End of obligatory paragraph about the greats I once knew-and, in Christgau’s case, still do.īut placid the place wasn’t, because that’s how it goes with fecundity. Willis edited me (subject: Norman Mailer, and Ellen was very tolerant of my pigheaded case for the defense) before, eventually, I edited her (subject: former Creedence Clearwater frontman John Fogerty, a rare return to rock criticism for her that I’m still pleased I cajoled her into). But Christgau literally changed my life by letting the untried, unproven twenty-one-year-old me review David Bowie’s latest. To my deep regret, I never once spotted Jules Feiffer around. Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis! Nat Hentoff, too. No question, it was exhilarating to find ourselves bumping elbows with-and, more incredibly yet, being treated as colleagues by-the self-same people who’d made us want to do this in the first place. If the legend was of awfully recent vintage, so much the better, because the only history that matters at that age is the kind that still feels contemporary. When we were young, it was The Show, and a paper that was already legendary by the time we started writing for it. But I doubt that any of us-except maybe Wolcott, who was plainly destined for midtown’s bigger platforms from the get-go-thought of the Voice as a farm team at the time.
Voice returns its village voicey movie#
On the culture beat alone, its still active alums range from New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis, to New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, to Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott, to James Brown and Robert Frank biographer RJ Smith. MoreĪs a result, the Voice became one of the greatest farm teams in American journalism. But at its best, it was also a welcoming haven for scads of new-gee, what’s the right word?- voices, who strutted their stuff until some more august publication decided to up its hipness quotient by poaching them. The paper couldn’t have prospered without its lifers, for sure.
Voice returns its village voicey update#
For some readers, that no doubt remained a much better reason to pick up the paper every Wednesday than the basket of unpredictables who’d chosen to update a bohemian sensibility they’d imbibed from the Voice itself by regularly yanking and re-wiring their elders’ preconceptions six ways to Sunday. I don’t want to exaggerate this side of the paper’s appeal, because our audience could also expect the Voice’s crankier mainstays to reliably produce thoughtful variations on the same column brief week in and week out. The Voice became one of the greatest farm teams in American journalism.Īmid all the disputativeness, fecundity became the only constant, defining the paper’s identity every bit as much as the stubborn (albeit increasingly minuscule) “Village” in its name. We hashed these squabbles out every week among ourselves, as well as with an audience that expected contentious perceptiveness about the latest City Hall shitstorm or collective art-world orgasm, not just a tidy rearrangement of the same reassuringly familiar deck chairs.
We let ourselves get stimulated and jostled by it, and brother, did we ever argue about it.
But the difference between how we went about the job and the staid way the NYT or The New Yorker did was that we never covered that stuff from a settled institutional distance. The Voice broke its share of hard-news stories, and certainly alerted readers to more than its share of no-longer-fringe trends, sometimes NYC-specific and sometimes not. That was because responsiveness to cultural and political flux was built-and often jerry-built-into the paper’s ramshackle m.o. Interludes of smugness weren’t unknown, but ossification was never in the cards. When I think about my two stints at the now-shuttered Village Voice-for which I freelanced regularly from the late seventies to the late eighties, returning as a staff writer from 1994-1999-one unexpected but apt word that keeps popping to mind is “fecund.” My recollection that I worked for two or possibly three different papers all hawked under the same name doesn’t seem remarkable, because the Voice never stopped mutating.
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