My most recent nonfiction read was Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock, which, as the title handily states, covers the New York rock scene form the late 60’s through the early 80’s. It’s one of a few books on that time period that I’ve devoured in the past, so I was all primed to check out the VH1 documentary NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell. I wasn’t disappointed.

In addition to an excellent array of archival footage and photographs that went well beyond the images most people associated with the 70’s punk scene, the two-part series shed some much-deserved spotlight on the embryonic hip hop scene emerging from the South Bronx and the disco fever that was gripping Queens and Manhattan above 42^nd Street. Shrewdly, director Henry Corra and writers Nanette Burstein and Jonathan Mahler include physical art, graffiti, and dance in their retrospect of the new, explosive forms of expression coming out of possibly the most volatile year in New York’s history. Serial killers, massive fires, the infamous blackout and the subsequent looting…punks and thugs, kids and their wiser elders – everyone had reason to lock the doors, draw the shades, and hope the shitstorm ended without too much physical or political fall out, but instead the city of New York raised a middle finger to the chaos and channeled it back into one of the most fertile, groundbreaking, fucked up and fucking beautiful periods of creative output in American history.

…All that from a Bird who told you yesterday that I wouldn’t live in New York because of all the New Yorkers.

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