I was super disappointed with the layout and production of my first book, Hip Hop, so I brought in my own personal art director (Flick Ford) to lay out my second book, Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene.
Hip Hop was about the South Bronx in the 1970s, but my second book was going to be about how the punk movement and the hip hop movements collided in the East Village in the 1980s. The book has been out-of-print for decades and copies in good condition sell for over $100, so it’s about time it was released as an ebook at an affordable price. When it came out, a lot of critics thought it was a bit lightweight because it concentrated more on nightlife than art criticism, but many artists, including Kenny Scharf and Ann Magnuson, have recently told me it remains the definitive document of the Mudd Club and Club 57 era. The book is now available at Amazon, Smashwords and iTunes.
Hip Hop started on August 11, 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Southeast Bronx, but the collision between hip hop and the downtown scene began at New York/New Wave, P.S. 1, Long Island City, curated by Diego Cortez. Don’t have that date in my head, but it’s easy to google, it would probably be 1980. The two decades are defined by those two very important ceremonies that kicked off their respective parties.