I can’t say that about any other publication I’ve written for!Įvery intern got one pity assignment during his or her semester of transcribing and mail-opening, and mine - in 2000, during the second half of my junior year a NYU - was a review of a Dismemberment Plan concert at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan.

I got two book deals out of Voice stories: Rock She Wrote is based on my history of women music critics, “The Feminine Critique,” and the Rent book. That review led to many more, including a 1995 cover story on Patti Smith and my eventual hire as music editor. I was happy to write about them for a larger audience, although I don’t think in retrospect I succeeded in capturing how intense that album is, its turbulent peek inside psychosis, as songwriter Kristin Hersh revealed decades later in her autobiography Rat Girl. My first piece was about Throwing Muses’s Hunkpapa album, ironically, since the first paid piece of music criticism I ever wrote was about the Muses for Providence’s NewPaper about four years earlier. That was one of the great things about the Voice: they were open to new writers. Soon after, I began copyediting at The Voice, and soon after that, I started writing. Soon enough I was publishing essays there that took me a week.Ĭurrently: Associate professor and director of the journalism program at Loyola Marymount University, editor of upcoming book Women Who Rock But it ended much too sloppily, largely because I didn’t think a full-length essay I was getting paid 40 bucks for was worth more than an all-nighter’s effort. The bulk of “Gap Again” is so good I considered including it in my forthcoming Is It Still Good to Ya? collection. My first Rock & Roll & column for The Village Voice appeared Maand analyzed the growing generational differentiations within a “rock culture” inevitably becoming less uniform. But unlike the Village Voice, at least I’m still alive.Ĭurrently: The Expert Witness columnist at Noisey, author of upcoming collection Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017 My first actual assigned album review, of Bad Religion’s now long-disowned (because more prog than punk) Into the Unknown, ran in July 1984. box - weird, but not the kind of thing one complains about.īefore long, I learned that Robert Christgau had appreciated my spiel enough to publish a hugely pessimistic, partly tongue-in-cheek, couple-hundred word chunk of it as a boxed sidebar, under the headline “Over And Out.” Here he is, in the lead paragraph of his own essay, which ran in the Februissue: “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).’”Īfter that, Christgau ran voters’ comments alongside his P&J essay every year - until 2006, by which time I’d been the paper’s music editor for seven years and the company laid us both off. Some weeks after sending in, I received a mysterious check from the Voice in my A.P.O. Along with my 1983 top tens, I submitted a ridiculously wordy screed tearing through the state of both rock and rock criticism - for no other reason than because I wanted to get a few things off my chest.

Army Signal Corps in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany, paying taxpayers back in boredom, toil, deployment plans and standard operating procedures for the ROTC scholarship that had funded my diploma. By the third year I voted, I was a 23-year-old second lieutenant serving the U.S. My first Village Voice byline happened entirely by accident. I’d been voting in the paper’s annual Pazz & Jop music critics poll since 1981, my senior year in University of Missouri’s Journalism program. Currently: Author of several books, most recently 2016’s Terminated for Reasons of Taste: Other Ways to Hear Essential and Inessential Music

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