"As music, it is perfumed gunk," Hampton writes of the sounds from the bronzed white man with a toe-tapping colonial beat in "obedience to the social hierarchy rock finds itself absorbed by." Adkins' songs on The Wild Man arrived far from this civilization, Hampton wrote.
A freelancer who lived in Apple Valley, Ca., Howard proposed to compare and contrast new LPs from Sting and Hasil Adkins, a yawping rocker from West Virginia. Critic Howard Hampton hammered the Englishman's effort from the headline - "Bring Me the Head of Gordon Sumner" - to the last sentence - "Your head, my wall."Īs music editor, a gig I held from 1985-90 in a 22-year run at the paper, I had a rich stream of story pitches from dozens of fine writers - it was a no-brainer giving the go-ahead to Howard's. His boiling letter appeared in The Village Voice in November 1987, the week after the music section's review of his solo album Nothing Like the Sun. It was such a thrill, she tells me, to know that something she had written was part of the East Village trash.ĭoug Simmons - former editor-in-chief music editor and writer from 1985-2006, currently core product business developer for Bloomberg The icy wind was blowing newspaper pages - newsprint, you remember - down the Bowery, and in those pages she glimpsed her own piece. She had something in Riffs that week‑-"Pere Ubu Live in This S***!," probably. We were walking down to CBGB on a bitter night in 1978. But it was the Voice's music coverage as a whole that imparted a sense of possibility that changed his life.Ĭarola's story is shorter and maybe better. When he retires, he could take up music journalism easy, especially since he probably wouldn't need to make much money at it. Cam is now COO at New York Presbyterian as well as one of the most wide-ranging music lovers I've ever met. Somehow, it convinced him that he was part of a community larger than any he'd known - that he belonged in a world he'd dreamed of. A heart surgeon who also headed up the University of North Carolina Medical School, he traveled a lot, so I believe it was in person that he told me that my little note had been a turning point when he was a Vanderbilt freshman, up from Mobile on a scholarship. In early 2011 he quickly proved the most articulate, knowledgeable and together of the amazing commenting community that gathered around the Expert Witness iteration of the Consumer Guide that Microsoft's publishing arm MSN forced on me in a money move (a community I doubt would ever have developed at the Voice, by the way). I know, because 30 years later I met Cam. While never a big deal, that incident stuck in my memory. Keep yer buck." (It might have been "you." It was definitely "yer.") So I slid a Pazz & Jop issue into one of the big envelopes also piled under my task and taped the dollar onto a piece of Voice stationery on which I wrote: "Here ya go, Cam. It was from a guy in Nashville who'd missed the Pazz & Jop issue at the local hipster store and hoped I could mail him a copy. I don't want to brag or romanticize - even at Pazz & Jop time, fan mail was much rarer than press boompf.
Mine concerns the 1981 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll, fifty or so of which were piled beneath my desk late in February of 1982, where I opened the usual pile of press releases, promotional LPs, and fan mail. Sum up they don't - in 2015 I published a memoir called Going Into the City that makes a pass at that feat and doesn't sum up either. Whereupon Carola proved her greatness yet again by coming up with two anecdotes worth repeating inside of 45 seconds, one for me and one for her. but reading the stories below, that seems pretty impossible to believe. It's easy to say nobody cares any more - about music, about writing, about anything. Below you'll find a lot of words by some of those writers, whose work collectively smudged millions, people who remember reflexively the importance of a sentence's contour, a well-placed swear and a well-executed takedown. The Voice had most - all, it can seem - of the world's best music writers pass through its pages.
#Village voice its village voicey free
(It has to be said that oftentimes, in my experience, those stands were as likely to be filled with bottles of urine as they were papers, though I only got there after the door was free to open.) Now, there are soon to be tens of thousands a week less, as The Village Voice ends an epoch, removing newsstands that for 62 years contained the lean and mien of an unparalleled city. There are far fewer fingertips smudged and squeaky with newsprint ink today than there were even an armful of years ago. Its final publication date has yet to be finalized. An East Village newsstand of T he Voice, which is ending its print edition after 62 years.
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