DescriptionIn “Contorting the Color Line: Race in New York City Underground Music and Culture, 1978-1981,” I use a performance studies framework to argue that the changes in attitudes toward race in Manhattan’s underground music scenes during that period set the template for multicultural pop music in the 1980s. I begin by unpacking several performances in both the song and video for Blondie’s “Rapture” (1981) including instrumentation, vocalization, lyrical re-presentation and allusion, discourse, dance, negotiation of identity through fashion, the act of community building, and ideological organization. I work backward, using the “Rapture” template to examine the No Wave, mutant disco, punk funk, and hip hop scenes as points of cultural contact where black and white artists formed spaces of what Mark Chou and Roland Bleiker refer to as prefigurative politics: “a genre of activism that is small in scale and limited in impact but nevertheless can show the way toward a more democratic political community.” In these spaces artists exchanged cultural expressions and formed relationships in a growing Manhattan club scene that promoted interracial mixing and expanded social boundaries by bringing white downtown rockers and black uptown hip hoppers into closer proximity. Their collaborative relationships resulted in musical hybrids that appealed to both races and set the tone for a pastiche style of music making that became popular among mainstream audiences at the end of the 20th century.