The Downtown Pop Underground
Rating
The Pequod Review:
Kembrew McLeod’s history of the underground NYC music scene covers an earlier period (1950s-1970s) and is more detailed (profiling a number of lesser-known artists, filmmakers and playwrights outside the CBGBs/Greenwich Village orbit) than most other works of its kind. And like Patti Smith’s memoir, it highlights the importance of NYC’s density — and its cross-fertilization of ideas from other genres — as essential to the emergence of Punk/New Wave.