The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano
“We wanted to jam the gears of creeping automatism,” said Richard Goldstein, one time rock critic and arts editor for the Village Voice. Whether or not they jammed those gears, they managed to shift the direction of media and culture. The Voice set the precedent for alternative newspapers as forums for well-thought opinions that often defied conventional wisdom—and the dubious stuff they teach in journalism school, all that white noise about “objectivity.”
Tricia Romano came to the Village Voice as an intern and stayed for 18 years. Her oral history collects comments and memories from a couple hundred insiders and close observers. Andy Warhol appears on page 1 (“The Village Voice was a community newspaper then, with a distinct community to cover—a certain number of square blocks in Greenwich Village plus the entire liberal-thinking world.”) Those square blocks have been gentrified and commodified and as for the “liberal-thinking world” …?
During the peak years from its 1955 debut (Norman Mailer was a cofounder) through the ‘80s, the Voice was home to some of America’s most important cultural critics, including Greil Marcus, Nat Hentoff, Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs and Andrew Sarris. The Voice recognized that culture defines and moves society as much and usually more so than legislation. The Voice did much to popularize Off-Broadway, punk rock and hip hop.
At the same time, the Voice was courageous in challenging local politicians and institutions. It didn’t seek smooth relations with New York’s big wheels. The Voice survived Rupert Murdoch’s proprietorship (1977-85) with its values intact, even daring to criticize him in print. Murdoch took it for a few years, threatening, “I’m going to sell the paper to someone worse than me” (according to editor David Schneiderman).
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He eventually made good on his threat. That sale didn’t spell the end of the Voice as it was known—not right away. At least Murdoch loved the journalism game, unlike the soulless MBAs to follow. The new management fired Christgau and other key writers in 2006 and the talent shrinkage continued. And then came Craigslist, which decimated one of the Voice’s most important revenue sources.
The rocky downward road led to the Voice’s closing in 2018. However, it reappeared online two years later, followed by an irregularly appearing print edition. Romano describes it as “very Village Voice-y.”
