Thre Last Book I Read

I remember reading Ellen Willis' column in the Village Voice back in the '80s and 90s, and always enjoyed her perspective on things (mostly she wrote, from a feminist perspective, on broad cultural topics). When her book of earlier music criticism came out a short time ago, I was a bit leery, as the topics tended toward artists who I've already read about, in some cases (the Rolling Stones) ad nauseum. Understanding that she wrote about them earlier than most critics didn't make much difference-- it was hard to believe that encountering these early pieces for the first time at this late date was going to help me know any more than I already do about Bob Dylan, the Who, the Velvet Underground, Creedence Clearwater Revival... you get the idea: this appeared to be well-trod ground. What I should have remembered from her later work (that was familiar to me) was that Willis never failed to spark and hold my interest by recognizing connections that tied her subjects to both broader and deeper cultural themes than might be evident on first glance. So reading this book turned into a somewhat unexpected pleasure as her insights made me think about how those artists related to their times in ways that went way beyond making popular records or engaging in hotel-smashing escapades. It also made me appreciate again just how central rock was to the countercultures of the late sixties and early seventies, and not just as the proverbial third leg on the stool of "sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll" but as a core means of communicating ideas about identity, politics, and philosophy (especially related to the concept of liberation). You can tell from these pieces that Willis used the music to help her work out a lot of these ideas in relation to her own perceptions of sixties society and possibilities; and you can also see, as her work advanced deeper into the seventies, how generally the music became less central, providing Willis with a new set of critical questions to address as the counterculture fractured, largely from its own indulgences (not the least of which was its inherent sexism). In the end, the fact that most of this book does address familiar artists made it that much easier to appreciate just how sharp and unique Willis' insights on them were, making it clear that she fully deserves to be recognized as one of the key originators of rock criticism and -- even though she moved out of that field within a few years-- still one of the best.