Pop-Culture | Posted by Julie Z on 05/21/2011
Saturday Vids: Out of the Vinyl Deeps – Ellen Willis on Rock Music
In 1968, the New Yorker hired Ellen Willis as its first popular music critic. Her column, Rock, Etc., ran for seven years and established Willis as a leader in cultural commentary and a pioneer in the nascent and otherwise male-dominated field of rock criticism. As a writer for a magazine with a circulation of nearly half a million, Willis was also the country’s most widely read rock critic. With a voice at once sharp, thoughtful, and ecstatic, she covered a wide range of artists—Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Velvet Underground,—assessing their albums and performances not only on their originality, musicianship, and cultural impact but also in terms of how they made her feel.
Because Willis stopped writing about music in the early 1980s—when, …
