Nik Cohn In Conversation With Ben Ratliff

Legendary rock critic Nik Cohn discusses a new collection of his writings with his editor, jazz music critic Ben Ratliff.

Before rock criticism had rules, Nik Cohn was already breaking them.

Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old gathers 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 (1968), his groundbreaking history of pop music; 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. The collection includes some of Cohn’s earliest published writings, in London’s Observer when he was nineteen, and his most recent: “Apprehension,” written in 2025, an 8,000-word narrative of his 1983 arrest in New York City for drug trafficking.

The collection also features long-form conversations that bridge Cohn’s peripatetic, Zelig-like life. It includes full-color images drawn largely from Muriel, his ever-evolving, sixty-year photo-collage.

Cohn will speak with the book’s editor, Ben Ratliff, who 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. Ratliff’s subjects include popular music, listening, journalism, creative nonfiction, and the practice and history of cultural criticism. He has taught criticism and nonfiction writing at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Columbia University’s 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. Please RSVP in advance so we can plan accordingly. After the talk, copies of Corner Boy and Ben Ratliff’s books will be available for sale and signing by the authors.