Books like Positively Fourth Street by David Hajdu

Patti Smith’s memoir charts her life in New York City, from the bohemian scenes of Max’s Kansas City and the Hotel Chelsea to a creative partnership with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Brooklyn.

A definitive oral history of punk rock, featuring interviews with Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, the Ramones, and other influential musicians.

Profiles of American indie rock bands from 1981-1991, chronologically organized to explore the decade's musical landscape.

Sean Wilentz blends rigorous historical research with personal enthusiasm to chart Bob Dylan’s cultural impact and artistic evolution from his Greenwich Village beginnings to the present.

Simon Reynolds charts the explosive era after punk, tracing the innovations of bands like Joy Division, Talking Heads, and the synth‑pop pioneers of the early 80s.

Explores the artistic and spiritual births, deaths, and rebirths, the guises and incarnations, that are Bob Dylan.

“Punk rock and hip-hop. Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented—all at once, from one block to the next, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the city’s infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless. Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era’s music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year’s Day 1973 to New Year’s Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the Lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGBs and The Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation. As they remade the music, the musicians at the center of the book invented themselves: Willie Colón and the Fania All-Stars renting Yankee Stadium to take salsa to the masses, New Jersey locals Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith claiming the jungleland of Manhattan as their own, Grandmaster Flash transforming the turntable into a musical instrument, David Byrne and Talking Heads proving that rock music “ain’t no foolin’ around.” Will Hermes was there—venturing from his native Queens to rooms where the revolutions were taking place—and in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire he captures the creativity, drive, and full-out lust for life of the great New York musicians of those years, whose sounds would change the world.” BOOK JACKET