The Village Voice's Freak Scene
By David Swanson
Welcome back to Culture Club, the weekly feature where Talia and I discuss our preoccupations—what we’ve been thinking about, reading, watching or playing.
On the night of October 15, 1986, a crowd of Village Voice staffers gathered around a rabbit-eared television in the paper's offices on Broadway and 13th Street to watch the New York Mets battle the Houston Astros in game six of the National League Championship Series. It's a legendary game—the Mets rallied back from a 3-0 deficit in the ninth inning before winning in the 16th. A photo of the occasion is depicted on the cover of Tricia Romano's indispensable new oral history of the Voice, The Freaks Came Out to Write.
At the very moment the shot was taken, I was watching the game in my childhood apartment on Broadway and 11th, just two block south of the Voice offices. As a Village kid, the Voice was my local paper long before I was an actual reader of it. But in October, 2016, four decades later, I'd start working for the Voice. After fifteen years in journalism, it felt something like a homecoming. (And as Talia mentioned last week, it's where our partnership—and friendship—began.)
Last week, in a rave review of Romano's book, the New York Times' Dwight Garner wrote that it "may be the best history of a journalistic enterprise I’ve ever read." Inevitable bias aside, I have to agree. It's also a lot more: a sprawling history of New York in the latter half of the Twentieth Century; a firsthand accounts of the rise of feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Gay Rights Movement; early coverage of punk rock and hip hop; sordid tales of Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump. Given the affection with which the old Voice is remembered in the publishing world, it's not surprising that numerous outlets have run excerpts of the book. But those only scratch the surface. The paper's history is impossibly rich, and Romano, a former Voice columnist, has done a service to us all in documenting that history though the actual voices of the men and women who made it what it was.
I should know. After the the print edition of the Voice was discontinued in 2018, I was kept on to work on the paper's archives. Most of my time was spent in our Cooper Square offices, poring over the countless bound volumes, and filling the site with stories that had never before appeared online—including many that Romano documents. "As an obsessive consumer of New York history," I wrote here last year, "this was like having access to the not-so-secret history of the city’s counterculture."
In an effort to showcase the breadth and depth of the Voice's legacy, as well as the work of some of its most iconic contributors, I had intended to provide a representative sampling stories in this week's column. That was a more ambitious undertaking than I'd anticipated, so I've decided to split the project in two. Below you'll find an emblematic—if far from comprehensive—selection of some of the paper's best arts journalism from its pre-internet era. On Tuesday, I'll be back with hard news, investigative and advocacy writing, and coverage of identity politics. You won't find much of the Voice's seminal hip-hop or punk coverage, or Wayne Barrett's depressingly prescient reporting on the corrupt career of Donald Trump here; I've already included many of those stories in previous archive columns.
By the time I left the Voice at the end of 2020, the entire archives had been digitized (credit to the heroic R.C. Baker, a Voice legend who is still running its current incarnation.) A lot of the material we created in those two years is lost; the below posts used to include artwork and scans of the original layouts. Thankfully, the words survived, but until the full digital archives are available, our work will remain incomplete. In an interview last week about the book, Romano was asked for her feelings about the current state of the Voice. “What I really wish,” she said, “is that they would put money into putting the archives up in a searchable, viewable way, because that’s an important document of history. If the Voice exists, it should be a serious archive.”
When I look at the picture of those freaks on the book's cover, and think back on my nine-year-old self living out the same moment just two blocks away, it's a bittersweet sensation. The Village is different place than it was when I was growing up, and it's a different place without the Voice. Still, I'm incredibly grateful to have added my name to the illustrious roster of Voice contributors. For that I have to thank Joe Levy, who brought me into the fold, gave me the best job I've ever had, and who gets the final word in Romano's book. I'll do the same. "Without the Voice, there is one less advocate for the rights of sex workers, or the rights of immigrants," said Levy. "One less place to be noticed as an aspiring playwright, musician, choreographer… The Voice is a place that took things seriously small things, developing things, emerging things—that other places didn't. That's what it always did."
