Writing the Record

The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism

Devon Powers

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781613763223
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

During the mid-1960s, a small group of young journalists made it their mission to write about popular music, especially rock, as something worthy of serious intellectual scrutiny. Their efforts not only transformed the perspective on the era's music but revolutionized how Americans have come to think, talk, and write about popular music ever since.In Writing the Record, Devon Powers explores this shift by focusing on The Village Voice, a key publication in the rise of rock criticism. Revisiting the work of early pop critics such as Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau, Powers shows how they stood at the front lines of the mass culture debates, challenging old assumptions and hierarchies and offering pioneering political and social critiques of the music. Part of a college-educated generation of journalists, Voice critics explored connections between rock and contemporary intellectual trends such as postmodernism, identity politics, and critical theory. In so doing, they became important forerunners of the academic study of popular culture that would emerge during the 1970s.Drawing on archival materials, interviews, and insights from media and cultural studies, Powers not only narrates a story that has been long overlooked but also argues that pop music criticism has been an important channel for the expression of public intellectualism. This is a history that is particularly relevant today, given the challenges faced by criticism of all stripes in our current media environment. Powers makes the case for the value of well-informed cultural criticism in an age when it is often suggested that "everyone is a critic."

CHAPTER 1

Village

On October 30, 1955, the New York Times announced to the rest of the city word of a new downtown newspaper. Called the Village Voice, it printed its first issue on October 26 and sold for five cents every Wednesday at Lower Manhattan vendors. Editor Dan Wolf and publisher Ed Fancher intended to make their paper Village-centric not just in distribution. Localism also governed its choice of writers—as Wolf put it, the neighborhood teemed with “so many capable people who are ready and willing to contribute.”¹

Times columnist Harvey Breit used that day’s installment of In and Out of Books to focus additional attention toward the renaissance afoot in Lower Manhattan, suggesting that “apparently things are beginning to stir again in Greenwich Village, that antique site of all sorts of creative experimentation.”² Though things certainly had changed since the turn of the century when, Breit wistfully reminisced, “writers and painters and musicians somehow managed without jobs,” the latter-day bohemia of the city’s contemporary Village “has shown it isn’t altogether moribund.” Some evidence: a series at the New School dedicated to celebrating the Village’s art scene; a new edited collection of writings from neo-bohemian writers; and the launch of the Village Voice.

That the Village already had a newspaper, however, tunes these laudations to a slightly different key. Siblings Walter and Isabel Bryan founded The Villager in 1933, and they served as publishers until their deaths in 1941 and 1957 respectively.³ The weekly paper reported on neighborhood happenings and personalities, including event announcements, births, concerts, and recipes, and commanded a respectable circulation and advertising base. At the same time, The Villager was adamantly neither of nor for the eccentrics of the Village. Walter Bryan made this clear during his lifetime, when he proclaimed, “Many people . . . have the stubborn conviction that the Village is a Bohemian community. Well, it isn’t.”⁴ The New York Times once described the paper as “small-townish,” noting that its “star reporter and columnist” was a cat named Scoopy.⁵ The paper not only boasted its unsophisticated leanings but likewise put forward a sanitized version of the Village, editing it both literally and figuratively. Noted the Times, “To the best of its ability, The Villager stays out of political squabbles, fastidiously skirts murder and scandalous doings, prints birthday wishes, Village booster stories and names, names, names”—thus staying true to its motto to reflect “the treasured traditions of this cherished community.”⁶

Given this context, the Voice was not just a new community paper, another bud in a blooming cultural efflorescence. Nor was it simply a milestone in the “proto-underground”⁷—a concept some historians have used to situate the newspaper as a more moderate antecedent to the radical underground press that appeared during the next decade. Rather, the Voice both recognized and fostered the Village’s emboldening bohemian community and in the process played a key role in enlarging the Village’s conceptual borders. Along the way, the paper instantiated a vastly re-imagined vision of what journalism could be, and this new view would prove critical to the establishment of rock criticism and a wide range of freewheeling journalistic endeavors that would follow in its footsteps.

