Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old

'The best writer about pop music . . . an inspiration' Jarvis Cocker, BBC Radio 6 Music
Before rock criticism had rules, Nik Cohn was already breaking them. Corner Boy gathers Nik Cohn’s nonfiction from the 1960s to the present into a riotous self-portrait. Moving from Derry to London, New York, and New Orleans, he writes 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 groundbreaking history of pop music; Today There Are No Gentlemen, about English men’s fashion; The Heart of the World, a soul-biography of Broadway; Yes We Have No; and Triksta, about his misadventures in the New Orleans rap scene. The book includes the new essay “Apprehension,” a narrative of his 1983 arrest in New York for drug trafficking.

Edited by distinguished critic Ben Ratliff, the collection features long-form conversations that bridge Nik Cohn’s peripatetic, Zelig-like life. Complete with full-color images drawn from Muriel, his ever-evolving, sixty-year photo-collage, Corner Boy is the vivid record of a life spent bearing witness.