The focus here is clearly music. Mr. Lawrence even includes some D.J. playlists for the listener to investigate. But “Life and Death” is more expansive than that — it takes you deep into a time and place, the good-old-bad-old-days of pre-Rudolph Giuliani New York, which many have valorized for some time now. If the 1970s have been thoroughly examined, the early ’80s have been left relatively unexplored, and while Mr. Lawrence provides a lot of minutiae, he also delivers a story with some sweep.  Once again, Mr. Lawrence’s heroes are the night crawlers of ’70s and ’80s New York dance clubs. His first two books focus on a pair of men whose cultural reach far outweighs their personal fortunes: David Mancuso, proprietor of the foundational disco the Loft in SoHo (its first party was on Valentine’s Day 1970) in “Love Saves the Day” (2004); and the mercurial, wildly eclectic Arthur Russell in “Hold On to Your Dreams” (2009). Obscure in his day, Mr. Russell, a cellist with a still-improbable résumé that includes chamber compositions, plangent pop songs and a handful of extraordinarily creative disco 12-inches, is now the locus of a thriving cult following fed by a series of reissues.  Those two men also make appearances in “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor,” but as part of an ensemble cast that’s hardly short on star power. Others includes the artists Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite) and David Wojnarowicz; the D.J.s Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and Jellybean Benitez; the young Run-D.M.C., Melle Mel and Russell Simmons; Blondie’s Deborah Harry and Chris Stein; and, yes, Madonna, who finally arrives on Page 248, appearing live at Danceteria, where, by her third show, her fee will outstrip the promoter’s budget.  They, along with scores of others, were hitting clubs in this era, and Mr. Lawrence makes a tight-knit case for the sociocultural value of clubs as meeting places for artists of different disciplines, particularly in New York, where property values were still low after the city’s near-bankruptcy in the mid-70s. Though perhaps this was already beginning to change. As Mr. Lawrence notes, “After a long slump, the real estate business was in ‘high gear,’ reported architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in the summer of 1980.”  By 1981, Steve Mass, founder of the Mudd Club, says: “There was this explosion of 20-odd clubs. Everyone was starting a club based on the fact that it cost no money. One of my bartenders went down the block and started doing nights in a strip club.”  Mr. Mass’s spot, which opened in TriBeCa in 1978, was the first of what would be called “rock discos” at the turn of the ’80s. Live bands played alongside D.J.s, and the D.J.s tended to refuse to play straight-up disco, though many kept things danceable, even before beat-matching became standard among club jocks. But Mudd Club also helped shift New York clubbers’ concept of cool away from the hauteur of Studio 54 in Midtown, with its infamous velvet rope. Mischievously, Mr. Mass had a blacksmith create an industrial chain and stanchion for the Mudd Club’s entry, boasting: “The velvet rope was designed to keep the people lacking taste, the underclass, away. But I took the velvet rope and devalued it.”  The art world gets special notice here, in particular the trajectories of Haring — gay, sharp, friendly, and dead of complications from AIDS by 1990 — and Basquiat, a magnetic presence who in addition to becoming a world-famous artist also dabbled in music. (He would die of a heroin overdose in 1988.) Basquiat played in the experimental quartet Gray and produced K-Rob vs. Rammellzee’s still stunning hip-hop 12-inch “Beat Bop,” issued by Profile Records, whose executive Cory Robbins turned down Basquiat’s offer to make artwork for the sleeve because “he would make more money if he stuck with the standard Profile jacket.” (The earlier original, Basquiat-designed cover, pressed in small numbers on a tiny label, now fetches as much as $1,500.)  Basquiat even occasionally spun his own, decidedly undisco mix of records in clubs, insisting to Johnny Dynell, a Mudd Club and Danceteria D.J., that “Anyone who can’t dance to John Coltrane can’t dance.”  As the mid-1980s approached, downtown wasn’t so carefree anymore. When 1983 came to a close, Dow Jones was up more than 200 points over a year earlier, bringing silly money to an area unused to it. “An era shaped by deepening inequality, accelerating commodity consumption and an obsession with surface image was making its presence felt,” Mr. Lawrence writes.  He quotes Michael Zilkha, founder of the “mutant disco” label ZE Records. “A lot of it had to do with the Reagan ethos,” Mr. Zilkha says, when everything “started to revolve around money. The more you retained your leftist ideals the more alienated you became.”  Ann Magnuson, the actress and 1980s party promoter, sensibly says near the book’s end, “Don’t romanticize having no money!” Then she adds: “But would I rather be a 22-year-old now or back then? Back then, absolutely.”  Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983  Illustrated. 578 pages. Duke University Press. $27.95.  A version of this review appears in print on October 10, 2016, on page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Cultural Time Capsule When Sparks Flew. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Tim Lawrence’s book depicts a gritty commingling of punk bands, graffiti artists and hip-hop D.J.s that sent sparks flying before economic forces remolded the city.