Night People by Mark Ronson
As a fan of his own music, I was intrigued what a book on Ronson’s early days learning how to DJ in 1990s New York would be like. I cracked the (digital) spine and was finished in less than two days, whisked along by the storytelling, name-dropping, nineties nostalgia. Like Questlove’s recent books on hip-hop and music generally, I found myself regularly pausing my reading to listen to songs I either didn’t know or hadn’t heard for years, a soundtrack that added even more to the reading experience. Ronson floats through NYC and the names fly, from Trumps and Diddys to Lennons and Jay-Z’s as he charts his part-fortuitous, part-hard-working rise through the small club DJ scene (some of whose names inadvertently seem like rejected Stefan scenes from SNL: “At the same time, highly exclusive lounges like Wax, Moomba, and Veruka were redefining nightlife…”). His writing style is simple, fun and friendly, making you feel like one of the crew tagging along as he tells of “burning the candle at both ends with a blowtorch,” or of a teacher being “the kind of person who’d make you want to graduate and open a sociology store, or whatever it was that sociologists did..”Ending with some poignant self-reflection and a look at the changes in contemporary music (and life generally: “Part of what made our era so special was the absence of surveillance. People were completely in the moment.”), I’m already looking forward to the follow-up and Ronson’s shift from record spinner to record maker – it can’t come soon enough for this fellow UK transplant to the US.
Night People by Mark Ronson, (List Price: $29, Grand Central Publishing, 9781538741115, September 2025)
Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana
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It’s easy to root for people who make the same choices you do. I think the metaphor I use in the book is it’s harder to be the person standing on the shore when you thought you were going to be the person on the boat or on the plane. I thought I was going to be the leaver, and instead I had to be the one who threw the goodbye parties. And I’m grateful for that. It taught me some really important lessons about being happy for people, even when the choices they make are different from your own. And you really have to be content in your contentedness in order to root for and support the people who leave. And I do think it’s important that you do that, because the conclusion I have reached in my almost 40 years is we all will do both. We are not all going to stay all the time and we’re not all going to leave all the time. It’s both. And so, I currently sit in a seat of staying, but I also have left beloved institutions. I have left relationships. And so, that’s the other side is, I hope I’m learning lessons from my friends who have left. They have something to teach me too.
