On October 26, 1955, The Village Voice printed its first-ever difficulty, changing into the nation’s first various newsweekly. Over six many years later, on Sept. 20, 2017, the publication printed its final difficulty. And on Aug. 31, 2018, the Voice shut down solely.
Throughout its course, the Voice was dwelling to a lot of right this moment’s music authorities who’ve since lent their voices right here at Billboard and elsewhere, authored and edited books and taught programs at universities throughout the nation. But all of them needed to begin someplace. Here, music writers and editors recall their first story for the Voice.
Chuck Eddy
Currently: Author of a number of books, most lately 2016’s Terminated for Reasons of Taste: Other Ways to Hear Essential and Inessential Music
My first Village Voice byline occurred solely accidentally. I’d been voting within the paper’s annual Pazz & Jop music critics ballot since 1981, my senior 12 months in University of Missouri’s Journalism program. By the third 12 months I voted, I used to be a 23-year-old second lieutenant serving the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany, paying taxpayers again in boredom, toil, deployment plans and commonplace working procedures for the ROTC scholarship that had funded my diploma. Along with my 1983 high tens, I submitted a ridiculously wordy screed tearing by the state of each rock and rock criticism — for no different motive than as a result of I needed to get a couple of issues off my chest. Some weeks after sending in, I obtained a mysterious verify from the Voice in my A.P.O. field — bizarre, however not the form of factor one complains about.
Before lengthy, I realized that Robert Christgau had appreciated my spiel sufficient to publish a vastly pessimistic, partly tongue-in-cheek, couple-hundred phrase chunk of it as a boxed sidebar, underneath the headline “Over And Out.” Here he’s, within the lead paragraph of his personal essay, which ran within the February 28, 1984 difficulty: “To quote Chuck Eddy, the West Bloomfield, Michigan, free-lancer whose 11-page ballot gave me the idea of sharing my essay with the voters this year: ‘There are only a couple of 1983 records that really matter to me (have become part of me, have changed me, have taught me important things about life or love or Woody Guthrie or food or baseball, have reminded me of stuff I already knew but forgot, you know what I mean).’”
After that, Christgau ran voters’ feedback alongside his P&J essay yearly — till 2006, by which era I’d been the paper’s music editor for seven years and the corporate laid us each off. My very first assigned album overview, of Bad Religion’s now long-disowned (as a result of extra prog than punk) Into the Unknown, ran in July 1984. I’ve aged a era or two since. But not like the Village Voice, no less than I’m nonetheless alive.
Robert Christgau
Currently: The Expert Witness columnist at Noisey, creator of upcoming assortment Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017
My first Rock & Roll & column for The Village Voice appeared March 3, 1969 and analyzed the rising generational differentiations inside a “rock tradition” inevitably changing into much less uniform. The bulk of “Gap Again” is so good I thought of together with it in my forthcoming Is It Still Good to Ya? assortment. But it ended a lot too sloppily, largely as a result of I did not suppose a full-length essay I used to be getting paid 40 bucks for was price greater than an all-nighter’s effort. Soon sufficient I used to be publishing essays there that took me per week.
Evelyn McDonnell
Currently: Associate professor and director of the journalism program at Loyola Marymount University, editor of upcoming e book Women Who Rock
I moved to New York in late 1988. Soon after, I started copyediting at The Voice, and shortly after that, I began writing. That was one of many nice issues concerning the Voice: they had been open to new writers. My first piece was about Throwing Muses’s Hunkpapa album, sarcastically, for the reason that first paid piece of music criticism I ever wrote was concerning the Muses for Providence’s NewPaper about 4 years earlier. I used to be glad to jot down about them for a bigger viewers, though I don’t suppose on reflection I succeeded in capturing how intense that album is, its turbulent peek inside psychosis, as songwriter Kristin Hersh revealed many years later in her autobiography Rat Girl. That overview led to many extra, together with a 1995 cowl story on Patti Smith and my eventual rent as music editor. I bought two e book offers out of Voice tales: Rock She Wrote is predicated on my historical past of ladies music critics, “The Feminine Critique,” and the Rent e book. I can’t say that about every other publication I’ve written for!
Nick Catucci
Currently: Features director, Billboard
Every intern bought one pity project throughout his or her semester of transcribing and mail-opening, and mine — in 2000, in the course of the second half of my junior 12 months a NYU — was a overview of a Dismemberment Plan live performance on the Knitting Factory in Manhattan. (Long earlier than the arrival of non-public media manufacturers, I used to be the workplace emo boy.) Because I used to be a blandly formidable journalism pupil I turned in a mannered imitation of what I assumed skilled rock criticism was purported to be: the piece was pompous, dry and peppered with references to Fugazi and “big-label execs.” The music editor, Chuck Eddy — the man whose mail I used to be opening — famously hated the snoozily pretentious sorts of items I used to be emulating and will most likely barely tolerate studying it.
