US V. THEM

Not made in Manhattan.

Brooklyn wasn’t always the hipster mecca that it has become, as Givony notes in his book about the borough’s indie scene from 2004 to 2014. Manhattan was once the home to cutting-edge music. But as he writes, “The cultural supremacy of downtown Manhattan was yielding to an insurgency in Brooklyn….Compared to Manhattan, the scene in Brooklyn felt more unsupervised and lawless, like the adults had left the kids and gone on vacation. The floor was usually sticky; the bouncers were blasé; the smoking ban, loosely enforced.” It was also, the author adds, “an era of immense anticipation, possibility, adventure, and naïveté: when screens had yet to be ubiquitous; when blogs could launch an artist based on enthusiasm; when bands created venues out of sheer necessity; when life online was more ramshackle, free-wheeling, and democratic than today.” Givony traces the history of Brooklyn’s ascendancy among DIY musicians and related artists, yet he’s not interested in big names. He prefers writing about musicians who “earned no gold or platinum records, headlined no major festivals, performed in zero Super Bowls, and sold modestly, if at all.” This includes acts like Delia Gonzalez & Gavilán Rayna Russom, Parts & Labor, and Dragons of Zynth, as well as venues and art spaces such as Silent Barn, Glasslands, and Death by Audio. He also mixes in memoir, reflecting on his time working for the Lincoln Center and his founding of Wordless Music, a series that pairs classical musicians with rock bands. It would have been easy for Givony to appeal to millennial nostalgia with simple reflections on more popular musicians, but, as he notes, “the Brooklyn scene was overwhelmingly white, male, and privileged, at every level.” Instead, he writes about the underdogs of the time, many of them women and people of color—which makes for an inclusive and eye-opening read.

A rousing chronicle of Brooklyn’s indie heyday.