For a lot of us, the middle '70s was a dormant period in music sandwiched between two stellar periods: the monstrously creative middle and late 1960s and the shedding skin and rebirth of rock music in the late 1970s, particularly the punk and new wave movements. Will Hermes tears that myth apart and takes us on a journey, witnessing the birth of hip-hop, punk, minimalism, salsa and free jazz in the basements, lofts and small upstart clubs of New York City.

Hermes was a young teen living in the suburbs of New York during those days; these days he's a writer for NPR's All Things Considered and for Rolling Stone. What makes Love Goes to Buildings on Fire so compelling is that it reads like a living history, so you find Philip Glass witnessing a Talking Heads performance and vice versa, and we begin to understand how events changed the music and how music in one small geographical location changed what we hear today.

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