It's an interesting period, but I think the most interesting part about that era is all the art that came out of New York. The city was literally decaying since families had left for the suburbs and no money was going into its infrastructure, but the benefit was that artists could live in the city for almost nothing.
The late 60s of course saw the Stonewall Riots, which were really early LGBT protests. It also had the Warhol art scene.
Hip Hop first emerged in The Bronx around '73, among the Jamaican immigrant population. Discos were popular, but they cost a lot of money to get into, so people would just get boom boxes and throw block parties, dancing in the street. The Jamaicans brought with them dub techniques from reggae, which included manipulating records to make them repeat the catchiest parts of the songs, emphasize the bass and percussion, and "scratch" records. Street poetry was popular too, especially with people like Gil-Scott Heron and The Last Poets. So people literally recited poetry to the dub music, and hip hop was born. They created their own street dance, now known as break dancing, and their own style of graffiti art.
Punk emerged about a year later in Manhattan's lower east side. It had its roots in post-Warhol/Velvet Underground art bands like the New York Dolls and Suicide. But since no record companies were looking for local talent since everyone was obsessed with California, locals just started forming their own bands and playing at clubs, like the Ramones and The Dictators. There were also a lot of poets and artists gravitating toward New York because of Warhol and Beat poets like Burroughs and Ginsberg, and these poets and artists also found a home with this local rock scene, forming bands like Talking Heads, Television, and the Patti Smith Group. Notably, one of these poets, Richard Hell, was interested in looking as outrageous as possible, so he started spiking his hair, ripping his shirts, and putting safety pins everywhere, inadvertently inventing the punk look.
Disco also emerged pretty much at the exact same time. But local disco was a lot different than the pop music of the time. Since they weren't designing it for the radio, they just made a purely functional style for dancing, which was all about a repetitive beat; this style eventually evolved into house music, and EDM more generally.
I also think there was a Cuban music revival in New York at the time, but I don't know much about it, except that the punk band Mink DeVille seem to have been into it.
26 Oct 2017, 11:20 am
