All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77

To quote the long forgotten but still great Broadcasters from Nyack: THE WALLS OF THE CITY ARE GONNA SHAKE!...

...and as Tony Fletcher vividly illustrated in ALL HOPPED UP AND READY TO GO, they certainly did shake...from jazz to mambo to r and b to rock n roll to girl groups to punk to disco!!!

As a amateur musicologist, music fan, lover of all these genres and NYC lore, ALL HOPPED AND READY TO GO is a book I was heavily anticipating from when word spread of its impending release. Suffice to say, I wasn't disappointed and actually quite enlightened about the impact such genres as mambo had on the music culture here. Indeed I concur with a lot of other people who dig this book, in that Tony draws a easily follow-able line that runs through and connects the many movements that made up music culture in New York City over the specified 50 year period. It's history...it's anthropology...it's sociology...it's nostalgia...all wrapped up in a subject we all have a love for in a city we all have a love for.

AHU+RTG is in my opinion, also a fine companion piece to Charlie Gillett's SOUND OF THE CITY and Simon Reynolds' RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN. The former, released in the early 70's, was one of the first to examine the impact of pop music in all its forms on the urban populus. The latter basically takes up where ALL HOPPED OFF leaves off...taking the disco, hip hop and punk movement into post-punk.

There is also a quality to the energy, depth and enthusiasm in the narration that might only come from an immigrant who decided to become a part of his own scene in his adopted city (which is the author's currently untold story). As Suicide's Alan Vega said regarding the inspiration of NYC on his band's music "It made a great playground for us" The wonder in the story Tony Fletcher conveys from that inspiration is palpable throughout the book.

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