A countercultural upheaval

‘New York stories in a way are always real estate stories,’ says the journalist Alan Light in Lizzy Goodman’s bustling oral history of the city’s music scene at the dawn of the century. The same goes for all music scenes. Talent clusters and thrives only where there are cheap places to live, hang out, play shows and, crucially, fail.

New York in 2001 was such a location. The Lower East Side was still affordably sketchy and Brooklyn far from hip. When Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio moved to Williamsburg and invited his Manhattan friends to visit, ‘It was like I was asking them to go to China on a single–engine prop plane.’ Now Williamsburg, like Manhattan, belongs to the well-heeled. Gentrification is to Goodman’s narrative what heroin was to grunge: a devouring plague. Her book romanticises, and mourns, the last time New York was seedy enough to allow for a countercultural upheaval.