NEW YORK ART, ROCK, POETRY AND NOISE 1956-2022

“D REAMS! ADORATIONS! ILLUMINATIONS! RELIGIONS! THE whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!” From Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, tuning into new visions before heading out west, to wave after wave of disruptive Downtown noisemakers, New York has been a crucible of radical art for decades. No wave, street jazz, garage jams, revolutionary poetry, deviant rock’n’roll, avant-noise, incantations, meditations, “sensitive bullshit” and senseless freakouts – it’s all on Break It Up!.

Through these 14 tracks, certain key figures overlap, interact and recur: the artfully-distressed punk pioneer Richard Hell, for instance; or Sonic Youth, inexhaustibly creative standard-bearers bringing New York subcultures into the indie rock mainstream.

And then, of course, there’s Patti Smith, this month’s wise and regal MOJO cover star. Smith’s enduring brilliance manifests in conjunction with the Soundwalk Collective on Eternity, from 2019, and is hymned by Jim Carroll in his 1980 tribute to her, Crow: “It was so sweet,” he observes, “when you brought donuts to the junkies.”

To quote from Ginsberg again, “Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!” – they’re all here, and much more besides. Break it up!

1 RICHARD HELL AND THE VOIDOIDS

BLANK GENERATION

Where better to begin than a crucial document of NYC punk at its most louche and literate? When Richard Hell retooled Rod McKuen’s Beat Generation in 1976, he’d already formed and quit The Heartbreakers and Television – whose first review was written by Patti Smith.