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Night People: How to Be a DJ in ’90s New York City
Mark Ronson
Penguin, $36.99
Behind some of this century’s biggest musical moments – Lady Gaga, Adele, Amy Winehouse, Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, the Barbie soundtrack – stands Mark Ronson, the velvet-suited studio whisperer who mashed retro soul and modern pop into a platinum streak that dazzled the world.
Night People won’t tell you that story. The trans-Atlantic trust-fund wunderkind’s breakneck memoir is a far more visceral ride: a tornado of nostalgia for the scene he helped build as a young man, from flea-market vinyl hound to white prince of New York’s hip-hop-fuelled ’90s club explosion.
From Jacksons to Trumps, there’s more name-drops than needle-drops in Ronson’s writhing cauldron of nightclub spills. That’s saying a lot, given his penchant for recalling room-melting streaks in the DJ booth track-by-track in spiralling canons of surefire bangers and humble-ragging obscurities.
The rare groove nirvana is, of course, a tedious pile of “huh?” to outsiders, but that’s kind of the point. Above all, Night People is a story of tribal identity. For storyteller and reader alike, the ache of not belonging is everything.
Celebrity is no biggie for young Mark. His old-money English socialite mum, Ann, cops a shout in Warhol’s diaries. It was for her that his rock-star stepfather Mick Jones wrote I Wanna Know What Love Is. One of his besties when they move to New York is a kid named Sean, who lives in The Dakota apartment building and recently lost his dad.
Producer, DJ and nepo-baby Mark Ronson.
Ronson’s crazy passion for music is his drive. It’s deep in his gut and eventually maddeningly encyclopaedic. But it’s tied from page one to what he later names as “a compulsive need to impress people”, essentially by being the smartest guy in the booth, the one the crowd adores most. Unattractive as that may be – and this whole drug-and-bling scene definitely skews tacky in the light of day – Ronson writes with enough self-awareness to keep us on side. “Hi, I’m a very important club DJ from New York,” he tells the Acid Jazz label in London, blagging for promos. The chutzpah is admirable; the joke mostly on him.
Ronson’s New York rattles like an upmarket junk shop in a funhouse mirror. He captures the narcotic tempo of the city’s nightlife in a blur of sleazy decor, bathroom lighting, cocaine panic attacks, cop raids and celebrity collisions: Jay-Z, DiCaprio, Mike Tyson … damn, Tupac doesn’t make it past the crowd. Success is obviously measured by proximity to such people though with hindsight, that $100 tip from Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs feels kind of dirty.
That leads to a gig for the now disgraced rap mogul’s 29th birthday, a horrendous society soiree of roped-off enclaves and Cadillac-sized chandeliers. When the throng loves him, and shrugs off his hero Kid Capri, Ronson realises he’s hit the dark side of credibility. A Tommy Hilfiger “nepo-babies” roadshow and a cameo in Zoolander seal the arc from underground cool to lame-stream satire.
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Ronson writes clean, vivid sentences, with a producer’s ear for rhythm and a collector’s fetish for detail. If obsession is your identity, his digressions on turntable needles or crate-digging etiquette will thrill you. If not, his close-ups on the physical act of turntabling will sate your curiosity about what that sniffy dude in the headphones might actually be doing up there.
As the blur reaches its crescendo, the way forward is flagged by one ironically retro moment: one fateful night at Cheetah, he drops the needle on AC/DC’s Back in Black in the midst of a Biggie Smalls rap. “Nothing was ever the same,” he swears, as sweet adoration fills his veins. In the sweat-haze of the moment, you believe him.
That small act is a neat symbol of the giant leap Ronson would soon make, from the ghetto of esoteric chic to the glittering world of Oscars and Grammys and red-carpet superstars shouting his name. That might make a fine sequel one day, but for white-knuckle thrills and sheer passion, this fever dream of a vanished world will be hard to beat.
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