Books by Tim Lawrence
Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92 (Forthcoming, autumn 2009)
Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, the first biography to be written about the downtown musician Arthur Russell, has gone into
production with Duke University Press and will be published in the
autumn of 2009. Developed around exhaustive interviews with Russell's
closest collaborators, friends and family, and including eight-seven Read more »
Love Saves the Day / Japanese Translation
Love
Saves the Day has been translated into Japanese:
＜ガラージ＞＜ロフト＞＜12インチ＞＜ノンストップ・ミックス＞…
現在の隆盛の礎となった、NYを軸とした70年代のDJ/クラブ/レコード業界まわりの史実を、オリジナル・インタビュー、“ダンス・クラシックス”リス
トを通して徹底検証した決定版！DJカルチャー参 Read more »
Love Saves the Day / Italian Translation
"Love
Saves the Day", uscito in prima edizione nel 2003 per la Duke
University Press, e' un libro secondo noi importante, giunto a colmare
una lacuna evidente nella critica musicale e piu' in genere nella
critica del costume. Infatti, sebbene non Read more »
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79
Opening with David Mancuso's groundbreaking "Love Saves the Day" Valentine's
party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music
culture in the 1970s -- from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell's
Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire
transmission through America's suburbs and urban hotspots... Read more »
New from Tim Lawrence
Kiss Me Again: Mapping the Life and Legacy of Arthur Russell (NYU, 10 October 2009)
The
composer and musician Arthur Russell lived and worked in New York
between 1973 and 1992. During his time in the city he performed and
recorded compositional music, pop music, disco, new wave Read more »
Who's Not Who in the Downtown Crowd (Or: Don't Forget About Me)
It's becoming commonplace to note that New York City in the 1970s and
the first half of the 1980s was a place of remarkable musical
innovation across a range of sounds. During this period, hip hop
evolved in the boroughs and then made inroads into the city; punk, new
wave and no wave transformed the aesthetics and culture of rock; the
jazz loft scene that Read more »
Lucky Cloud Sound System (i-D)
Lucky
Cloud Sound System is rooted in the ethos of the house party, the
social potential of audiophile equipment, and the willingness of David
Mancuso to travel to London to put on parties four times a year. The Read more »
Disco Madness: Walter Gibbons and the Legacy of Turntablism and Remixology (Journal of Popular Music Studies)
This
story begins with a skinny white DJ mixing between the breaks of
obscure Motown records with the ambidextrous intensity of an octopus on
speed. It closes with the same man, debilitated and virtually blind,
fumbling for gospel records as he spins up eternal hope in a fading
dusk. In Read more »
Wild Combination (ICA)
The London premiere of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
-- a film by Matt Wolf -- will take place at the ICA on 26 September
2008. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director, hosted by
myself, and a launch party in the ICA bar featuring an Arthur Russell
inspired DJ set from Twitch of Optimo. The invite runs: Wild Read more »
Feminist / Queer Desires (Goldsmiths)
I
was invited by Angela McRobbie, Professor of Communications at
Goldsmiths College, to present a paper on the theme of "Disco and the
Queer Dance Floor" at the third annual Gender and Theory Conference,
which took place on Wednesday 11 June 2008. The conference was
excellent; how could it not be, with Angela talking in a line-up.... Read more »
Arthur Russell / Rhizomatic Musicianship (Liminalities)
During the 1970s and early 1980s, a diverse group of artists,
musicians, sculptors, video filmmakers and writers congregated in
downtown New York and forged a radical creative network... Read more »
David Mancuso and the Loft (Placed)
The following article and interview was published in Placed, an new
Berlin-based magazine, in 2007. Conducted in London on the eve of Lucky
Cloud Sound System's spring party of that year, the interview... Read more »
Arthur Russell interview (Blow Up)
On
25 January 2007 I was interviewed by Daniela Cascella for the March
2007 edition of Blow Up (Italy). The full transcript of the interview
follows, along with a PDF of the article. Daniela Cascella: Setting out
on a new project always implies a great deal of research in which a
number of ideas/feelings/expectations are met... Read more »
In Defence of Disco (Again) (New Formations)
"Disco"
is the overburdened name given to the culture that includes the
spaces (discotheques) that were organised around the playback of
recorded music by a DJ (disc jockey); the social practice of individual
freeform dancing that was established within this context; and the
music genre that crystallised within this social setting between 1970... Read more »
"I Want to See All My Friends At Once": Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco (Journal of Popular Music Studies)
Disco, it is commonly understood, drummed its drums and twirled its
twirls across an explicit gay-straight divide. In the beginning, the
story goes, disco was gay: Gay dancers went to gay clubs, celebrated
their newly liberated status by dancing with other men, and discovered
a vicarious voice in the... Read more »
Disco: Liberation of the Body (Liberazione)
In the popular imagination, disco conjures up images of Studio 54, the
celebrated New York 1970s nightclub, where hoards of would-be dancers
queued up on a nightly basis, waving their arms frantically in an
attempt to... Read more »
Discotheque: Haçienda
Histories of UK club culture often tell the following story. Before the
summer of 1987, rare groove ruled, beats-per-minute were slow and dance
floor energy was low. Then a gaggle of London lads went to Ibiza,
tasted the Ecstasy-dance cocktail, and... Read more »
Acid - Can You Jack?
House
music is disco's revenge. So said Frankie Knuckles, reflecting on the
charged history of the genre, which emerged in hometown Chicago in the
middle of the 1980s. In this case home, to quote Gil Scott-Heron, is where the hatred is, or... Read more »