Posted March 9, 200718 yr Perfect playlist: New York In the 1970s, a city in crisis inspired music from disco to punk. By Bernadette McNulty 1. Lou Reed Walk on the Wild Side, 1972 By the early 1970s, New York was a city in meltdown: bankrupt, abandoned, awash with heroin. The music scene had moved on to sunny California. But New York's cheap rents and empty lofts made an artistic playground for the likes of Andy Warhol. The first hit single from Lou Reed, former singer with Warhol's Velvet Underground, was a window to this underbelly, full of Warhol's drag queens enacting their own version of the American dream. 2. The Beginning of the End Funky Nassau, 1972 The atmosphere of sexual freedom, boosted by the Stonewall riots and liberalisation of the licensing laws meant that a new breed of DIY dance club sprang up downtown. The Loft and the Gallery saw a utopian mix of races and cultures gather in sweaty proximity to dance to a wild mix of Latin, R & B and rock-and-roll rhythms. To extend the groove, DJs started to use two turntables and the disco was born. 3. New York Dolls Jet Boy, 1973 No one was quite ready for the first band to emerge from the anarchy of 1970s New York. Refugees from across the East River, looking like the Rolling Stones in drag, and pumping out angry, primitive rock, the Dolls valued attitude over music. They were adored in the city but horrified the rest of the US. "We single-handedly lowered the tone of the whole island," as singer David Johansen put it. 4. Television Marquee Moon, 1977 The emergence of the Dolls lit the touchpaper for the city's music scene. Inspired by their revolutionary approach, Television founders Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell found a struggling downtown country bar, CBGBs, and in 1974 set up a residency where they could hone their stripped-down take on rock and roll. Patti Smith would see Verlaine here, fall in love and create her own avant-garde mix of poetry and primitive guitars, soon to be followed by the likes of Talking Heads and Blondie. 5. Ramones Blitzkrieg Bop, 1976 "Punk" was the name of a New York magazine that featured the new underground bands, but it was the furious, two-minute garage-rock assaults of the Ramones that heralded a look and a sound that would turn into a 30-year musical movement. Sets at CBGBs led them to be the first of the New York bands after Patti Smith to sign a record deal, and the new music of the city started to filter into the rest of America and across the Atlantic. 6. Bernard Herrmann Theme to 'Taxi Driver', 1976 New York's hottest young director, Martin Scorsese, chose cinema's most revered film composer to score his major breakthrough. Herrmann turned to the earlier jazz age of the city, using mournful saxophones and menacing percussion to underpin the atmosphere of paranoia. He died the night he completed this soundtrack. 7. Odyssey Native New Yorker, 1977 While punk was taking off downtown, uptown disco was taking over the world. Brooklyn-based film Saturday Night Fever became a global hit but it was the arrival of the first superclub, Studio 54, that made the damned and the beautiful really feel at home. Bianca Jagger rode in on a white horse and the great and good basked in the smooth glossy sounds of Donna Summer and this first hit from Odyssey. 8. Chic Le Freak, 1978 Studio 54 soon became a victim of its success, creating a backlash from the masses barred outside its doors. One New Year's Eve the rejects included Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, who, as Chic, wrote the first Studio 54 protest song, originally called F*** Off, but censored into Le Freak. Chic had the last laugh by creating the most enduring music to come out of disco, with rhythms that became the template for hip-hop. 9. Sugarhill Gang Rapper's Delight, 1979 The Bronx was excluded from the musical party taking place up- and downtown, and its embattled inhabitants were left to survive in slum-like conditions amid riots and gang warfare. Kids started to create their own fun out of the debris around them: art from spray cans, and music from old funk records re-assembled by DJs such as Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaata at massive block parties. The Sugarhill Gang were the first to turn the sound into a record, borrowing Chic's Good Times bassline and adding their own rhyming couplets. 10. Blondie Rapture, 1980 Blondie had become the most successful band out of the CBGBs scene by heavily appropriating pop and disco and even reggae to sweeten their original punk sound. Singer Debbie Harry was excited by the new Bronx scene and quickly borrowed the style to make the first hip-hop crossover record. New York had reasserted its musical supremacy when Rapture went to number one in the US charts Once Upon a Time in New York: The Birth of Hip-Hop, Disco and Punk is on BBC4 tonight at 10pm. any more songs to go on this list that you can think of?
Create an account or sign in to comment