READ PART TWO: VOICES AT A REVOLUTION
Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers
By Norman Mailer
January 3, 1956
Many years ago I remember reading a piece in the newspapers by Ernest Hemingway and thinking: “What windy writing.” That is the penalty for having a reputation as a writer. Any signed paragraph which appears in print is examined by the usual sadistic literary standards, rather than with the easy tolerance of a newspaper reader pleased to get an added fillip for his nickel.
But this is a fact of life which any professional writer soon learns to put up with, and I know that I will have to put up with it since I doubt very much of this column is going to be particularly well written. That would take too much time, and it would be time spent in what is certainly a lost cause. Greenwich Village is one of the bitter provinces—it abounds in snobs and critics. That many of you are frustrated in your ambitions, and undernourished in your pleasures, only makes me more venomous. Quite rightly. If I ever found myself in your position, I would not be charitable either.
Genet, Mailer, & the New Paternalism
By Lorraine Hansberry
June 1, 1961
With regard to Mailer and the new paternalism, it will be said, and swiftly, that Negroes cannot be satisfied; that, in this instance, the Negro intellectual is himself so “hung-up” that he does not understand at what Mailer is getting; that he has transcended what we still suppose to be the mark-off points of an old discussion and has found some more profound level where the white intellectual assumes all of that to be old hat and has moved on to where we can all really talk as the most inside of insiders, which is to say, as some obscure undefined universal outsider who may be known as “the hipster.”
It has had a numbing effect, the creation of “the hip” into an expanded formalized idea. Negroes seem to have met it mainly with a crowning silence because who knew where to begin in the face of such monumental and crass assumptions? A number of years had to dissolve before Jimmie Baldwin would remark in print, ever so gently: “… matters were not helped at all by the fact that Negro jazz musicians, among whom we sometimes found ourselves, who really liked Norman, did not for an instant consider him as being even remotely ‘hip’ and Norman did not know this and I could not tell him.”
James Brown: Knocking ‘em Dead in Bed-Stuy
By Susan Brownmiller
November 25, 1965
James Brown back at the microphone, still in one piece, singing about making love again, “All night long, two o’clock, three o’clock, seven o’clock, eight o’clock,” getting worked up again. The dancers calm him, hold him by the jacket… But James Brown still doesn’t want to go. Not yet. The crowd, the people, the love. He must give something more… his clothing! He rips off his tie and throws it into the pit. He starts to rip—bodily they carry him from the stage. What a finish! Nothing like it since Jackie Wilson used to lie down stage front and kiss all the ladies, one at a time. The mantle has fallen on James Brown. The apotheosis of the ethnic thing. Four-a-day on the black subway circuit. The short, skinny kid with the big head. Dynamite. James Brown.
Taking a Look Behind Warhol’s Shades
By John Wilcock
May 6, 1965
Andy Warhol makes movies with the same unruffled objectivity that he looks at life. His usual procedure is to set up the action—often a group of people interacting—point the camera at them, turn it on, and step back. The camera makes the movie: whatever happens, planned or not, is the film. Sometimes in the studio (which he refers to as “the factory”) there will be interruptions: telephone calls, people going up or down in the elevator, somebody dropping something or walking inadvertently in front of the camera. All is recorded. No trace of surprise or annoyance registers on Warhol’s face. He is totally cool or very uptight, depending on your point of view. The latter school says: “Andy’s been trained in Madison Avenue. He’s like a high-powered executive who doesn’t show his feelings, but he’s seething inside.” Personally, I think it the height of coolness to regard everything with a detached eye and rely on intuition to make instant decisions. Warhol’s intuition is usually correct.
