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Tim Lawrence is the author of Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79; Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Party Scene, 1973-92; and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83. He is a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. He co-founded the Centre for Cultural Studies Research and Lucky Cloud Sound System.

“Multivocal Partying in Early 1980s New York City”
The New York City party scene of the early 1980s came to be defined by its multivocality. DJs integrated a vast array of sounds as they pieced together sonic tapestries through conversations with their crowds. Art-punk venues became renowned for the range of activities that could be pursued in their spaces, including art shows, performance art, live music, immersive happenings, film screenings, cabaret, and DJing. Straight-up dance spots hosted radically extended conversations between their DJs/musical hosts and dancing crowds, while others established a connection with the Bronx party scene to forged the convergent culture of hip-hop in a downtown setting. Dancers and partygoers who frequented the city’s subterranean network of hangouts also became increasingly marked by their heterogeneity and their openness and previously discreet scenes came into generative interaction. Meanwhile music recordings from scores of artists came to be marked by a mutant sensibility that set aside some of the genre wars of the 1970s in order to move into a period of sonic exploration, overlap, and inquisitiveness. As a result of these developments the city’s party network came to reflect as well as shape the diversity of its citizenry. Resistant to summary, translation, and marketisation, the scene and its sounds amounted to a heterotopic social laboratory meant to metasize into society at large (or, for Sylvere Lotringer, a form of schizo-culture). Forces of division interrupted the multilingual flow but can its legacy expose the myths of neoliberal capitalism?