About the Book

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 1969, 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.

Praise for Nik Cohn and Corner Boy

“[A] longtime freelance scene-maker, [Cohn] practices a form of journalism that might be called loitering with intent . . . [He] took an interest in unknown and marginal souls . . . Cohn grew up amid the rubble of post-World War II London and 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, the author of Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (1970), a landmark early history of rock. His music writing was ardent, fond and knowing, and it had bite.”

—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

“From the time I first read Nik Cohn, in 1969, in his revelatory history of rock ’n’ roll, to—new to this book—‘Apprehension,’ about his 1983 arrest for drug conspiracy, I’ve almost always had the same response. I believe this, I’d find myself saying, whether it was about Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s stage show or his grandmother’s life and death in Stalin’s jails; this rings true. Apprehension, seeing, thinking: get inside it, get behind it, get it down, and pass it on. The world will seem a little bigger than before, and, for the writer, all those tiny events will stay with you, each one adding to the story you have to tell. As for us, the readers, we get the same reward.”

—Greil Marcus

“The best writer about pop music . . . an inspiration.”

—Jarvis Cocker, BBC Radio 6 Music

“Nik Cohn’s Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old is alive with mystery, intrigue and revelation . . . Cohn has never given up his contrarian voice and his yen for anti-complacency.”

—Kenneth Womack, Salon

“One of the finest and most significant post-war journalists . . . The writing is clear and dramatic; it grips from the first sentence and never lets go.” 

—Hanif Kureishi

“[T]he legendary Nik Cohn . . . his extraordinary career and his brilliant new book Corner Boy.”

—Rock’s Backpages

“Set the template for a whole new style of rock journalism, informed, irreverent, passionate and polemical.”

—Choice Magazine

“Of course I'm a Nik Cohn fan. His name is actually kind of a password. If somebody says they know about Nik Cohn, you know that person is literate—and cool.”

—Jay McInerney

“Scholars of rock and roll still revere him for Awopbopaloobop, a passionate argument for the primacy of the three-minute pop song . . . A book ostensibly about popular music, but really about youth, innocence and rebellion.”

—Observer

“Cohn was the first writer authentically to capture the raucous vitality of pop music. His writing still sizzles and crackles.”

—Sunday Telegraph

“A brilliant, beautiful agitator, vibrant and loud enough to wake the dead.”

—Salon

About the Author

About the Editor