The Voice would need to earn and even create this position, however, rather than simply occupy it. This was a feat that would require not just balance, but a balancing act: of the Village’s bohemian myth and its multicultural reality; of the paper’s proletarian beginnings and capitalistic aspirations; of the time period’s conservative veneer yet radical underbelly. Despite the paper’s homegrown beginnings, the staff of the Village Voice would need to enter this terrain, making decisions on how to negotiate these and other forces that were often divergent, if not at odds. The paper’s cultural journalism made these dynamics particularly evident, as a site where alternative cultural forms became standard topics for reportage and commentary—though not without contention, as revealed in its early forays into folk music, discussed at the end of this chapter. In this sense, the story I tell here is an insight into how media can go beyond representing or inspiring community to the fractious process of actually creating it.⁸ This difficult work proved critical in the establishment of an intellectual, community-interested, radical cultural form such as rock criticism.

Bohemia and Its Discontents

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, New York City in general and Greenwich Village in particular held a special place in the imagination of America’s dissident subculture. The repressions of the time, though often stereotyped, still are useful as an element of the explanation. But if certain confinements pushed people out of other spaces, the promise of freedom pulled them to this one. “New York had no real rival for youth who wanted to be at the creative—and creating—center of the American dream,” wrote journalist and 1950s New York resident Dan Wakefield in a collective memoir about his youthful days in the city.⁹ Such a statement is inextricable from wistful nostalgia, and that is precisely the point: it is the best evidence that New York City, both at the time and to a reflective gaze, was awash with intrigue and legend.

Much of this appeal took root in the Village, long one of the city’s most storied neighborhoods. Beginning in the early twentieth century, Greenwich Village emerged into one of the main laboratories for American bohemianism, alive with literary radicalism, social progressivism, cultural experimentation, and intellectualism. Writing—and, more specifically, its mediation in print—provided a context for the articulation of these ideas and their broadcast to curious readers. In addition to plays, prose, and poems written in and about the Village, short-lived, small-circulation “little magazines” of literary and cultural criticism shaped the neighborhood’s radical praxis and created communities of likeminded readers. Through these media, the Village became more than just a physical space; it had also developed into concept: an “imagined community,” to borrow Benedict Anderson’s oft-used phrase, bonded through a set of ideas as well as through geographic boundaries. In those pages, an alluring vision of the Village—as it was and, perhaps more important, as it could be—began to solidify, providing sustenance not only to the Village denizens seeking to establish an identity but also to those who would learn about the Village at a distance of space or time.¹⁰

Mid-century bohemians stressed over whether the Village still cultivated the kinds of creative dissonance so fundamental to its ken. This was an old worry: as early as 1916, residents lamented that the neighborhood was losing its freedom and charms. Yet as latter-day bohemian intellectuals saw stark contrast between the real and idealized Village, these concerns gained new traction. Writer Milton Klonsky’s “Greenwich Village: Decline and Fall,” originally published in 1948 and reprinted in the 1955 volume The Scene Before You: A New Approach to American Culture, resurrected the age-old bohemian grievance in this mid-century context. Klonsky surmised that while nearly everyone living in Greenwich Village came “to escape from the stunning heat and light and noise of the cultural mill grinding out the mass values of a commercial civilization,” the truth was that “the good old days when nobody had a job and nobody cared were over.”¹¹ Klonsky’s writing resonated with the longtime fear of loss of the Village spirit, not to mention worries about conformism and technocracy that plagued the period in question—an obsession that existed on the coasts as well as in the heartland, among the middle class as well as the bohemians.¹²

The recurrent “death” of the Village cannot be extricated from anxieties about how the hegemony of mass culture and, in turn, the encroachment of the market in general would alter creative production. These too were long-standing concerns. Artists and writers stood in complex and versatile relationship to the economics of their activity, publicly damning the strangulating effects of rapid industrialization and mass culture while at the same time benefiting from the latter’s tools, fashioning themselves into progressive cultural revisionists in ways that not only became the essence of early modernism but also secured their mythic celebrity.¹³ Still, the romance of this period—to wit, Klonsky’s “good old days”—remained (and remains) powerful, especially for the way creativity seemed to swell unencumbered by the stringencies of the economy and the banalities of everyday existence.

