It’s a sad sad day. Not just for my friends who just got laid off, but for New York, for all of us. We are ALL the poorer when something like this happens. But to New Yorkers … to writers … hell, to anyone looking for an apartment (the VV’s classifieds!) … the Village Voice was a part of the warp and weft of our lives in a way few other papers ever achieve. Founded by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer (I mean, come on), the Village Voice published some of the greatest voices of the 2nd half of the 20th century, as well as giving a platform to out-there non-mainstream genius types, people with distinct unmistakable sometimes ornery voices, people you looked forward to reading. Robert Christgau. Andrew Sarris. Ellen Willis. (Of course, this all pre-dated me … I WISH I had been around then.) Tom Carson. James Wolcott. Molly Haskell. Wayne Barrett (up until very recently). I feel truly grateful that I have actually gotten to know some of these people personally.
The loss is almost too big to grasp. End of an era. End of a lot of things.
Maybe something else will rise from the ashes. Maybe the corporatization of so much of our culture will help create an underground press, or ‘zines, like back in the day, SOMEthing that isn’t money-driven. It feels like maybe that’s the way things might go. But in the meantime: I mourn the loss of these alt-weeklies, of what they provided, their eccentricities, their devotion to the purely local.
Not too many publications (then or now) would have published Lester Bangs’ unforgettable obituary of Elvis. But the Village Voice did.
If you’ve read it, then you know how powerful and sui generis it is. People are still arguing about it, and these arguments just underline the obit’s stature as a piece of critical commentary. The obituary feels like it’s going to derail into a gigantic PAN of the man – not as vicious as, say, Hunter Thompson’s obit for Nixon, or Christopher Hitchens’ obit for Mother Teresa – but it’s certainly not misty-water-colored-memories. In it, Bangs describes wandering around the Village, going into different stores looking for beer, asking people what they think of Elvis. But of course Bangs builds to something. It builds and builds and builds … The piece has a crescendo like you wouldn’t believe. It is one of the most well-known pieces of music writing in the canon – not to mention social/cultural critique – of that era and ours. It is EERILY prescient about where the culture was going.
In the obituary, Bangs was also one of the only (if not the only) heterosexual male music critics who admitted that Elvis turned him on sexually. This is a huge “missing” in much of the contemporaneous commentary on Elvis, most of which was written by men. Of course the men refer to Elvis’ wiggling, his sexual persona, etc., but they remain distant from it. Lester Bangs goes right to the heart of it.
Everyone always references the final paragraph but I treasure this section:
“He was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn’t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection. I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as far back as 1964 and twice in ’65, never even came close. There was Elvis, dressed up in this totally ridiculous white suit which looked like some studded Arthurian castle, and he was too fat, and the buckle on his belt was as big as your head except that your head is not made of solid gold, and any lesser man would have been the spittin’ image of a Neil Diamond damfool in such a getup, but on Elvis it fit. What didn’t? …
That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter, tens or tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger, not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria among so many.”
A huge connection with our past is now severed. In their final announcement, they did say that they were working to keep the digital archives online. But that feels extremely precarious. This is why when people say “the Internet is forever” I say, “What internet are YOU talking about?” Stuff is lost all the time. Yeah, yeah, wayback machine, but please, the fact remains: when a site goes down, often all the writing goes down with it. We cannot lose these things. We cannot lose access to them! What do we have to replace the Village Voice?
Don’t answer that. I already know.
To steal the famous last line of Bangs’ obit for Elvis:
So I won’t say goodbye to the Village Voice. I’ll say goodbye to you.
Well said, as always, Sheila. This has just been a shitty couple of weeks, Aretha, McCain, Neil Simon, Village Voice. That paper was as real to me as Aretha Franklin was. I rented my first apartment out of the Village Voice in September 1974 on E. 7th Street off Avenue D. The rent was $115 month. I went to the Thalia on 8th Street because of their reviews and to see the Astaire/Rogers movies. I could see their offices from my friend’s apartment.
The Voice was different. It made you want to be better and smarter because the writing was so good even when you didn’t even understand why the writer was so mad. The paper felt different than the Post or Daily News or the Times. People read and talked about the Village Voice.
This has been a shitty week.
// The rent was $115 month. //
Oh my God.
// even when you didn’t even understand why the writer was so mad. //
Ha!!
Thank you so much for these memories, Carolyn.
and yes. Shitty week for sure. and year.
For some reason, I remember that the first issue I got after subscribing in the fall of 1978 was October 30, 1978 – with Reggie Jackson on the cover. And then when I went away to Cal two years later, I transferred the subscription to my dorm address and no one on my floor quite knew what to make of the publication.
I’ve still got about four scrapbooks of original articles from the Voice (and Rolling Stone) of that era. The authors you mentioned, but also Alexander Cockburn, James Ridgway, Nat Hentoff, Geoffrey Stokes, Stuart Byron, Carrie Rickey, J. Hoberman and of course all the great music critics. It was for the music reviews that I subscribed, but after a while that was rarely the first thing that I read.
For me the biggest tragedy (among many) is the potential demise, assuming it doesn’t go elsewhere, of the Pazz & Jop poll. Even after I stopped subscribing a few years back, that more than anything was what got me excited – and checking the web site every day after the beginning of the new year. I can’t imagine there not being a Pazz & Jop poll.
Thanks for these memories, Jeff. Yes, Carrie Rickey – I finally met her for the first time at this year’s Ebertfest! The current film editor – Bilge Ebiri – was a huge draw, recently – I always read whatever he wrote. He combined film knowledge with readability – a killer combo, and sorely lacking in so much film writing now, which seems to be written for other critics. I learned a lot from reading him.
Although I knew, the moment they went all-digital, that the Voice wouldn’t last, I am still very sad. Like many other people, I found apartments, relationships, concert tickets and jobs from the paper’s listings. And my name change was published in its Legal Notices section!
It just feels like, if not the last, then one more nail in the coffin of a city you came to because you had a vision for your life (or lifestyle) that didn’t fit wherever you came from. Now this is a city where you work a corporate job or move in with lots of money–and live in a neighborhood where everybody else is doing the same.
It’s really true. I moved to the area over 20 years ago. The changes have been extreme and not in a good way. City for the rich now. And the whole theatre scene, the non-union theatre scene – which I was very involved in – it still exists but it has taken a huge hit. These companies can’t afford rent anymore … so all the little black box theatres where weird work could be done, experimental work … is slowly vanishing. and of course this changes the texture of the city – like so much else.
I found jobs from those classifieds too. I am fairly certain that the classifieds were how the VV kept afloat for so many years – huge source of income in the pre-digital era. Once that vanished – once Craig’s List rose – the writing was on the wall. Change is inevitable but it’s still sad.