Nik Cohn In Conversation With Ben Ratliff

Legendary rock writer Nik Cohn discusses Corner Boy, a new collection of his writings edited by music critic Ben Ratliff Before rock criticism had rules, Nik Cohn was already breaking them. Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old gathers Nik Cohn’s nonfiction from the 1960s to the present into a single, riotous self-portrait. Moving from Derry to London, New York, and New Orleans, he 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. The book draws from across Cohn’s career, including Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, from 1968, his ground-breaking history of pop music from its beginning; Today There Are No Gentlemen, about English men’s fashion; The Heart of the World, a soul-biography of Broadway (the street); Yes We Have No, a road trip through an alternative England, seen as a banana republic, just before the new millennium; and Triksta, the saga of his misadventures in the New Orleans rap scene, as a would-be bounce impresario. Here are some of Cohn’s earliest published writings, in London’s Observer, at age nineteen, as well as his most recent: “Apprehension,” written in 2025, an 8,000-word narrative of his arrest in New York City, in 1983, for drug trafficking. The collection features long-form conversations that bridge Nik Cohn’s peripatetic, Zelig-like life. Complete with full-color images drawn largely from Muriel, his ever-evolving, sixty-year photo-collage, Corner Boy is unique and essential—the definitive record of a life spent bearing witness. Nik will be speaking with the editor of his book, the noted music writer Ben Ratliff. Ben has written about pop, jazz, traditional and experimental music for publications including Granta, the New York Review of Books, Wire, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, where he worked as a music critic for twenty years. His subjects are popular music, listening, journalism, creative nonfiction, and the practice and history of cultural criticism. He has previously has taught criticism and nonfiction writing at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the Columbia University School of the Arts. He is the author of five books: Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty; The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music Coltrane: The Story of a Sound; and Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings . This event is free and open to the public - we kindly ask that you RSVP in advance so we can plan accordingly. Following the talk, copies of Corner Boy, as well as Ben's books, will be available for sale and signing by the authors.