AAN Association of Alternative Newsmedia

Writer Fondly Recalls the '80s at the Village Voice

By AAN Staff

april 12, 2006 07:16 am

R.J. Smith, senior editor at Los Angeles magazine, tells stories of bickering and battling at the Village Voice in an interview with rockcritics.com. Smith, who was a music critic for the Voice until he left in 1990, calls Robert Christgau "the most helpful and complicated editor I've ever had," someone who was so obsessive that when he received a baggie full of semen from a member of the Swans protesting a bad review, he just told his assistant "to file it under S for Swans. Order had to be maintained." Other edit staffers were not so serene, Smith says, so "every week there was some new line being drawn, one week it was the old city hall lefties versus the fresh radical feminists, the next week it was the folks who thought the performance artist who stuffed yams up her ass was the bomb scuffling with those who had their knickers bunched."

Tags: The Village Voice