up
like so, over several decades: R. & B.-disco-rap-hip-hop-R. & B. Malcolm
McLaren’s single “World’s Famous,” for instance, a staple for New York
street dancers in 1983, sampled a squelchy, half-time breakdown from the
1979 single “Rocket in the Pocket,” by the disco star Cerrone—and that
sample was then used in a grip of rap songs during the eighties. In that
decade, in an attempt to mirror this blend more accurately, *Billboard*
began toying with its Disco Action chart, changing it to the “Hot
Dance/Disco” chart, and then dropping the word “Disco” altogether. It was
obvious people were dancing at venues like Mudd Club, Paradise Garage, and
Danceteria. It was not obvious what they would dance to, or if the dancers
themselves would even agree to be part of a cohort with a name.

But the d.j.s of the time knew they were operating in a zone between
genres. Afrika Islam was the right-hand man to Afrika Bambaataa, and called
himself “the son of Bambaataa, none hotter,” on his seminal hip-hop radio
show, “The Zulu Beat.” Lawrence quotes Islam as saying, “We were anti-disco
because disco was John Travolta and *Saturday Night Fever* and Studio 54.”
He goes on to say that “we didn’t look like John Travolta, but it didn’t
mean we didn’t listen to the music or dance to it. . . . A lot of disco
records became hip hop classics.” Islam’s sentiment is echoed in “Life and
Death” by various participants who followed the same principle. B-boys from
the Bronx and painters from Brooklyn and entrepreneurs from Germany all
gravitated toward music that was made for dancing, however it was tagged.

It’s true that some rejections of disco were simply sublimations of racism
and homophobia. (Many of the people who helped smash records at Steve
Dahl’s Disco Demolition event, which took place at Comiskey Park, in July
of 1979, did not bother to sublimate their feelings.) But for many New
Yorkers rejecting disco wasn’t about race or gender; it was about what
disco had come to signal: dumb wealthy people and the dumber clubs that
catered to those people, and a narrow, tamed version of music they knew as
fire.

The ending of the dream period Lawrence describes in “Life and Death” was
both complex and miserable. He cites a piece
<http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/weekinreview/is-the-city-building-its-tax-base-or-eroding-it.html>
in the *Times* from July of 1981, after Koch’s tax abatements had kicked
in, in which a tax consultant says, “There is virtually no building going
on in the city which is not subsidized.” Before that, rent was cheap and
entrepreneurs could move from one venue to the other without much
interference from the city. Enormous clubs like Area, intended to be the
spiritual heirs to Mudd Club and its ilk, were overrun by what the
performer Ann Magnuson called “awful Wall Street frat boys.” At the other
end of the axis, crack began to undo communities not graced by the presence
of Wall Streeters, as the real-estate developers lived on an ascending
X-curve of profit.

AIDS was even more destructive, as far as an artistic cohort is concerned.
After AIDS, the city lost much of its legendary heterodoxy. Although
“intersectionality” hadn’t entered the lexicon
<http://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/intersectionality-meaning>,
it was, in the period Lawrence examines, happening organically on the dance
floor. Straight crowds were being mentored and tutored by people of color
and the L.G.B.T. community, who were sharing records with each other before
those crowds arrived. Even if the scene largely consisted of apolitical
enthusiasts, the politics of the downtown hybridity were a conversation
topic, as Lawrence reveals. The curator and connector Diego Cortez (born
James Curtis) “abandoned the SoHo art scene because it consisted of white
people drinking white wine in gallery rooms that were painted white.”
Initially, the Queens artist Lady Pink thought that the director Charlie
Ahearn, who was then working on his movie “Wild Style,” might be “just
another entrepreneur trying to profit from graffiti.” (She later decided
his interest was legitimate.) But, in general, the goings on felt largely
unsupervised. No scene like downtown 1981 could flourish today under the
eye of the Internet. Chi Chi Valenti playing fast and loose with Nazi
regalia at Mudd Club? There would be trouble.

Lawrence chases most of his stories to their concrete end. Though I saw
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five being booed when they opened for the
Clash at Bond’s in May of 1981, I had no idea until now that they returned
for a second opening slot at Bond’s, and got through it without major
incident. This is the beauty of research with a generous deadline:
footnotes can one-up the text.

The final blanket over all the fantastic noise in “Life and Death” was
thrown in the nineties. It was then that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani resurrected
an antique law requiring clubs to have “cabaret licenses.” This allowed
police to shut down clubs that were ostensibly producing the kind of
late-night traffic that might disturb a new breed of New York tenant—the
sort of person who preferred order over, well, New York.

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at *The New Yorker* as a staff writer and
pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.
https://goo.gl/wyknTb

-- 
carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)
professor de musicologia ufmg
professor colaborador ppgm-unirio
www.proibidao.org
ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini <http://goo.gl/KMV98I>
www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2
scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