Corner Boy

“The best writer about pop music . . . an inspiration.” ―Jarvis Cocker, BBC Radio 6 Music

“[A] longtime freelance scene-maker, [Cohn] practices a form of journalism that might be called loitering with intent . . . [He] was in the exact demographic place to feel the detonation of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who across a formerly dull, gray landscape. He was a pioneering rock critic . . . His music writing was ardent, fond and knowing, and it had bite.”

―Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

The definitive, lavishly illustrated collection of music writing, memoir, and reportage from the redoubtable Nik Cohn.

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.

Edited by distinguished critic Ben Ratliff, the collection features long-form conversations that bridge Nik Cohn’s peripatetic, Zelig-like life. Complete with full-color images drawn 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 Cohn grew up among the sectarian tribes of Derry, Northern Ireland as it lurched towards The Troubles. In 1960s London, he wrote a series of novels and non-fiction books including “the first best book on rock and roll” (Greil Marcus). In 1970s New York, Cohn wrote the magazine story that formed the basis for Saturday Night Fever. He’s also had a longtime connection to New Orleans, where in the early 2000s, he was an incongruous bounce impresario. As his work is summarized in Ben Ratliff’s foreword to Corner Boy: “His writing on any subject is for anyone who believes that the best option is usually off the menu, who suspects that membership may be a trap, that reputations are often misleading . . . he makes the impossible possible.” He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Ben Ratliff is the author of books including Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. A former music critic for The New York Times, he lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.