But we were serious about music. And no other publication in America spoke to my generation, and many succeeding generations, about popular music more authoritatively or entertainingly than The Village Voice.
News that The Voice may be on its way out will not elicit much in the way of sympathy from most conservatives. That’s to be expected. The unrelenting far left slant of its political coverage was both irritating and sometimes hysterically and unintentionally funny.
The Voice nurtured some of the best liberal writers of the latter half of the 20th century, fulfilling much the same function that Buckley’s The National Review accomplished for the right in that respect. It was loud, brash, unconventional, and gloriously subversive. But what interested my friends and me was that it took rock music as seriously as we did. We had endless discussions about the music, the musicians, and the themes and messages hidden and obvious. The music talked to us, spoke our language. There was, what long time music critic for The Voice Robert Christgau (fired in 2006) referred to a “texture” and subtext to the music that once revealed, allowed us to appreciate what it was we were listening to in a more subtle, and enjoyable way.
I eventually outgrew The Voice, just as I outgrew rock music and liberalism. And much to their chagrin, I’m sure, The Village Voice has become part of the establishment — just another alternative weekly spouting liberal inanities and parroting the nostrums of the far left. The last time I read it, about a decade ago, I remember thinking how boring it was. The columns I read were strident and humorless — a far cry from the vibrant, obnoxiously brilliant writing I recalled from my youth.
My father and mother watched as the old Mom and Pop grocery store died a slow death. My grandparents watched the end of wheelwrights and blacksmiths. Progress is sometimes measured in pain and suffering, and the eventual end of The Village Voice and the newspaper business in general shouldn’t be mourned any more than the corner grocery store, whose death led to the modern supermarket, or blacksmiths, whose disappearance was a harbinger of the coming transportation revolution and the internal combustion engine.
But perhaps somewhere, in some quiet place where reminisces of one’s youth is allowed, I’ll shed a single tear for the death of The Voice when it happens. At a time when few adults, or adult publications, understood what their children were thinking and feeling, The Voice and the music they wrote about, answered a need to express the inexpressible that I am grateful for to this day.
Ahh, the “Village Voice”…
Page 1-25: 17 different articles about how women are made into sex objects by the evil capitalist system.
Page 25-48: “massage parlor” and “escort” ads.
Back in the day, they had the most entertaining dirty ads in the business.
– to (fill in the city) Weekly. Hypocrites. Hurray for the days of consortin’ with the low hippie chicks, however.
The Village Voice: guidance for those who nonconform in lockstep.
Exactly: “Hey Dad, I wanna be *different*…you know, just like everyone else!”
VV used to have a civil liberties columnist (name has slipped my mind at the moment) who was consistent — when the Right did something good on CL, he’d acknowledge it, and when the Left did something bad on CL, he’d condemn it.
Aside from that, the Left has always condemned the US for being “fascist” while at the same time they want at least a fascist state, if not worse
rbj, are you thinking Nat Hentoff?
I too grew up on the Voice. Then went on to write for Rolling Stone in the Seventies.
(But that, as some Elizabethan said, was in another country. And beside the wench is dead.)
Worth noting ia that most renowned Voice columnist when I was a kid was Nat Hentoff, who certainly hasn’t been a liberal or leftist for years. Change (not the Obama kind) is good.
Hentoff is who I was thinking of. Has he really moved right, or has the left moved radical?
Stranger still: Hentoff was a man of principle, to be applied equally to friend and foe. ….Another anachronism lost to time?
Stranger still, he was a man of principle, applied equally to friend and foe. This, too, now seems a relic of another age, especially on the left.
Hentoff still has a link from Drudgereport. He’s actually on the right-wing wnd.com site, but he’s mostly writing from an ACLU type of perspective (afraid for our losses in 1st and 4th Amendment rights, as much under Obama as Bush). Apart from his opposition to abortion, I think he’s still mostly on the left.
As a wannabe sax player in the 60′s I also grew up as an avid reader of the Voice; Hentoff, Feiffer, The Stonewall riots, etc. It was a good read back then but gradually lost it’s edge-or maybe it was just me that changed.
LA Weekly seems very healthy, if an inch-thick wad of advertising every week is any indication. They even manage an interesting article about once a month, besides club ads and massage parlors.
It’s “pored” over, not poured, unless it was syrup.
The Voice was born partially in the wake of the demise of PM, the far left newspaper David Axelrod’s mom worked for in New York back in the 1940s. And the reason why the left in New York wanted an alternative ‘advocacy’ paper was that the remaining liberal papers in the city — including the Post and the Times — just weren’t hyperbolic enough for that crowd.
The double ironies look at present day media in New York, is that while the left knows and vilifies the fact that Rupert Murdoch bought the Post in 1976 and turned it into the city’s conservative paper, they forget that Murdoch bought the Voice the following year and didn’t do anything to its ideology, which should have blown up their talking points about Rupert being the right-wing eviscerator of press freedom and progressive thought worldwide, but the left doesn’t surrender its most cherished narratives easily. The other irony is that while the Post has moved right, the Times under Pinch for the past 20-plus years has moved head-first into the type of liberal advocacy journalism Punch and his dad tried to avoid for the most part in the 1955-88 period.
Aside from the decline of big city newspapers in general, now that The Paper of Record is throwing out the same sort of hyperbolic, partisan accusatory news articles as the Voice did, while championing alternative lifestyles and arts that mix their politics with entertainment, what’s the point of the Voice other than those back page sex ads?
I think the last time I bought a Village Voice was at a small PX at Tank Hill, Fort Jackson back in ’79. (It was forthwith unceremoniously confiscated, never to be seen again, by my drill sergeant before I could even rumple its pages.)
Wasn’t Karen Silkwood en route to the Voice when she mysteriously died in a car that went off the road on an Oklahoma highway?