The its very village voicey archive#

No one knew that history was loading a bullet with our name on it. On Friday, a year after the paper became online-only, the current owner, Peter Barbey, told the staff that it would no longer publish new material.

The its very village voicey archive#

He said that a few employees would stick around to work on a digital archive the rest were laid off immediately. My first time at the Voice, in 1966, was a fluke typical of the overnight mobilities of life and work in New York then. As a chaotic college-dropout poet and freelancer, subsisting on Avenue B, I had no credentials apart from hanging out with a lot of artists and having done some short (chiefly one-sentence) reviews for Art News. Someone at the Voice-eleven years past its founding, by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer-liked how I wrote. In a contest between meeting deadlines and doing drugs, guess what won. But the brief elevation launched what I hadn’t yet imagined would become a career. My second cruise, from 1980 to 1981, was wonderfully timed for a resurgence of energy in an art world that, like me, had drooped through the seventies. Then I blundered, jumping to the revived Vanity Fair before I was ready for it, or it for me. I wished to return to the Voice, but the fabulously acerbic Gary Indiana (who ended one column with this direct address to his readers: “Fuck you”) held the art-critic post by then. It seemed like every time I ran into Gary he said he was about to quit, but he didn’t quit-playing dog in the manger, in my exasperated view. The Voice’s publisher at the time, David Schneiderman, reacted to the city’s rising prosperity in the eighties by trying to nudge the paper toward an upscale market, but was stymied by the staff’s entrenched counterculturalism. (Thank God for the contract of the Voice’s union, by the way, which would finance me through an otherwise bankrupting health crisis.) In 1988, Schneiderman effectively went into competition with himself with a new, stapled tabloid weekly, 7 Days, where I was employed once again. It was terrific (Adam Moss was the editor Joan Acocella covered dance we were a darn clever bunch) but doomed by the recession that shortly followed.

I rejoined the Voice two years later, after 7 Days shut down. The next seven years-until, to my lasting wonderment, I was tapped by The New Yorker-were the most fun I’ve ever had as a critic. Among other things, I could consult with a canny photographer-first James Hamilton, then Robin Holland-to double the thrust, or the irony, of each column. I could take for granted a hip audience that required a minimum of exposition, and was game for jumping into the deep end of the subject at hand. A huge percentage of the working rock critics of the last three decades are graduates of the Voice music section, shaped by Christgau’s mentoring and fearsome line-editing.I never worked at the office, but I recall a thrill nearly every time I entered it-headed to the desk of my editor, Jeff Weinstein or Vince Aletti-three blocks from my apartment, on St. He also earned the “dean” title by teaching. He continued to write about the records that arrived in his mailbox every day, keeping his ears and mind open to new music more than most critics 40 years his junior. In the 1970s and early ‘80s, when rock criticism was arguably at its height of cultural influence, Christgau was formidable enough to inspire in-concert tirades by Billy Joel, who ripped up his Voice reviews onstage, and Lou Reed, who wondered aloud on the live LP Take No Prisoners, “What does Robert Christgau do in bed? Is he a toe fucker?” Unlike other first-generation pop critics, who drifted into other kinds of work, lost interest in current pop, or, in the case of Lester Bangs, died, Christgau was persistent. From his perch at the Village Voice, Christgau reigned as the country’s foremost popular-music writer. In any case, as the years passed, the quip became a fact. Christgau was in his late 20s at the time-not exactly an é minence grise-so maybe it was the booze talking, or maybe he was just a very arrogant young man.

When Robert Christgau appointed himself Dean of American Rock Critics, he was “slightly soused at a 5 th Dimension press party” in the early 1970s.