The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock 'n' Roll Glitter Queens Who Revolutionized Culture

Kembrew McLeod

Hardcover | 15.24 x 3.18 x 22.86 cm | 368 pp

Harry N. Abrams | 2018 | 9781419732522

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the inhabitants of a small, roughly one-square-mile area of lower Manhattan were smashing the status quo of music, art, film, performance, and sexuality. These profound transformations were set in motion by a tightknit community of theatrical performers, playwrights, poets, musicians, video-makers, visual artists, activists, and gender rebels who made sparks fly when they brushed up against each other.

Paving the way for everything from punk rock, disco, indie media, and performance art to the gradual acceptance of gay and transgender life, this motley assemblage expressed themselves without a thought about career development, marketing, or sound business plans - and, most importantly, they did it collectively in the spirit of fun and adventure.

In The Downtown Pop Underground, author Kembrew McLeod takes a kaleidoscopic tour of New York City during this era and, for the first time, shows the deep interconnections between all the alternative worlds that flourished in the basement theatres, dive bars, concert halls, lofts, and dingy tenements. He links the artists, writers, and performers who created change, and while some of them didn't become
everyday names, others, like Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, and Debbie Harry, did become icons.

Ambitious in scope and scale, the book is largely fueled by the actual voices of many of the pivotal characters who broke down the entrenched cultural divisions between high and low, gay and straight, and art and commerce—and whose impact is still felt today.

'Downtown New York in the latter half of the twentieth century was so much more than
a Warhol print and a CBGB-OMFUG T-shirt. Mcleod tracked down more than a hundred
denizens of that freaky bohemian milieu to tell the stories most people don't know. The
Downtown Pop Underground breathes new fire into a familiar history and is a must-read for anyone who wants to know how American bohemia really happened. Ann Powers, critic, NPR Music

'The Dowontown Pop Underground honours those who were at the forefront of a movement that transformed our understandings of sexuality and artistic freedom.' Lily Tomlin

'Having walked these streets as a child, I can attest to the visceral accuracy of the book's portrayal of a time when artists affected a true change in the way that we view our culture and ourselves' Tim Robbins