It took a Village (Voice)

It's alright, Ma, I'm only crying

I noted a couple of posts back in Friday Night Jukebox that I spent my formative years (ages 14-21) in the small (but completely uninteresting) town of Kokomo, IN.  Our newspaper there, The Kokomo Tribune, reflected the town itself and what many of its residents would consider an ideal America--Mom, baseball, apple pie, and hot dogs (not a caricature).  Somehow when I started college at the regional Indiana University campus there in Kokomo, I came across the New York City weekly The Village Voice.  

The big city newspaper in Kokomo was The Indianapolis Star, a conservative beacon in Indiana.  Television consisted of five channels--the big three (only ABC, NBC, and CBS existed back then), one local channel that showed nothing but reruns, and if the weather was just right (no clouds) you could sort of get the PBS station on the TV.  Radio was top forty out of the big city there in Chicago, and again, if the weather was just right, you could get one of them rock and roll FM stations out of Indianapolis.  There was no internet.

You can imagine what it was like, then, when I started subscribing to The Village Voice, an alternative weekly before there were alternative weeklies.  It introduced me to the punk movement and Neil Young (after a hella review of his Rust Never Sleeps LP) and the work of music critic Robert Christgau (whom I continue to have a love/hate relationship with to this day).  It taught me that not all people who were gay were in the closet.  That there were Americans who were a lot more liberal than that commie Jimmy Carter.  That there were a lot of people angry just like me at the state of America.  And that there was a lot more to America (both good and bad) than I had been taught in my high school history classes.

So it was with some sadness that I read this past week that The Village Voice is ceasing publication, though I'd quit subscribing sometime after my daughter was born (not a justifiable expense for a young family) roughly thirty-five years ago.  Not surprised--printed newspapers have pretty much become a quaint nod to our past, which I suppose is what this whole post is.

Give 'em credit, though--in a world that is still screaming for the coolness quotient, they scored a perfect ten on their final cover (Dylan saluting, as seen at the top of this post).

If you gotta go, as the saying goes, at least leave a beautiful corpse.

Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee