Out of the Vinyl Deeps

Even if they've never read her work, generations of pop music critics owe a debt to Ellen Willis. During her 1968-'75 tenure as The New Yorker's first rock critic, Willis pioneered a style that was neither as self-consciously anarchic as the Lester Bangs school, nor as theory-dense and footnote-driven as Greil Marcus' more scholarly style. Personal without being self-involved, smart but not overly analytical, and politically-engaged while avoiding cheap polemics, Willis avoided both hipster obscurantism and populist cheerleading. (Or rather, she was capable of both: her favorite bands during her period of greatest visibility as a writer were Manhattan hipsters The Velvet Underground and Bay Area Everydudes Creedence Clearwater Revival.) Most importantly, she wrote as a fan: not that she liked every musician she wrote about, but that she seemed to approach each new experience with an open mind. This makes her disappointments (most notably a dispirited, the-dream-is-over take on the 1968 Newport Folk Festival) as fascinating to read as her praise. And unlike many rock critics, Willis had the good sense to pack it in before she got cynical: with few exceptions, Willis stopped writing about music in the early '80s, refocusing on feminist theory and teaching at New York University until her 2006 death. Reading this engaging, thoughtful anthology, her early retirement from rock feels like a loss: closing the book, it's easy to wonder what Willis might have thought about more recent artists like PJ Harvey or Tune-Yards.