The book to read if you want to get some idea of the original primal energy of pop music. Nik Cohn: A Derry boy who became the omnipresent man in music's developing story from the 50s to the present; a self-styled rat, addicted to adventure, a rock legend, forever at the heart of the real action. This memoir provides a strong flavour of the person whose writing inspired Saturday Night Fever and several other pop-culture landmarks. Cohn leads us, in reverse order, through the decades of his musical life and times, meeting familiar heroes and rogues - let readers decide the categories to which Hendrix, Moon, Proby, Vicious et al belong. The Noise From The Streets is elegiac, charming and thoughtful - wallow in it. Nik Cohn recently headed Jarvis Cocker's top 10 music books in The Guardian (13 June 2014) for his title Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. 'The original title for this book was ' Pop from the Beginning' and that pretty much sums it up. Nik Cohn was only just out of his teens when he wrote it and it's the book to read if you want to get some idea of the original primal energy of pop music. Loads of unfounded, biased assertions that almost always turn out to be right. He went on to provide the inspiration for Saturday Night Fever (Hurrah!) and Tommy (Boo!), but this is still his best book. Absolutely essential.
New York City is in the grip of a bad-moon heat wave, with the street-corner preachers running amok. Into the fray, four damaged lives come together at a pet store on the Upper West Side, each one consumed by a private hunger and driven toward an inevitable fate. 304 pp. 15,000 print.
Acclaimed music writer Nik Cohn’s love of hip-hop goes back to its beginnings, and his love of New Orleans even further, to when he passed through the Big Easy on tour with The Who and discovered a place with a magic that never failed to seize him. On the surface he’s the least likely candidate for a rap impresario. But with his signature charm and passion, he plunges headfirst into the wards, clubs, and projects of New Orleans, opening up a world closed to most outsiders: a journey into the heart of the hip-hop dream, and into larger question of racial identity in America. Written before Hurricane Katrina struck (and published here with an afterword that chronicles how Katrina altered the lives of those he met) Triksta now stands as an elegy to a city, its music, and its people.
From the rise of Bill Haley to the death of Jimi Hendrix, this account of music in the 1950s and 1960s is “the definitive history of rock ‘n’ roll” (Rolling Stone). This is British music journalist Nik Cohn’s classic and cogent history of an unruly era—filled with outrageous tales and vivid descriptions of the music, and covering artists from Elvis Presley to Eddie Cochran to Bob Dylan to the Beatles and beyond. From the father of what would become a new literary form—rock criticism—this is a seminal history of rock and roll’s evolution, including revisions and updates made for a new edition in the early 1970s.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.