Pop Goes Homosexual
By Vivian Gornick
April 7, 1966
Popular culture is now in the hands of the homosexuals. It is homosexual taste that determines largely style, story, statement in painting, literature, dance, amusements, and acquisitions for a goodly proportion of the intellectual middle class. It is the homosexual temperament which is guiding the progress of Pop Art, producing novels like Last Exit to Brooklyn, making “underground” movies, selling cast-iron lamps shaped like roses to sophisticated schoolteachers, and declaring the Gene Kelly–Debbie Reynolds movies of the ’40s and ’50s a source of breathlessly amusing entertainment. It is the texture, the atmosphere, the ideals, the notions of “camp” (a term, from its beginnings, the private property of American and English homosexuals) which currently determines middle-class taste, directs its signs, and seems to nourish its simple-minded eagerness to grind the idea of “alienation” into yet another hopelessly ironic cliche.
Frank O’Hara: He Made Things and People Sacred
By Peter Schjeldahl
August 11, 1966
Frank O’Hara’s body was small and lean—classically “bantam”—and was topped by a face organized around a preposterous Roman nose, like a falcon’s beak. He had a smallish, sensuous mouth; a high, freckled forehead, and limpid blue eyes of a certain hypnotic charm. His every movement bespoke will and self-assurance, poise, and a kind of unmannered courtliness. His physical presence in a room was like that of an exclamation point on a page. That presence quickly became one of the most sought-after, and one of the most freely granted, in the city. The painter Helen Frankenthaler says personal invitations to parties in the ’50s often carried the information “Frank will be there”—the ultimate inducement to attend.
Citizen Kael vs. ‘Citizen Kane’
By Andrew Sarris
April 15, 1971
Truffaut makes a curious reference to The New Yorker (no person’s name is given) description of [Orson] Welles as “a genius without talent.” One might just as aptly describe The New Yorker as talent without genius, and Miss Kael’s approach to “Kane” and Welles as more intelligent than insightful. She spends infinitely more time on preliminary (and subsequently discarded) drafts of the script than on the final form of the movie as it materialized on the screen. Her bias is thus as always inescapably literary rather than visual. And it follows that she would be impatient with the visual, aural and emotional coup represented by “Rosebud.” “The mystery in Kane is largely fake,” Miss Kael contends, “and the Gothic-thriller atmosphere and the Rosebud gimmickry (though fun) are such obvious penny-dreadful popular theatrics that they’re not so very different from the fake mysteries that Hearst’s American Weekly used to whip up—the haunted castles and the curses fulfilled.”
The operative words in the preceding passage are “though fun,” a familiarly quaint Kaelian reconciliation of what she can enjoy viscerally with what she can endorse cerebrally.
On Marlon Brando: An Essay in Nine Parts
By Molly Haskell
June 14, 1973
In 1946, while still in the theatre, Brando left “Candida” where he was playing Marchbanks for $300 a week, to take a $48-a-week part in Ben Hecht‘s pro-Zionist play, “A Flag Is Born,” because he wanted to lend his support to Palestine. He marched on San Quentin the night Caryl Chessman was gassed. He was at Gadsden and Birmingham for the civil—rights protests. He took part, in Tacoma, Washington, in a “fish-in” for some Indians whose fishing rights were in jeopardy. He had scuffles with the law in California—where he was picketing with CORE—and in Cambridge, Maryland. He participated in a Black Panther rally after the killing of Bobby Hutton. He has always been on the right side, doing all the right things for people that, in good radical fashion, are as far as possible from his own self-image and thus infinitely susceptible to romantic idealization. He gets points from the politicos, but loses them with anybody who gives a damn about movies.
When Bob Dylan Called on Patti Smith
By James Wolcott
July 7, 1975
All hail the Rock and Roll Republic of New York. With the Rolling Stones holding out at Madison Square Garden, Patti Smith and her band at the Other End, and Bob Dylan making visitations to both events, New York was once again the world’s Rock and Roll Republic.
