Last month the Village Voice announced it was ending its print edition, a 62-year run of muckraking reporting, cultural criticism, opinion, advocacy, and opposition—opposition to authority, to anything, sometimes to everything. Founded in 1955, by Norman Mailer among others, the Voice was America’s original alternative weekly newspaper, giving rise to imitators from Baltimore to Seattle. But to me it was the local paper.
I grew up in Greenwich Village, around the corner from the offices, and for a short period I was lucky to work there. There were many great writers and journalists who started at the Voice or became famous there: civil rights advocate Nat Hentoff; Wayne Barrett, the crusading investigative reporter and early adversary of the real estate tycoon who would become the 45th president of the United States; the novelist Colson Whitehead; the photographer Sylvia Plachy; and dozens of others. But it occurs to me that among the most significant is a name most readers will not know, my friend the writer and editor Joe Wood, who died in 1999 at the age of 34. In a sense, Joe helped shape the way America looks today. It’s difficult, for instance, to imagine the presidency of Barack Obama without the questions that shaped Joe and in turn shaped his friendships and how he influenced his friends.
The Voice was always on the left, sometimes the far left, sometimes the cranky left, in an age when these dispositions were far more marginal to America’s mainstream than today. Yet it’s difficult to overstate its impact on American culture and politics, as well as media in general. Its coverage of the gay community, for instance, especially during the AIDS crisis, compelled the large daily newspapers like the New York Times to devote more resources to covering an increasingly visible and vocal segment of America. The same was true of race and the politics around race, a subject the Voice not only covered but for which it served as a platform.
Before America argued about the nature of identity politics, its virtues and dangers, the Voice got there first—and sometimes the debates turned into brawls. In the late ’80s, before my tenure, the paper’s jazz critic Stanley Crouch punched, and was fired for punching, colleague Harry Allen, a prominent rap impresario/intellectual. What started as an argument over the direction of American music was so loaded that it spun out into a confrontation over race in America.
The obvious lesson that print and broadcast media across the country learned from the Voice was that if you were going to report on and write about race your newsroom would have to be equipped to do that work. You needed to hire African Americans.
Joe was a kid from the Bronx who wound up going to a private school in the borough, Riverdale, before he went on to Yale. I think he was so accustomed to being the only African American in any given room that he was keen to get that fact out of the way. He did not make it easy. He always opened a conversation with a stranger about race. He had edited a collection of essays on Malcolm X. He was writing a book about the slave-owning family that owned his family. Did you see the latest Spike Lee movie? What do you think about Public Enemy’s last album?
Joe had a very acute sense of power, and if he felt his interlocutor flinch, he’d tear him to ribbons. But I can’t count the number of times at a party I turned around again after a few minutes and saw Joe and his new best friend bright in the light of Joe’s warm laugh.
But the deeper truth is that he wasn’t interested just in race or writing about race—he was a movie fanatic at a time when memorizing classic European films entailed hours, days, weeks in dark theaters across New York. Race, though, was his way into the human experience—it was his experience, and thus part of his way of explaining himself, to others and to himself.
And he was a kid from the Bronx who loved bird watching. He was at a writers’ conference in Seattle and went to Mt. Rainier to look for birds he’d never seen before. It was July and the snows were not yet melted so they could not find his body. I’m sure I’m not the only one from the Voice or his large circle of friends who has been speaking to him constantly since he died nearly 20 years ago.
There are many reasons I hate to see the Voice disappear from newsstands, but that may be the main one: It reminds me of all the other voices I’ll never hear again.
