Review: New York, New Music, 1980-1986, Museum of the City of New York
Reviewed by Jeffrey Escoffier
There’s been a flurry of interest, in recent years, about the incredibly creative years of New York City during the 1970s and early 80s — from books, (Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect (2017) by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore; Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront (2019) by Jonathan Weinberg; Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics (2019) by Frances Richard, and Fiona Anderson’s Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (2019), etc.); art shows (about Andy Warhol, Alvin Baltrop, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Gordon MattaClark, the Piers, Studio 54); documentaries (on CBGB, Studio 54, the Velvet Underground), TV series (The Deuce, The Get Down); and film festivals (the Drop Dead film series at the Film Forum that included Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Cruising etc.). More unusually perhaps, there have also been a series of museum exhibits on various aspects of New York’s musical life from 1974 to 1984. Since 2019 there have been four museum shows that have on focused on New York’s rock music scene: on Leonard Cohen at the Jewish Museum; the instruments of rock and roll at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; on punk graphics at the Museum of Arts and Design; and on sexual themes in punk rock at the Museum of Sex. We have only just begun to come to terms with the cultural vitality that flourished in New York during the 1970s and 80s.
Now the Museum of the City of New York has opened an ongoing exhibition, New York, New Music, 1980-1986, covering the full range of new music from modernist avant-garde to rock — punk, new wave, no wave & noise — to salsa, hip hop, and pop. The exhibit not only commemorates the numerous musical pioneers and performers that thrived in New York during this period, celebrates the dozens of venues that provided stages for the musical performances, and shows the interaction between musicians, visual artists, designers, and cultural entrepreneurs, it also situates the music of 1980s New York in time and place. Organized around fourteen pivotal moments — performances by Grandmaster Flash, Madonna, and Blondie — the Museum has created a series of tableaus that feature photographs, audio clips, a mix of found footage and video art, archival film, clips from public-access programs, and MTV interviews against a backdrop of an economically devastated New York just beginning to recover to highlight the depth and vitality of the “community-driven musical renaissance” that had swept the city in a period of economic decline.
In the early 1970s, three broad streams of new music genres in New York City — loft jazz pioneered by saxophonist Sam Rivers at his Rivbea studio; experimental post-Cagean modern music around John Zorn; and punk and new wave music that emerged downtown around CBGB, the Mudd Club, and dozens of other performance spaces. These were soon joined by hip hop, Latin music, and other varieties of rock that originated on the streets and in neighborhoods around the city.
By the 1980s, as the city began to recover economically from the fiscal crisis of 1975-77 and many of these musical genres had mixed with one another, the city entered one of its most ferociously intense and creative periods — musical developments that were nurtured in underground clubs, party venues, and art galleries. The exhibit moves from an event at the Mudd Club in 1981 that hosted an art exhibit (of graffiti) and a hip hop performance by the Fantastic Five with DJ Afrika Bambaataa; a Talking Heads concert in Central Park in 1980; to Kid Creole and the Coconuts (1980) and Madonna (1982) at Danceteria; from John Zorn at Roulette (1984) to Keith Haring’s first Party of Life at the Paradise Garage in 1984. Built-in headphones are available throughout the exhibition, or if you prefer you can bring your own headphones to insert in the plugs provided. The Museum has even put together a playlist on their website with samples for you to listen to before you arrive: https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/new-york-new-music.
New York City has been the creative center of the popular music business since the late 19th century. Centered on a few streets in the Flower District (W. 28 & 29th Streets, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue) and known as Tin Pan Alley, music publishers and songwriters located there dominated American popular music up until the 1950s when rock & roll emerged as the new mainstream of popular music and shifted its business center to the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, between W. 49th and 50th Streets. In the 1930s sheet music was supplanted by the phonograph, radio, and motion pictures.
New York’s economic collapse in the 1970s led to a new wave of reorganization in the popular music industry. By the mid-seventies, music of all kinds — rock, disco, hip hop, salsa, jazz, and even modern music — had proliferated across the city, emerging from neighborhoods in the South Bronx (salsa and hip hop), Lower Manhattan (disco, The Velvet Underground), Queens (the Ramones), and Staten Island (Wu-Tang Clan). The Museum’s exhibit opened to mark MTV’s 40th anniversary in June 1981. With MTV the music business had entered a new phase. Its broadcasting of wall-to-wall music not only revolutionized the industry and it also took the product of local communities throughout New York City and broadcast it across the country.
This exhibit is also about how music drove the intense nightlife in the city during the early 1980s. While Studio 54 closed in 1979, and was by no means the site of musical innovation, it had dominated nightlife in New York City during the 1970s. Yet CBGB, the Mudd Club, Club 57, and Paradise Garage continued to have prominent places in New York City nightlife and continued to remain musically vital into the 1980s. These are the sites of pivotal moments in the museum’s show. In 1980 CBGB hosted DNA and Gray and the bands helped to launch No Wave — a defiantly punk style that also attracted experimental filmmakers, visual artists, and avant-garde classical musicians.
Danceteria, which opened in 1979, was another of the dominant venues for music, dancing and performances. Madonna’s debut took place at the club in 1982. But the Smiths, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Depeche Mode, the Butthole Surfers, the B-52s, Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J all performed there at some point in the club’s history.
The Mudd Club — long conceived as the antithesis of Studio 54 — which issued membership cards in “The Mudd College of Deviant Behavior,” and which included both an art gallery and performance space, sparked a new movement that featured both graffiti art and hip hop.
Modeled on The Loft, David Mancuso’s private disco club, Paradise Garage, that operated from 1977 to 1987, pioneered the modern dance club, which elevated the DJ as the central performer. Historian Alice Echols has argued that disco spoke to those not included in sixties rock culture: African Americans, women, and gay men. One of the Museum’s pivotal scenes focuses on Keith Haring’s first Party of Life held at the Paradise Garage. Haring, a street artist and a cultural heir of Andy Warhol, organized a birthday event that featured art exhibits and performers such as John Sex and Madonna.
New York also supplied the musical brew that mixed Cuban and Puerto Rican ingredients into salsa. Just a few years ago, in 2017, the Museum mounted an exhibit called Rhythm and Power: Salsa in New York which was devoted to showing the city’s role in the development of salsa. The current show brings back Hector Lavoe and some of the other Latin stars of the Fania record label — founded in the Bronx and initially sold out of cars.
I got to hear a lot of exciting music I didn’t know. And another wonderful thing about this show is that it is contextualized by other exhibits at the Museum. For instance, both New York at Its Core and Activist New York provide more information about the political and economic context that shaped music during the early 1980s. All in all, New York, New Music, 1980-1986 is an excellent introduction to the rich musical history of New York City in the 1970s and 80s.
New York, New Music, 1980-1986 opened on June 11, 2021 and is ongoing at the Museum of the City of New York
Jeffrey Escoffier teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and writes on the history of sexuality and on the history of New York City in the 1970s. His most recent book is Sex, Society and the Making of Pornography (Rutgers University Press, 2021)