Patti Smith had a special Rimbaud-emblematized statement printed up in honor of Stones week, and when her band went into its version of “Time Is on My Side” (yes it is), she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a Keith Richard T-shirt beneath. On the opening night she was tearing into each song and even those somewhat used to her galloping id were puzzled by lines like “You gotta a lotta nerve sayin’ you won’t be myparking meter.” Unknown to many in the audience, parked in the back of the room, his meter running a little quick, was the legendary Bobby D. himself. Dylan, despite his wary, quintessential cool, was giving the already highly charged room an extra layer of electricity and Patti, intoxicated by the atmosphere, rocked with stallion abandon. She was positively playing to Dylan, like Keith Carradine played to Lily Tomlin in the club scene from Nashville. But Dylan is an expert in gamesmanship, and he sat there, crossing and uncrossing his legs, playing back.
Where Were You When Elvis Died?
By Lester Bangs
August 29, 1977
I got the news of Elvis’s death while drinking beer with a friend and fellow music journalist on his fire escape on 21st Street in Chelsea. Chelsea is a good neighborhood; in spite of the fact that the insane woman who lives upstairs keeps him awake all night every night with her rants at no one, my friend stays there because he likes the sense of community within diversity in that neighborhood: old-time Card-Carrying Communists live in his building alongside people of every persuasion popularly lumped as “ethnic.” When we heard about Elvis we knew a wake was in order, so I went out to the deli for a case of beer. As I left the building I passed some Latin guys hanging out by the front door. “Heard the news? Elvis is dead!” I told them. They looked at me with contemptuous indifference.
A Cult Explodes—and a Movement Is Born
By Robert Christgau
October 24, 1977
When conceptually sophisticated local art movements disperse, distortion or vulgarization can result, but so can a kind of creative misapprehension that rolls right through apparent formal cul-de-sacs. That’s what happened when the Ramones toured England. The Ramones exploit the standard ironic strategies—role-playing, humor, and extreme rigidity—to make a powerful but ambiguous statement that both celebrates and mocks the frustrated energy of the ordinary American teenage male. But so unmistakably did they imply that any leather-jacketed geek can master three-chord rock and roll that in England, where teenage males were desperate for mastery in any form, all their other messages were ignored. In the wake of the Ramones summer ’76 tour, bands playing Ramonseish avant-punk sprang up all over Great Britain.
Backstage at the Oscars
By Arthur Bell
April 8, 1981
Tuesday. The themes of politics, assassination, celebrity, and movies have never been more dramatically visible than backstage on Oscar night. A block away from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a bomb squad truck blares its way toward the arena. Security has been stepped up. Usually 200 guards are on duty. This year, 350 policemen, sheriff’s deputies, and private plainclothesmen patrol inside and outside the hall. Many actors bring along their own bodyguards. Richard Pryor is always within thumb’s reach of his Man Mountain Dean.
An hour before the show, word filters to the press about John Hinckley’s letters to Jodie Foster, including the final one, not mailed, confessing his unrequited love and stating, “There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan.” The immediate reaction is life imitates art: Taxi Driver with Hinckley playing De Niro, minus Marty Scorsese’s direction. Especially in Hollywood, this sort of news upstages the Oscars.
The Long Walk of the Situationist International
By Greil Marcus
May 1, 1982
I first became intrigued with the Situationist International in 1979, when I struggled through “Le Bruit et la Fureur,” one of the anonymous lead articles in the first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste. The writer reviewed the exploits of artistic rebels in the postwar West as if such matters had real political consequences, and then said this: “The rotten egg smell exuded by the idea of God envelops the mystical cretins of the American ‘Beat Generation,’ and is not even entirely absent from the declarations of the Angry Young Men… They have simply come to change their opinions about a few social conventions without even noticing the whole change of terrain of all cultural activity so evident in every avant-garde tendency of this century. The Angry Young Men are in fact particularly reactionary in their attribution of a privileged, redemptive value to the practice of literature: they are defending a mystification that was denounced in Europe around 1920 and whose survival today is of greater counterrevolutionary significance than that of the British Crown.”
