Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews by Simon Reynolds

Simon Reynolds’s collection of interviews and essays, Totally Wired, sheds further light on the author’s definitive book on post-punk, 2006’s Rip It Up and Start Again. In its best chapters, Totally Wired is so conversational and discursive that it’s possible to get lost in all the interconnections, gossip, and reminiscences without having read Rip It Up first. The irony here, of course, is that Reynolds—now in Los Angeles after nearly two decades in New York (and, full disclosure, a friend)—has railed at length against rock history’s tendency to “auto-cannibilise its own necrotic myth-flesh.”

culture April 01, 2010

Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture by Alice Echols

For a musical style once purported to suck and still decried as mindless, disco has spawned a lot of thoughtful writing, especially in the past decade. In 2004, Tim Lawrence published the lovingly researched Love Saves the Day, a history set primarily in gay 1970s New York clubs such as David Mancuso’s invite-only Loft, generally considered the music’s birthplace. A year later, Peter Shapiro brought out Turn the Beat Around, which was heavier on both social context—the “Rotting Apple” of ’70s New York—and discussion of the songs, some of which you’ve probably never heard of: one passage sifts