Scene: Downtown New York Punk and Post-Punk, 1976-83
There’s always music going on in New York City, always young artists coming to town to seek their fortune. But from the mid ’70s to the early ’80s, a bunch of interlocking music scenes popped up around downtown Manhattan, where the rents were still low enough for young people to find a cheap loft to live in, make big noises and push their art as far as it could go.
The center of the early New York punk rock scene was CBGB, Hilly Krystal’s narrow, loud, adventurous club that transformed the Bowery from a deeply unfashionable scuzz-pit to a very trendy scuzz-pit. Max’s Kansas City, on Park Avenue South, provided similar refuge. The Ramones were the band who defined what “punk rock” would go on to sound like; what’s fascinating is that most of their contemporaries had much more in common with their spirit than with their sound. Patti Smith was a poet who liked rock ‘n’ roll for its Dionysian possibilities; Television were hard-jamming virtuosos; Blondie were a pop band who eventually reached out to disco and hip-hop, both gigantic scenes elsewhere in New York City that barely made contact with the downtown rockers.
Eventually, though, more of New York’s art and music scenes started to rub off onto the downtown rockers. The “no wave” cluster of bands (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, the Static, Bush Tetras, the Contortions, Mars and others) explored extreme dissonance and fine-art conceptualism. The “loft jazz” scene of the earlier ’70s left its stamp on hybrid bands like the Lounge Lizards, Curlew and Defunkt; artists like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Dinosaur L and Cristina brought disco grooves together with the sour friction of the downtown sound. Composers from Philip Glass to Glenn Branca formed ensembles to play their unconventional works in unconventional settings.
By a couple of years into the ’80s, a lot of the stiff rhythms and unfiltered aggression that had characterized the scene early on had evolved into rich, tricky grooves. The minimalist South Bronx groove band ESG had effectively been drafted into the same circles as the downtown experimentalists Liquid Liquid; a bunch of bratty punks who called themselves the Beastie Boys got obsessed with hip-hop radio transmissions; Talking Heads, who’d initially made their name by exaggerating their uptightness, got into funk and discovered that they had hips.
That particular downtown scene eventually splintered, as all scenes do: rents went up, prime movers moved up or burned out, New York punk’s catholic taste was replaced by the strict codes of hardcore, and by 1984 or so the hip-hop movement in the outer boroughs of New York City was where the action was. CBGB closed in 2006, and hadn’t been a cultural force for a long time. But for a few years, the fertile, chaotic downtown scene produced as wide a variety of incredible music as any zone that small has managed before or since.