Mystical cretins… finally, I thought (forgetting the date of the publication before me), someone has cut through the suburban cul-de-sac that passed for cultural rebellion in the 1950s.
Was Walt Whitman Christ?
By Paul Berman
Voice Literary Supplement, April 1, 1982
During the last couple of thousand years, a handful of superior individuals anticipated this evolutionary development. These individuals, who stand in relation to ordinary people as humans do to dogs and cats, included Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammed. Also Balzac. Greatest of all was Whitman, the harbinger of evolution’s next step, who offered in his own person the fullest picture of what the future of the race would be like. That future was on its way and would take hold initially in the United States. Wealth and poverty would be abolished, and democratic socialism would reign. Whitman, who had absorbed the entire human race, would in turn be absorbed back by every individual who attained the higher spiritual level.
Martin Scorsese, King of the Outsiders
By J. Hoberman
February 15, 1983
The second son of first-generation Sicilian garment-workers, Scorsese was set apart from other children when he developed asthma at age four following a traumatic tonsillectomy. He was eight when his family moved from a house shared with relatives in Corona, Queens, back to their old neighborhood on the crumbling Lower East Side. Small and sickly, Scorsese did not fit easily into the tough Little Italy street life he would ambivalently celebrate in Who’s That Knocking? and Mean Streets.
“I couldn’t mix in,” the director says with pained diffidence. “I mean, I did mix in, but for comic relief. If you weren’t able to give a beating, you had to take one.”
Stagolee vs. the Proper Negro
By Greg Tate
September 11, 1984
Don’t be fooled by the scandal sheets out to turn Michael and Prince into the Romulus and Remus of American pop. Because naw, buddy, what’s happening with these two is akin to, say, Jesse and Farrakhan. You got one playing the Proper Negro to the other’s Stagolee, one making off with the kids like Peter Pan, with elfin charm and fairy dust, and the other sucking ’em up into his trip, like the Pied Piper when he blew into his magic flute. The question is whether the industry will provide equal opportunity to all the other black rockers rising en masse to the battle cries of Thriller and of Purple Rain—thereby ensuring that MTV will soon look like New York Hot Tracks. Or whether it’ll merely update Daddy Jim Rice and Colonel Tom Parker and attempt once again to clone the funk. (I for one wish them luck, because if they can brew up a caucasoid replicant who can write, sing, dance, style, profile, and rock the microphone as viscerally as Sensitive Mike and His Royal Badness, won’t nobody be able to say white man just got a God complex.)
“Fuck the Curtain”: An Oral History of Off-Broadway
May 21, 1985
JERRY TALLMER: The Voice and the Off-Broadway movement started almost simultaneously, but it was Julie Bovasso’s performance in The Maids that really got my juices stirring. Some time during that first year, a bunch of us were sitting around the office and asked, why shouldn’t there be some sort of awards for Off-Broadway, to single it out from Broadway, to stick it in the establishment’s eye? The name actually came from Harvey Jacobs, a novelist who was working in the advertising department. We sent a notice to the Times, and Sam Zolotow, the eminent theater reporter, called to ask what the Voice was—as a matter of fact, he didn’t even know where Greenwich Village was.
Herman Melville’s Great Escape
By Geoffrey O’Brien
Voice Literary Supplement, September 19, 1985
Melville’s shrines and monuments accumulate relentlessly, as if in atonement for past neglect: he becomes a plaque in the Poets’ Corner of St. John the Divine, a three-volume set (all the fiction, with the poetry still to come) from the Library of America, a museum in the Berkshires, a 90-minute movie full of beaches and sails and waves. Yet all our hagiolatry cannot force the stately mask to wink back at us. We want to make Melville “ours,” have him talk to us as a friend, but he withdraws irrevocably into a muteness like that of the Galapagos Islands, where “no voice, no low, no howl is heard.” It’s a curious communion his work offers: the deeper we wade in it, the more it seems a vast isolation, chill at the core yet capacious as a National Park. He’s our official literary wilderness, in whose clefts and shadows we come to lose ourselves and thereby find the world again. Where other writers proffer ideas or stories or companionable chat, Melville seems to promise the very stuff of existence: time, space, air. We don’t so much read him as inhale him.