I do not bear in mind what Chuck informed me in the course of the edit, which like all edits there on the time was executed in-person, line by line. But quickly after I made a decision to check a bunch of critiques by Don Allred, whose epically lengthy drafts, usually filed on-spec, Chuck would usually make area to run in print, as I recall, virtually utterly unaltered. (Or possibly that is extra like what he did with Frank Kogan. Chuck was infatuated with the each of them, their uncooked copy specifically.) Allred wrote, if that is doable, in a form of mock stream of consciousness that owed loads to early gonzo music writers like Richard Meltzer — this is a representative sample from after I was interning.
I used to be actually into Modest Mouse (emo boy), and some months later I satisfied Chuck to present me a second pity project writing about The Moon & Antarctica and Building Nothing Out of Something. This time, somewhat than try a bit of significant criticism, I aimed to out-Allred Allred. Even then I feel I knew I used to be histrionically pandering to the Voice custom of crucial insularity. Satirizing it, even. If this seems like a white dude flexing the privilege of writing for different white dudes, that is as a result of, partly, it was. But Chuck and the entire Voice‘s editors had been so splendidly invested in letting their writers take dangers and domesticate their lower-case voices that they gave me extra assignments, extra in-person line edits, and finally I started to determine that writing wasn’t (solely) about impressing (or baffling) different writers. A lesson I nonetheless want to recollect each time I sit down to jot down.
Rob Harvilla
Currently: Staff author at The Ringer
I’ll do you, the reader, a favor and never hyperlink out to my first-ever piece for the Voice, and moreover do myself a favor and never Google it in any respect. It was 2006, and I used to be formally introducing myself because the paper’s new music editor, changing a beloved determine (my predecessor, Chuck Eddy) and functionally serving as the general public face of the very unpopular alt-weekly chain that had simply purchased the paper and hastened the undeserved exits of Chuck and, over the course of my subsequent 5 years on the Voice, one thing like 10,000 different equally beloved writers and editors.
It felt like 10,000, anyway. My first piece was the primary installment of my new column, which I virtually known as The Charm Offensive as a nod to those circumstances, however as a substitute known as Down in Front as a result of I’m tall, and thus all the time involved throughout rock concert events that somebody’s going to toss stuff behind my head. This offers you some thought of my confidence stage. My first column was some form of ill-advised “Diary of a Newly Minted New Yorker” scenario, little half-cute vignettes completely coated in flop sweat. I wouldn’t say that circumstances improved, precisely, however I improved, somewhat, finally. Maybe I’ll Google a few of that stuff sometime. But I doubt it.
Nelson George
Currently: Author, filmmaker and producer for exhibits like The Chris Rock Show and The Get Down
It was a brief piece on a 12 inch single by Harlem rapper Lovebug Starski on Harlem World Records, a label run by the parents who owned the Harlem World Disco on 116th Street and Lenox. It was at Harlem World that Starski would have his well-known battle with Kool Moe Dee. My second piece was on “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” which was the primary document to seize hip-hop DJ strategies on vinyl. So it was hip-hop that was my gateway into the Village Voice.
Carol Cooper
Currently: Adjunct teacher at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts
If I bear in mind appropriately, my first story for the Voice was a e book overview in 1979. I used to be working then as a proofreader for the VV, however had beforehand been reviewing music for 3 or 4 different native publications– together with the presumptive Voice rival The Soho Weekly News — so Xgau was cautious of my music pitches at first. He made me wait awhile to crack his part, which was a typical hazing ritual most individuals who pitched tales to Xgau went by. But as soon as he took me on as a daily music critic, we had a really attention-grabbing and productive editorial relationship. My favourite assignments had been the small live performance and membership critiques we used to name “Licks.” I used to be free to pitch Bob something, however my “beat” quickly turned r&b, reggae, salsa, alt black funk, Gospel, dance, and particularly “world beat”; largely as a result of I had already traveled to Brazil, Nigeria and Jamaica to analysis a lot of the music I used to be writing about. Best factor about writing for the Village Voice? They all the time inspired me to jot down about books, music, movie, artwork, dance, and popular culture from a political (and historic) perspective. They additionally by no means requested me to dumb-down my work, knowledgeable courtesy for which I’ll all the time be grateful.
Tom Briehan
Currently: Senior editor at Stereogum
In the summer season of 2005, I moved to New York with no job prospects and no thought the place I’d find yourself. I’d by no means written for the Voice earlier than, however for no matter motive, Chuck Eddy nonetheless employed me as a music blogger. I wrote the Status Ain’t Hood weblog for the Voice‘s web site for 3 years — one lengthy piece on a regular basis, about no matter I needed, with no enhancing and no steerage. It was the most effective.
The first piece I wrote was a couple of weekend of grime exhibits on the Knitting Factory and the East River Park bandshell. Kano and Wiley performed these tough, anarchic units for American hipster youngsters who had been geeked up on the concept of grime however who’d by no means actually gotten to take pleasure in it earlier than. A-Trak and (I feel) Diplo performed DJ units. Juelz Santana did a fast set on the East River Park present, after which he spent extra time signing autographs for teenagers from the adjoining housing initiatives than he did rapping.
The complete factor performed out like some hazy, sunny dream. I could not consider what I used to be attending to see, could not consider I used to be being paid to jot down about it, and, greater than the rest, could not consider that I used to be attending to do it for the Village Voice.
