![]() Lester Bangs’ write-up of Iggy Pop two years later cut to the heart of the matter: “It’s as if someone writhing in torment has made that writhing into a kind of poetry.” Back in ’75, Andrew Sarris wrote a rather jaw-dropping profile of Hervé Villechaize (in which he begins a sentence, “The problem of midgets….”). Character studies have long been a Voice staple. The paper also became a voice for the most interesting things happening in the city at any given time, such as the goings on at a Bowery dive called CBGB in 1975. It became a prominent voice for New York’s LGBTQ culture and politics, through all the buyouts, cutbacks, and unbeatable competition that brought it to its current pass. Writer Walter Troy Spencer referred to Stonewall, for example, as “ The Great Faggot Rebellion” and used a phrase that has perhaps become the most wearisome in American English: “there was mostly ugliness on both sides.” This anti-gay prejudice was a regular feature of the paper’s first few years, but by 1982, just as the AIDS crisis began to filter into public consciousness, the Voice was the second organization in the US to offer extended benefits to domestic partners. In 2009, his “searches didn’t turn up any coverage of Norman Mailer’s 1969 campaign or the Stonewall riots… and there’s not much on Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral bid.” Many years later, months and years in the Google archive remain blank, “no editions available.” There are “blind spots” in Google’s archive of the Voice, noted John Cook at the erstwhile Gawker. ![]() In its over sixty-year run, Voice writers sat in the front rows for the birth for hard bop, free jazz, punk, no wave, and hip-hop, and all manner of downtown experimentalism in-between and after.Īmongst the many remembrances from current and former Voice staff in a recent Esquire oral history, one from editor and writer Camille Dodero stands out: “The alt-weekly’s purpose was, in theory, speaking truth to power and the ability to be irreverent, and print the word ‘fuck’ while doing so.’” Mission accomplished many times over, as you can see yourself in Google’s Village Voice archive, featuring 1,000 scanned issues going all the back to 1955, when Norman Mailer founded the paper with Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and John Wilcock. Hoberman, Robert Sietsema, Tom Robbins, Greg Tate, Michael Musto, Thulani Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates-equally so. Its columnists, editors, and reviewers-Andrew Sarris, J. Its music and culture writers like Nat Hentoff, Lester Bangs, Sasha Frere-Jones, Robert Christgau and so many others are some of the smartest in the business. The Voice published hard journalism that many, including Voice writers themselves, have ruefully revisited of late. The hermetic container of its newsprint sealed out frothing comment sections no links ferried readers through rivers of personalized algorithms. There’s a gesture toward the Voice’s profane unruliness, but the alternative weekly, founded in 1955, transcended the blog age’s sophomoric nihilism. For too many reasons to list, this comparison seems to my mind hardly apt. THE VOICE and Weekly Gleaner newspapers have moved to new offices in south London.īoth titles are now situated at the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, ending an eight-year stay in east London's Docklands.Īt the new location, the newspaper group, which is a subsidiary of The Gleaner Company Ltd, will be in the heart of the African and Caribbean community that borders with Brixton, Peckham and Stockwell, and not far from Streatham, areas where the papers have a large readership base.After The Village Voice announced this week that it was folding its print operation, a couple people compared the venerable NYC rag’s demise to the end of Gawker, the snarky online tabloid taken down by Hulk Hogan and his shadowy financier Peter Thiel. The Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre is also home to the head office for Jamaica National Overseas UK Ltd, where the building society operates the JNBS Rep Office and Money Transfer outlets. "Additionally, we are operating with smaller staff numbers now than when we first moved there in 2006, so it made economic sense to head back south and closer to the community." In commenting on the move, GV Media Group managing director George Ruddock said: "The idea of relocating to south London is something we have been considering for some time now, as our regular business customers felt the journey to the Docklands was too much of a trek for them and we listened to their concerns.
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