Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever
by Will Hermes
Why You'll Love This
Five years in a broke, burning New York City produced punk, hip-hop, disco, salsa, and minimalism simultaneously — and this book puts you on the street corner where it all collided.
- Great if you want: a deep, interconnected portrait of musical scenes rarely told together
- The experience: densely layered and panoramic — best read slowly, neighborhood by neighborhood
- The writing: Hermes structures history like a cut — quick scenes, sharp transitions, vivid texture
- Skip if: you want narrative drive — this is mosaic, not momentum
About This Book
New York City in the 1970s was broke, burning, and producing some of the most vital music in human history. Will Hermes traces five years — 1973 to 1977 — when punk, hip-hop, disco, salsa, loft jazz, and minimalist composition weren't separate genres competing for shelf space but overlapping, cross-pollinating explosions happening within miles of each other, often involving the same musicians. The city's dysfunction turns out to be the story's secret engine: cheap rent and social breakdown created the conditions for radical experimentation, and Hermes makes you feel both the danger and the extraordinary creative freedom that came with it.
What distinguishes this book is its structural ambition matched with an almost tactile sense of place and moment. Hermes moves panoramically across neighborhoods and scenes without losing the intimacy of individual artists working out their ideas in real time. The prose has the rhythm of someone who genuinely loves music — precise without being academic, passionate without tipping into hagiography. Rather than flattening the era into a tidy cultural narrative, he keeps the chaos intact, letting readers experience these five years the way the musicians lived them: simultaneously, urgently, and without knowing what it all meant yet.