Lawrence — Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor

Author: Tim Lawrence
Title: Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983
Year: 2016
Type: Academic book (Duke University Press)

Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983 is a book by the cultural historian Tim Lawrence, published by Duke University Press in September 2016. Lawrence argues that New York’s early-1980s scenes grew in the room deindustrialization left, began to come apart as finance and rising rents remade the city, and showed what party culture could do. The book follows the city’s relatively separate post-disco, post-punk and hip hop scenes as they came to mix, through clubs such as Club 57, Danceteria and the Paradise Garage, in four parts, one for each year from 1980 to 1983. Its evidence is interviews and email exchanges with some 130 participants and the writing of journalists who covered the scene at the time. Reviewers praised its research. Simon Reynolds, in Bookforum, found no fuller account of the period, and Megan Pugh, in the Village Voice, found its cast at times staggering, which she took to be part of the point. Emily Colucci, in Filthy Dreams, called it “essential yet flawed,” faulting its brief treatment of AIDS and of the closing of many clubs.

Lawrence, a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London, published the book with Duke University Press in September 2016.¹ In its preface he writes, “This book makes three core arguments.” The first is that “New York experienced a community-driven cultural renaissance during the early 1980s that stands as one of the most influential in its, and perhaps in any city’s, history.” The second is that “the renaissance was rooted in opportunities that came to the fore during New York’s shift from industrialism to postindustrialism, and it began to unravel when New York assumed the character of a neoliberal city organized around finance capital, gentrification, real estate inflation, and social regulation.” The third is that “although party culture is routinely denigrated as a source of mindless hedonism and antisocial activity, it revealed its social, cultural, and even economic potential during the period examined here.”² He adds that none of this means the city achieved a utopia, and that “the era’s indiscipline” stands at the center of the book.²

The book draws on interviews and email conversations with “some 130 participants,” most conducted by Lawrence, and on the accounts of journalists who wrote about the scene as it happened.² It is in four parts, one for each year, from “The Recalibration of Disco” in 1980 to “The Genesis of Division” in 1983, and its chapters move through the city’s venues, among them Club 57, Danceteria and the Garage.³ Duke’s description says the “relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes” came to mix and feed one another before rising rents, Reagan-era economics, corporate money and AIDS ended the period.¹

Reviewers praised the book’s research, and several qualified the praise. Among the excerpts Duke collects, Reynolds, in Bookforum, called the book “the most intensive mapping of this brief era of New York subculture” so far and wrote that “the book’s strength is its depth of research.” Michaelangelo Matos, in the New York Times, wrote that the book supplies DJ playlists to follow up and that the early 1980s had been little explored. He found that Lawrence, for all his minutiae, “delivers a story with some sweep.” Sasha Frere-Jones, in the New Yorker, thought the book was for readers who already care about its subjects, from disco and hip-hop to the city’s real estate, and that they would gain from it.¹

Pugh, in the Village Voice in October 2016, wrote that “the cast of characters in the book can be staggering, the exhaustive accounts overwhelming,” and that this was part of the point: “He wants a crowded and motley party.” She praised its research and its detail.⁴ Hillegonda Rietveld, in Times Higher Education, called it “a treasure trove” for readers interested in the melting pot of the period.⁵ For Colucci it was “an essential yet flawed reading for fellow nightlife obsessives.” Because the book stops in 1983, she wrote, the closing of many of the clubs and the deaths of figures such as Larry Levan and Klaus Nomi are pushed into its conclusion, though they “deserve more than a postscript.” Even with the conclusion, in her view, the brief “Sex and Dying” chapter falls short of capturing “how rapidly party promoters and artists became caretakers and activists.”⁶

Key contributions

• An account of New York’s post-disco, post-punk and hip hop scenes from 1980 to 1983 as a period of convergence.
• A year-by-year structure, from the recalibration of disco in 1980 to the beginnings of division in 1983.
• The end of the period traced to rising rents, Reagan-era economics, corporate money and AIDS.

See also

• Love Saves the Day — Lawrence’s 2003 history of American dance music culture in the 1970s
• Hold On to Your Dreams — Lawrence’s 2009 biography of Arthur Russell, whose downtown years overlap this period
• Mutant disco — a genre of the period
• Downtown scene — the punk bands, DJs, painters and hip hop artists who shared Manhattan’s clubs from 1978 to 1983