Ellen Willis: Out of the Vinyl Deeps

Ellen Willis, the first pop music critic for the New Yorker, is anthologized in a new collection called Out of the Vinyl Deeps . She was also one of the few critics to bridge the gap between traditional rock journalism and feminism, writing about women's roles as fans and consumers of pop music:

Female fans made an analogous identification with male rock stars — a relationship that too often found us digging them while they put us down. This was not masochism but expendiency. For all its limitations, rock was the best thing going, and if we had to filter out certain indignities — well, we had been doing that all our lives, and there was no feminist movement to suggest things might be different.

Says Maura Johnston for the Village Voice :

[...] most striking—and inspiring—is Willis's willingness to engage with herself as she tries to grapple with the cultural artifacts she covers. Yes, when she has an opinion, she isn't afraid to matter-of-factly state it. But there's a strong intellectual through line in the book, and it's brightest when Willis is debating herself—a quality that's lacking from too many writers right now, when brute force seems to count more toward one's intellectual heftiness than any sort of conviction or willingness to learn. Whether it's her struggling with the gap between her intellectual-feminist and primal-fan reactions to the Sex Pistols' brutal "Bodies" or noting that New York's frantic pace made her more likely to require that the music she listened to grab her right away, to read her work is to watch someone bristle against the idea of a music journalist merely serving as an objective pair of ears.

I'm looking forward to reading this, though it's a bit unfair to paint Willis as merely a pop music critic, though as a woman succeeding in rock journalim's boy's club, she definitely broke ground. A self-described democratic socialist, she also co-founded the radical feminist group The Redstockings with Shulamith Firestone, and wrote a number of articles on ant-semitism. That being said, the need for women's visibility in music journalism is huge, and this should be a worthy addition to the canon.