Tim Lawrence's newest book is required reading for anyone interested in the way popular music, especially music written for dancing, was reconfigured after the brief vogue punk and disco enjoyed in the 1970s. Very much in the same vein as Bernard Gendron's Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, Lawrence's Life and Death explores the relationship between dance music and the art scenes in New York City while at the same time discounting the accepted narrative that dance music stopped exerting cultural power during the early 1980s. But unlike Gendron's century-spanning work, Lawrence restricts his scope to four short years. Picking up where his first book, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979, left off, Lawrence takes a much more focused approach with Life and Death. Covering a third as many years in a significantly higher page count, his new book offers the kind of micro-level examination of the New York dance music scene in the early 1980s which successfully attempts to parse its history into discreet scenes while acknowledging the many points of overlap.

In one way, despite the shorter time span, he had a more challenging job with this book than with Love Saves the Day. After all, disco and dance culture had what seemed like a clearly delineated timeline that spanned the entirety of the 1970s, from its birth in New York's diverse gay clubs at the beginning of the decade to its public immolation on the Comiskey Park field in July 1979. But in his new book, Lawrence uncovers what many dance music fans had already known: that disco hadn't died that day in Chicago. It had merely gone back underground to the black, Latin, and gay clubs that had given birth to the culture less than fifteen years earlier; to the graffiti and performance art clubs where, merged with punk, musicians infused dance music with an eclectic mix of influences, later labeled “postpunk,” creating an anti-disco disco sound; and to clubs where disco and funk provided the backdrop to the development of rap music and hip hop culture. Lawrence is able to rebut the dominant argument that the early 1980s saw a decline in both quality and quantity of dance music production primarily by letting his informant's enthusiasm for the era speak for itself. At times, Lawrence overstates the near-monolithic influence he ascribes to New York City; he gives only a passing acknowledgment to San Francisco's Megatone and Moby Dick Records while ignoring the role Chicago's Wax Trax Records, Vancouver's Nettwork Records, and their associated artists (and consumers) played in the development of a post-disco dance music culture. While acknowledging the influx of dance music from the United Kingdom and Europe to the United States, he avoids discussing the influence these artists might have had on homegrown talent. But these minor issues certainly don't impede the larger goal of the book: to present a history of a community that created and used music for a set of purposes that for a while united gay, straight, white, Latin, and African American participants in a shared “New York”–ness, a sensibility that embraced both diversity and commonalities.

At 578 small-print pages, the book is divided into four large sections (one for each year under discussion) and subdivided into thirty-four chapters. Despite the large number of chapters, the subject matter can be broken down into a smaller collection of categories: nightclubs, music makers and producers, the downtown visual art scene, and the impact of AIDS during those years. The discussion of nightclubs takes up the most room, and he divides them into several types. First, he examines clubs that merged art, music, and performance in a reaction against disco, such as the Mudd Club, Club 57, Danceteria, Bond, and the Pyramid Club, with musical direction provided by DJs such as Ruth Polski and Mark Kamins. Another group of influential nightclubs that Lawrence describes offered a continuation and evolution of gay disco, including the Paradise Garage with DJs Larry Levan and David Morales; Better Days with DJs Tee Scott, Francois Kavorkian, Bruce Forest, and Shep Pettibone; and David Mancuso's long-running Loft. A third collection of clubs, largely straight, emphasized the new genre of hip hop, such as Negril, where Bronx MCs such as Afrika Bambaataa and Fred Brathwaite performed alongside DJ Ruza Blue and catered to a mostly white crowd, and the Fun House, DJed by John “Jellybean” Benitez. Appealing to a mostly straight African American crowd, Melons with DJ Derrick Davidson and a post-disco Studio 54 helped popularize records from small labels producing hip hop recordings. Finally, Lawrence isolates the Saint nightclub as its own Fire Island–influenced monolith. With its crowd of affluent white gay men, the Saint's music, as mediated through DJs Roy Thode, Sharon White, and Robbie Leslie, explored a hedonistic, electronic, and futuristic sound that controversially continued well into the AIDS crisis. But despite these divisions, Lawrence takes pains to emphasize the fluidity between these various subcultures, noting that it was common for patrons to belong to multiple scenes and for artists to incorporate musical aspects of these other movements into their dance recordings.

Lawrence's discussion of the visual art scene, especially the emergence of graffiti art in Brooklyn and its incorporation into the downtown music scene significantly expands on Gendron's study of the influence of such clubs as the Mudd Club and Club 57 and challenges simple racial distinctions between white and black music and its audiences. Thoroughly and exhaustively researched, his narrative clearly traces the many ways art and music overlapped throughout this period, including the musical contributions of individuals we today primarily consider visual artists, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and, vice-versa, musicians such as Fred Brathwaite, better known as “Fab 5 Freddy,” who began their careers as visual artists.

Musicologists might wish for a more nuanced discussion of musical details. Lawrence never defines what he means by genres such as “dub,” “electronic dub,” “reggae,” “funk,” and terms I was less familiar with such as “band music,” which Lawrence uses to refer to white music that incorporates guitars and is frequently performed live. “Band music” seems to refer less to a musical style, such as “rock,” though, and more in opposition to much of the other music played in nightclubs at the time, i.e. solo artists, producer-driven and studio-constructed electronically manufactured songs, and rap and turntablism. This ambiguity sometimes makes it difficult to tell what differences exist between various sounds and styles. As a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London, Lawrence's focus on the social rather than the musical is perhaps understandable. And Lawrence has set up future scholars interested in more analytical work in a stellar fashion by providing such a well-written, impeccably researched history. One of the book's highlights (carried over from his earlier history of the 1970s) is the inclusion of extensive playlists in nearly every chapter, showing the nuanced differences between the various styles and influences. After reading descriptions of each club and its habitués, it's satisfying to be able to recreate the atmosphere through the actual tunes played there.

By considering the contributions of DJs and nightclub culture as central to an understanding of the larger evolution of popular music in the 1980s, Lawrence has done a great service to US music studies. He has contributed to the restoration of the role disco and funk played in the creation of hip hop, shown how graffiti art allowed both visual and musical African American artists a foothold into what had been primarily white spaces, and recovered the contributions of so many gay men, many of whom died in during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, to the historical narrative. Life and Death enriches our understanding of the musical cultures of New York City during a time of great change and upset and reevaluates common misperceptions of the era, presenting future scholars with exciting avenues of exploration and a renewed excitement for a neglected aspect of popular music.