Imagine my surprise when I was flipping through the newspaper the other day and saw that Frankie Knuckles would be on TV. Frankie, Jellybean Benitez and Mel Cheren are just a few of the notables that make an appearance in the fascinating documentary NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell.

Despite the usual freakshow fare that airs on VH1, NY77 is actually one of the best docs I've seen in a long time. The 87 minute film casts a microscope on New York City in 1977, when blackouts pushed people out into the streets, gay liberation drew people out of the closet and the Son of Sam hunted them all down with his .44 caliber revolver. It traces the progress of a city that was facing catastrophe: bankrupt, seedy, plagued by urban decay and lawlessness... and the fascinating cultural ferment underway just beneath the surface.

The documentary takes on three seemingly unrelated genres of music that were born in the underground at around the same time in Metropolis: hip-hop, disco, and punk. To lead off the hip-hop segment, Afrika Bambaataa talks about trying to find something to get himself and his friends out of gangs. Equipment was hard to come by; musical education in New York's crumbling schools was non-existent. But with nothing but some old records, second-hand equipment and human ingenuity, the early pioneers of hip-hop wound up running outlaw parties with turntables powered by tapping into streetlamps with dozens of five foot electrical cords.

Underlying the message of the film is an anecdote about the opportunity bourne from hard times: the infamous blackout in the Summer of '77 and mass arrests which followed. Despite the economic loss as thousands engaged in looting, the blackout inadvertently gave the hip-hop movement a shot in the arm. One old school DJ talks about the explosion of DJ crews immediately after the blackout and looting of the audio shops in the area, with the pilfered equipment fueling the rise of the new movement.

The disco segment is astonishingly dead-on for a mainstream documentary. Sure, there's a pass through Studio 54, with the usual hookers'n'blow anecdotes of New York's glittering Babylon. But the writers also bring in Mel Cheren to talk about the Paradise Garage (oddly, David Mancuso isn't interviewed, though The Loft is featured). The writers make a clear distinction between the commercialized junk that followed Saturday Night Fever and the underground disco that planted the seed for the worldwide House Music scene today. Drawing that line between the kitsch that was fashionable and the classics which have endured is incredibly rare when mainstream reporters tell this story.

Probably the most effective speaker for disco here is none other than Frankie Knuckles. Other films and books have put this into words before, but none so well as Frankie talking about his personal feelings of insecurity, of being an outcast among family and peers, and how the underground disco scene became a home for misfits of all stripes. Some were kids thrown out of their homes for being gay, some were fleeing from broken homes, some were just possessed by a sense of not belonging anywhere. All of them found a community on the sweaty Garage and Loft dancefloors. As another person says, "If you can dance with anyone, you can get along with anyone."

The punk side of the story spends considerable time with Richard Hell, formerly of Television and the Voidoids and one of the most articulate writers and spokesman (though he'd cringe at being considered such) to come out of the punk scene. I was in middle school years ago when I found a Richard Hell essay that, for the first time, put punk rock into the proper context for me. "A child grows older and discovers that the world is monstrous," I remember him writing, "and to cope, he becomes a monster himself." Contrast the three scenes and you have three entirely different ways of coping with a world which is often brutal. But as we grow older (and, hopefully, wiser), we learn to cope in different ways, which explains why so many Househeads such as Lady Kier and even Screaming Rachel (who is still regarded fondly by veterans of the Chicago punk scene) moved so easily from one scene to another.

Without saying so directly, the film points out that despite the same environment, the seething discontent of New York in 1977 broke down largely along racial and social lines, with white kids digging punk, black kids gravitating toward hip-hop and gay kids being drawn to the disco scene. It would have been nice to note the exceptions (there's another documentary about black punk rock called Afropunk, and obviously House has always had a significant straight audience), but it's daft to argue there's not a grain of truth to this. The most important point here, in a society that loves to trivialize, is the cultural context: the Bronx was burning, the city was crumbling, New Yorkers were poor and angry but the kids found the means, as they always do, to express themselves.

After this aired, I checked out some reviews. Remarkably, fans of punk, house and hip-hop all seem to have enjoyed it. NY77 will continue airing on VH1 through the rest of the month and is slated for a Christmas DVD release.