Michael Jackson: Man in the Mirror
By Stanley Crouch
November 17, 1987
Since the ’60s, there has been a tendency among a substantial number of Afro-Americans to promulgate a recipe for the model black person. That model has taken many forms, but all of them are based on presumptions of cultural segregation between black and white Americans. The symbols of that purported segregation were supposed to permeate the ways in which black people lived, dressed, wore their hair, ate, thought voted, walked, talked and addressed their African heritage. And though the grip of such nationalism weakened over the years, it continues to influence even those who were lucky enough not to have been adolescents during its period of dominance.
Greg Tate is clearly one who has been taken in, and his recent article on Jackson illustrates the provincialism inherent in such thinking. Jackson alarms Tate, who sees the singer’s experience under the scalpel as proof of self-hatred. The trouble with Tate’s vision is that it ignores the substance of the American dream and the inevitabilities of a free society.
Rear Window: The Mystery of the Carl Andre Case
By Jan Hoffman
March 29, 1988
It was on the third day of the murder trial that the defendant’s voice was heard in the court for the first and only time. The prosecutor punched a cassette into a cheap portable, and cranked up the volume of the recorded phone call made to a 911 operator on September 8, 1985, at 5:29:26 a.m. The man’s voice, pitched high, is severely distressed, wailing, as he struggles to tell his story. It dissolves into broken cries and moans of pain and bewilderment. His wife just committed suicide, the caller says. What happened, exactly, asks the operator:
“What happened was we had… my wife is an artist and I am an artist and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was and she went to the bedroom and I went after her and she went out of the window,” said Carl Andre, 52, the museum-class Minimalist sculptor whose work is far more exposed to the public than that of his wife, the sculptor Ana Mendieta, whose body moments before had landed on the roof of the Delion Grocery, 32 floors below the couple’s apartment. Twelve hours later, the police arrested Andre for murder.
What We Do Is Secret: Your Guide to the Post-Whatever
By Tom Carson
September 1, 1988
Over a decade ago, the punk movement tried to harness all the discontent in rock into an explosion, and failed. Instead, it institutionalized the edge. The marginal music of today is any number of second thoughts removed from punk’s initial headlong impulse. The audience for it mainly consists of kids to whom 1977 and all that is somebody else’s distant past.
What most limits bands now is that whatever they do, it can’t ever be entirely new. The punk era’s improvised network of small clubs, indie labels, and college radio has become a sort of permanent infrastructure, like Taiwan or the folk circuit. That makes for one kind of predictability, but the real gridlock is in the concepts. The current scene comes up with all sorts of moves, but all of them end up as just one more convolution of a radicalism that’s become a genre, dealing in extremes that have become constants.
We’ve Gotta Have It: Spike Lee and a New Black Cinema
By Thulani Davis
June 20, 1989
Next year promises to be a boom year for black cinema. Lee is already in preproduction on a jazz film, A Love Supreme, to star Denzel Washington as a contemporary trumpet player. Robert Townsend’s doo-wop film Heartbeats will be completed, and Charles Lane’s Sidewalk Stories is soon to appear. Also due are films by James Bond III, Melvin and Mario Van Peebles, Reggie Hudlin, and Julie Dash. For all of them, the next battleground will be distribution. Will these films be released to more than two theaters in Detroit and Washington? Lee’s School Daze opened in 220 theaters last year, while most summer films open in 1500. Keenen Ivory Wayans’s I’m Gonna Git You Sucka was treated the same way. If you weren’t on the black grapevine, you wouldn’t know it was happening in time to get down to the theater. Earlier this month the Black Filmmaker Foundation honored a decade’s worth of films from these and other filmmakers. The film showings alone took several weeks. The release of Do the Right Thing is as worthy a landmark as any of the next wave in black cinema. There’s a whole gang of folk who know how to do the right thing, and that’s the truth, Ruth.
