The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Glitter Queens Who Revolutionized Culture

Description

Kembrew McLeod

Hardcover |15.24 x 3.18 x 22.86 cm | 368 pp

Harry N. Abrams | 2018 | 9781419732522

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the inhabitants ofa small, roughly one-square-mile area of lowerManhattan were smashing the status quo ofmusic, art, film, performance, and sexuality.These profound transformations were set inmotion by a tightknit community of theatrical performers, playwrights, poets, musicians, video-makers, visual artists, activists, and genderrebels who made sparks fly when they brushedup against each other.

Paving the way for everything from punk rock, disco, indie media, andperformance art to the gradual acceptance ofgay and transgender life, this motley assemblage expressed themselves without a thought aboutcareer development, marketing, or sound business plans – and, most importantly, they did itcollectively in the spirit of fun and adventure.

In The Downtown Pop Underground, authorKembrew McLeod takes a kaleidoscopic tourof New York City during this era and, for thefirst time, shows the deep interconnectionsbetween all the alternative worlds that flourished in the basement theatres, dive bars, concert halls, lofts, and dingy tenements. He linksthe artists, writers, and performers who createdchange, and while some of them didn’t become
everyday names, others, like Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, and Debbie Harry, did become icons.

Ambitious in scope and scale, the book is largely fueled by the actual voices of many of the pivotal characters who broke down the entrenched cultural divisions between high and low, gay and straight, and art and commerceand whose impact is still felt today.

‘Downtown New York in the latter half of the twentieth century was so much more than
a Warhol print and a CBGB-OMFUG T-shirt. Mcleod tracked down more than a hundred
denizens of that freaky bohemian milieu to tell the stories most people don’t know. The
Downtown Pop Underground breathes new fire into a familiar history and is a must-read for anyone who wants to know how American bohemia really happened. Ann Powers, critic, NPR Music

‘The Dowontown Pop Underground honours those who were at the forefront of a movement that transformed our understandings of sexuality and artistic freedom.’ Lily Tomlin

‘Having walked these streets as a child, I can attest to the visceralaccuracy of the book’s portrayal of a time when artists affected a true change in the waythat we view our culture and ourselves’ Tim Robbins