Willis Thoughtz
One of the things I really like about the Ellen Willis collection is how openly personal the reviews are. There’s a calmness of personality running in between the peremptory analysis, individuality behind the mechanical analysis. She’s a great critic, but what completes the essays for me are sentences as simple as “I enjoyed the show a lot” (“Believing Bette Midler, Mostly”) and “It was very hot” (“Frankenstein at the Waldorf”). Every writer is due his or her mundanity, and it’s the mark of an expert when knowing to cast off the critical hat in favor of bland honesty.
I read Out of the Vinyl Deeps discussed a lot in conjunction with Lester Bangs, because they worked during the same era and Bangs is the most prominent if only critic who’s endured since then. Some of the underlying sentiment (take my word for it) supposes that Willis is/was a lot better than Bangs, and her relative obscurity is due to the way society tends to lionize tragic white males who draw attention to themselves. Those criticisms aren’t unfounded, but my reading of it is that Willis’s style seems much more unconsciously influential on today’s predominant Pitchforkian model of criticism that’s spread to just about every music website* — one which considers objective politics and ideas through the prism of personal style, which has the unfortunate effect of crunching everything together as though attitudes towards art are axiomatic rather than individual. A lot of this criticism is very good and wholly necessary (in the way that writing can ever be necessary), but -ists/-isms are just as often used as reflexive shorthand for “I don’t like this very much,” which is good and fair but often exasperating when considering the narrative hivemind around just about anything controversial. There are a lot of reasons for this, and I probably shouldn’t get into it without acknowledging that my observations are pretty boilerplate.
Even when Willis gives a negative appraisal of something, it’s more disappointed than condemning. She’s like a professor you’re afraid to let down. She wants the work to be better, but it’s not quite there. Keep trying, though; she’ll be there to give it a fair shake. Maybe I’m wrong, but she seems to have that interior firmness (and the interviews I’ve read would confirm some of this) of not being too worried when people disagree with your thoughts, because after all, your world view is just your own. There isn’t a crime in demarcating between your thoughts and the actual way of things, if there is one. It might not make you as interesting or as likable of a critic, but it certainly seems more honest.
* Bangs, on the other hand, is baby’s first rock critic; his style is so intoxicating and energetic that every nascent teenager writer tries and fails to emulate him. He’s certainly imitable, but transparently so. Maybe this is what drier, more formal writing is birthed out of: reading one’s old personality-driven views on music (or anything) and murmuring “Oh my fucking God.”