Yet the irony is that while these widespread charges of rampant conformity, soulless capitalism, and hollow culture darkened the mood of both oppositional politics and culture during the 1950s, they also gave rise to iconoclastic styles of dissent that exteriorized a sense of possibility for those seeking an alternative to the mainstream. Perhaps no group exemplified this more than the Beats, a literary movement beginning to take root in New York City that would find allies in the Village. Though it would take an additional decade for their writing to reach the height of its popularity, authors such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassaday began their quest for a “New Vision” in the late 1940s, when they congregated at and around Columbia University on New York’s Upper West Side. These men and their circle of friends philosophized that society was rapidly in decline; the key to expanded consciousness under such dire circumstances was uber-realism that championed all experience, even the most base, and unfiltered artistic expression.¹⁴ While their circle was small, they saw their malaise as widespread, affecting everyone who was their age—and from this generalization comes the phrase “beat generation.” A November 1952 New York Times article by Clellon Holmes sought to rationalize, if not promote, their credo:

[Beats] have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity . . . Their own lust for freedom, and their ability to live at a pace that kills, to which war had adjusted them, lead to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism and Jean-Paul Sartre.¹⁵

Besides Harlem, the Village was the neighborhood in New York most welcoming of these transgressions. The movement’s main players actually lived in the Village only intermittently throughout the 1950s; however, its fiery life force made the neighborhood a home away from home.¹⁶ According to historian Barry Miles, central Beat figures frequently traveled from uptown down to the Village for “the same artistic and tolerant atmosphere they imagined had existed on the Left Bank before the war.”¹⁷ To the many who eventually took up the manifesto’s charge, Beatness was as confrontational as it was descriptive; not only had youth changed their views on their peers and society in general but they also modified what corridors of life were relevant stores of inspiration, meaning, and spirit. As proof of their success or perhaps a warning about it, Beat sensibilities held wide appeal especially to younger people, with the movement’s main figures becoming noteworthy to the wider culture precisely because of their damnation of it.

The Beats loom large to a retrospective gaze on Village life focusing on writing, but they are significant also because their doomsday renaissance fit within a wider swath of cultural experimentation happening in the Village at the time. As among the Beats, many of the era’s artists participated in movements that questioned how to exist, create, and rebel given the perils of modern society, as well as how to profit from art while maintaining integrity. The Village-based movement of Abstract Expressionist painting, for instance, fits a pattern exhibited in many other arts. Neighborhood artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko began to receive attention and acclaim over the course of World War II and after for their rabidly individualistic artworks that defied conventional representational codes. It was also during this time that interrelated domains of galleries, museums, dealers and buyers, and critics known collectively as the “art world” came into existence—a development that would place New York clearly at the center of the global art trade. As artists tried to fight absorption into the conformist stresses of the 1950s, a new system evolved to accommodate and even praise their disobedience.¹⁸ This came to include even the mainstream organs such as Life magazine, which approvingly covered Abstract Expressionism.¹⁹

Jazz and classical musicians also wanted to break free of artistic containments. In the late 1940s, progressive jazz instrumentalists such as Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk evolved the bop style and played it in jazz clubs in the Village, Harlem, and Midtown.²⁰ This turn away from swing, popular music, and dancing and toward contemplative listening was an effort on the part of jazz musicians to render their music high culture, an act closely entwined with their identities as black musicians.²¹ Critics writing about jazz during this time also joined the modernist bandwagon, writing in the interest of institutionalizing jazz as uniquely American. Jazz was also becoming a global export at this time, which some observers considered especially effective American propaganda.²² Jazz thus offered a critique of American culture at the same time that it was being institutionalized as one of its preeminent art forms.

Theater performance also rapidly advanced while facing worries about shrinking creative opportunity. While non-Broadway productions of plays had existed in various forms since earlier in the century, the nature and pace of production markedly changed beginning in 1947 and became known as Off-Broadway in 1952.²³ In this incarnation, new playwrights flocked to theaters in the Village as well as other locations in order to put on their productions for less money.²⁴ Many of the plays directly grappled with controversial issues of the day, making homosexuality, Puerto Rican migration, and other “impolite” topics fodder for public entertainment. Yet the circumstances which birthed this flowering ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Criticism
• 1. Village
• 2. Pop
• 3. Hype
• 4. Identity
• 5. Mattering
• Notes
• Index
• About the author