He studied a doctorate in English literature at Columbia University by day, and clubs by night.
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Lawrence first escaped to New York in the early 90s at a sensitive time in his life, following the sudden death of both parents and an early crisis of professional faith at BBC Newsnight. He also credits the city’s house music scene for his initial focus on the meaning of the dancefloor. Life and Death is the third of Lawrence’s books about the city’s rhythms, joining the disco scene-redefining Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music, 1970-79, and the quasi-biography, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92. The wiry 49-year-old may have grown up in the London exurb of Winnersh and teaches cultural studies at the University of East London, but there’s little question that New York’s late 20th-century nightlife has served as his muse. “There was always a sense of New York in my imagination,” said Lawrence in one of our numerous conversations during his visit. Better yet, you could dance to that transformation. In fact, through sheer circumstance, over the course of a single week in October 2016 you could watch and listen to urban folklore cement as history. At House of Yes, one of this tale’s endless postscripts played out as real-time legend. Reading Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor as a clubber in the city is to reflect not only on what’s been lost over the past three decades, but on how the sounds, events and characters at the center of Lawrence’s story still influence NYC’s nightlife. The scene played out like a simulacrum of the very bygone moment that Lawrence’s book documents. Flash’s skills at cutting up records, and his interpretation of the cross-genre flow at the heart of the city’s original sound (disco, rap, funk, dance-punk, Latin, mutant electronic, all in the mix) were rapturous and timeless. Understandably, the packed House of Yes crowd – an impressive congregation of young and old, black and white, straight and gay – went wild. (And is a wonderful fact-meets-fiction preamble to Lawrence’s historical account.) So, while Flash’s stock as a local legend never fell off, it’s been a minute since it paid such high market dividends. Now he is one of the executive producers of The Get Down, Baz Luhrmann’s colorful Netflix show that recasts the creation myth of rap and modern DJing as a fairytale musical. In the mid-1970s, he helped perfect record-scratching as one of the cornerstones of the Bronx culture that came to be known as hip-hop.
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Billing itself as part disco, part “circus theatre”, it features DIY décor, psychedelic projections, dressed-for-cabaret employees and an audience always ready to let loose.įlash, meanwhile, is riding his third wind.
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Unlike many New York clubs in the post-Rudy Giuliani era, House of Yes tries hard with its musical bookings, setting and entertainment acumen. Though there’s rarely a lack of nighttime activity in the city that supposedly never sleeps, on paper it seemed like an especially great match. On the eve of a week that would see New York City host a handful of events to celebrate and spotlight the release of Tim Lawrence’s new book, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 – a study of what the author convincingly identifies as the city’s “cultural renaissance”, when hip-hop, new wave and dance music collided in clubs like Mudd and the Paradise Garage – one of the book’s characters was making a rare Brooklyn appearance at a space in Bushwick. T he timing and location of the night’s entertainment – Grandmaster Flash at House of Yes – was entirely coincidental.