1989-1990: Flying Into the Next Century
By Laurie Anderson
January 2, 1990
I miss Robert Mapplethorpe. I loved his work because he was willing to look at taboos—big taboos—the kind that scare people, like: What do sexuality and religion have in common?
So to me, one of the most grating voices of the decade belongs to Jesse Helms. I can hear him now, twanging away about Robert Mapplethorpe. “This Mapplethorpe fellow was an acknowledged homosexual. He’s dead now, but the homosexual theme goes on throughout his work.” (So when you die your themes disappear with you?) And on the B side, there’s the voice of Walter Annenberg sniffing, “I’m sick of people expressing their artistic attitudes in an unappetizing manner.”
In Search of Bohemia
By C. Carr
February 4, 1992
Back when subterraneans still had a terrain, the bourgie types might go slumming through a Left Bank or Greenwich Village, but the colonizing process took much longer. No instant condos. No developer-spawned neighborhood acronyms. Now—relentless in its hunt for the Next Big Thing—the media cut such a swath through the demimonde that colonizers follow instantly, destabilizing and destroying. So, the energy that moved from Paris to New York, from West Village to East Village, from Old Bohemia (1830-1930) to New Bohemia (the ’60s) to Faux Bohemia (the ’80s) has atomized now into trails that can’t be followed: the ‘zine/cassette network, the living-room performance spaces, the modem-accessed cybersalons, the flight into neighborhoods that will never be Soho.
They’re all part of the bohemian diaspora.
A Time Line to Post-Soul Black Culture
By Nelson George
March 17, 1992
1988
■ TRACY CHAPMAN’s self-titled album follows the hit single “Fast Car.”
■ LIVING COLOUR, led by Black Rock Coalition co-founder Vernon Reid, debuts on Epic with Vivid. After much touring and groundwork, “Cult of Personality” becomes an MTV staple.
■ Teenager JOHN SINGLETON meets SPIKE LEE in Los Angeles after a screening of Lee’s new School Daze.”
■ PUBLIC ENEMY’s masterpiece It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back appears on Def Jam. Rick Rubin exits Def Jam and starts Def American Records in Los Angeles, taking Andrew Dice Clay with him.
■ Yo, MTV Raps!, hosted by FAB FIVE FREDDIE, airs Saturdays and garners the highest ratings in the network’s history.
■ JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT dies of a heroin overdose.
Picture This
By Hilton Als
November 10, 1992
Culture needs the “bad nigger” or two—Lee, Basquiat, Naomi Campbell, Malcolm X—but eventually punishes them. For being ornery, a loud mouth, a champion of “kissing my black ass two times,” they receive headlines like “Do the Wrong Thing,” which speaks scornfully of the Negro who speaks. If not solely an artist, Dad, or “bad nigger,” what will Lee become to his public? X and the criticism it is bound to provoke will push past [Spike] Lee’s familiar image. And Malcolm’s.
How has Malcolm changed in our collective imagination since he’s gone before the cameras? In the 26 books slated for release around the time of X’s opening (November 18), he is pictured as angry, unjoyous. He is, in his Denzel-as-Malcolm guise, pictured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and in L.A. Style or whatever, no longer a challenge. The cult of personality—but dead. Is he a representative of all those mad, mad colored folk not burning the mother down—again?
The Dancing Machine: An Oral History of Disco
By Vince Aletti
Rock & Roll Quarterly, Summer 1993
GLORIA GAYNOR: Disco started out as a sound and unfortunately evolved into a lifestyle that Middle America found distasteful—and that was the demise of disco. It got into sex and drugs that really had nothing to do with the music but that was the lifestyle that identified with disco.
