Nik Cohn with Ben Ratliff: Corner Boy

Overview

Join us for the New York launch of Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old, the definitive collection of music writing, memoir, and reportage from Nik Cohn. Cohn will be joined in conversation by the book’s editor, the critic Ben Ratliff.

Before rock criticism had rules, Nik Cohn was already breaking them. Corner Boy gathers Cohn’s nonfiction from the 1960s to the present into a single, riotous self-portrait, moving from Derry to London, New York, and New Orleans, and writing about pop stars and boxers, club kids and hustlers, painters, prophets, disco dancers, drag queens, lowlifes, nobodies, and the half-mythic figures who live at the edge of the action.

The book draws from across Cohn’s career, including Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, his ground-breaking 1968 history of pop music; The Heart of the World, a soul-biography of Broadway; and Triksta, the saga of his misadventures in the New Orleans rap scene. Complete with full-color images drawn from Muriel, his ever-evolving sixty-year photo collage, Corner Boy is the definitive record of a life spent bearing witness.

Cohn is “one of the finest and most significant post-war journalists,” says Hanif Kureishi. “The writing is clear and dramatic; it grips from the first sentence and never lets go.” Find out why in a conversation with Ratliff and an evening exploring a peripatetic, Zelig-like life at the boundaries of art, music, and journalism.

“The best writer about pop music... an inspiration.” — Jarvis Cocker