Corner Boy - by Nik Cohn (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The "Corner Boy" of rock criticism returns: A remixed collection of music writing, reportage, memoir, travelogue, and cultural criticism from the writer who defined the genre.

Before rock criticism had rules, Nik Cohn was already rewriting them.

Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old gathers Nik Cohn's nonfiction from the 1960s to the present into a single, unruly self-portrait. Moving from Derry to London, New York, and New Orleans, Cohn 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. He writes about fame, but even more about the people who stand just outside its light.

The book draws from across Cohn's career, including Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, from 1968, his speedy history of pop music from its beginning; Today There Are No Gentlemen, about the rise and fall of English men's fashion; The Heart of the World, a soul-biography of Broadway (the street); Yes We Have No, a subcultural travelogue of England just before the new millennium; and Triksta, about New Orleans hip-hop and Cohn's brief period as a bounce-music impresario. Here are Cohn's earliest published writings, in London's Observer, at age 19, as well as his most recent: "Apprehension," written in 2025, an 8,000 word narrative of his arrest and near-indictment in New York City, in 1983, for drug trafficking.

Edited by distinguished critic Ben Ratliff, the collection features long-form conversations that bridge Cohn's peripatetic, Zelig-like life. Complete with full-color images drawn largely from Cohn's sixty-year photo-collage Muriel, Corner Boy is a unique and essential addition to any music lover's bookshelf.

Review Quotes

"One of the finest and most significant post-war journalists . . . The writing is clear and dramatic; it grips from the first sentence and never lets go."

--Hanif Kureishi

"The best writer about pop music . . . an inspiration."

--Jarvis Cocker, BBC Radio 6 Music

"Set the template for a whole new style of rock journalism, informed, irreverent, passionate and polemical."

--Choice Magazine

"Of course I'm a Nik Cohn fan. His name is actually kind of a password. If somebody says they know about Nik Cohn, you know that person is literate--and cool."

--Jay McInerney

"Scholars of rock and roll still revere him for Awopbopaloobop, a passionate argument for the primacy of the three-minute pop song...A book ostensibly about popular music, but really about youth, innocence and rebellion."

--Observer

"Cohn was the first writer authentically to capture the raucous vitality of pop music. His writing still sizzles and crackles."

--Sunday Telegraph

"A brilliant, beautiful agitator, vibrant and loud enough to wake the dead."

--Salon