Harlem Underworld

An in-depth look at the last generation of Black music before the rise of hip-hop, with special attention to how the dying world influenced the new one The seventies deserve a long love letter. There you can see the beginnings of where we are today. But it was also the end of something beautiful that we will never see again. This is a big story that everyone should know, full of messy little details that no one has seen. Harlem Underworld celebrates Blaxploitation film, rapping deejays, looping riffs, larger-than-life artists, grungy record promoters, and bloody handed OG’s who hung people out of high-rise windows while Suge Knight was still in diapers. They lived the life and made the culture that fueled rap music and forecast hip-hop image, but their stories have been paved over by the very global phenomenon they inspired. A spiritual sequel to his book The Chitlin’ Circuit, in which Lauterbach showed how a loosely associated group of hustlers built the real estate of Black music and developed a network of nightclubs where rock ’n’ roll was born, Harlem Underworld follows how a new generation of hustlers—disc jockeys, record promoters, independent Black record companies, and more gangsters—evolved to carve out a space in American media for Black music, grab a fair slice of the profits, and push music to the edge of revolution.