Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever [Paperback]

A vivid, dramatic account of how half a dozen kinds of modern music--punk rock, art rock, disco, salsa, rap, minimalist classical--emerged in new forms and cross-pollinated all at once in the middle seventies in NYC.

Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinventedblock by block, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless.

Will Hermes'sLove Goes to Buildings on Fireis the first book to tell the full story of the era's music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year's Day 1973 to New Year's Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGB and the Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation.

Practically every paragraph about music here is also about something else just as fascinating--race, city planning, ambition, drugs, hair-dos. Braiding intricate research with his own teenage memories, Hermes has a bird's eye view of a great city, and has his ear to the ground. Sarah Vowell

By simply putting things in chronological order, Will Hermes shows just how astonishing New York City's music was in the 1970s. But he does morlóÅ