AUGUST DARNELL: The most decadent I got was dancing with two girls simultaneously, but the decadence of it was great to observe. In the bowels of Studio 54, there was a higher high. But I was like an observer more than a participant. I was like a journalist witnessing a national event.
DAVID MANCUSO: If people were using drugs, they were mild and recreational, where today it’s all about economics. But three-quarters was purely spontaneous energy.
RAY CAVIANO: In hindsight, the experience was exhausting and the lifestyle was obviously way beyond the call of duty. We were going to have a good time even if it was going to kill us. We wanted to take the trip as far as we could take it.
Beastie Boys: The Portable Lower East Side
By Joe Levy
June 14, 1994
For all their hard work and emergent craft, the Beasties are no longer about making records—today, they make culture. In the ’90s—when every new star climbs up on the cross to tell us about being afraid of, revolted by, or victim to the pop audience—no other major-label act works as hard to make their fans into a community. The magazine they started to answer write-in requests for the lyrics to Check Your Head offers both aesthetic and spiritual guidance, as do the hardcore and art-funk records they release on their label of the same name; Mike D.’s X-Large stores are only too happy to see to his audience’s clothing needs. Their records need only function as a portable Lower East Side, an East Village of the mind, a place where the 14-year-old kids who’ll flock to see them at Lollapalooza this summer—and who were in kindergarten when “Fight for Your Right” hit MTV—can go to hear good music and find out how people from another culture live. They’ve become the DJ, mixing Big Youth and the Treacherous Three with the SS Decontrol and Luscious Jackson. You might even think that was their plan from the very beginning.
No Future: Kurt Cobain’s Final Denial
By Ann Powers
April 19, 1994
In his painful last love letter to a world he couldn’t grasp, Kurt Cobain quoted Neil Young: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” “That’s bullshit,” Courtney said to her ruined husband as she read the note aloud. Truth is, Cobain didn’t even burn out. He fell out of our lives, unfinished. All the media attention, the vigil and the memorials in print and the endless rounds of MTV Unplugged, only recalls his absence, the lack he stood for and could never fill.
A few years ago, a friend of mine died of a heroin overdose. He’d been long gone before he actually left the earth. His old lover said, Ted died because he could never find the words to say what he really wanted. Kurt’s whole struggle, the same one rock’s going through in its most serious moments these days, was to cut into himself until he found a vocabulary that might offer those words. Sometimes a few of them would gush forth. In the end, though, silence swallowed him alive.
Quentin Tarantino, Natural Born Filmmaker
By Lisa Kennedy
October 24, 1994
“Someone said to me at Sundance when Reservoir Dogs was there, ‘You know what you’ve done, you’ve given white boys the kind of movies black kids get.’ You know likeJuice, and Boyz N the Hood, not Boyz N the Hood so much, but Menace II Society. Blacks have always had those movies.”
…Back in New York, when someone asks him in earnest does he hang out with gangsters, I realize the error of my ways. The key to Quentin’s easy familiarity with race, violence, and pretty much anything else resides in the freedom cinema has given him to be, well, a director. As we leave Toi Thai, Quentin pulls out his wallet. It’s a prop from Pulp Fiction, the same wallet that Sam L. Jackson’s hitman as spiritual seeker carries, the same one Tim Roth’s petty holdup man must fish out of a trash bag. It’s the one that says Bad Mother Fucker on it.
I Lost It At The Obies
By Ross Wetzsteon
May 30, 1995
“This is a very tough fucking house,” said Dustin Hoffman at the 30th annual Obie ceremonies at the Puck Building. “Please listen to this shit,” he went on, holding a glass that had apparently been refilled more than once. “We’re all in consort about a couple of things. The critics vote these awards and we hate their fucking guts, because they don’t know as much as we know.” What’s important, he continued, “isn’t the power the critics have in deciding these awards, but the emotional vote of your colleagues in the audience who cheer when you win. When I won my Obie, 20 years ago, it was the greatest moment of my life.”
