May 14, 2005
The Village Voice voice
Some New Yorkers may be unaware that The Village Voice is not only our favorite weekly but also the flagship publication of Village Voice Media, Inc., which puts out similar papers in Los Angeles, Orange County, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Nashville. I’ve recently noticed that the critics for these various papers—most frequently pop music and film reviewers—often have what I’ve come to call “The Village Voice voice.” I’ll use MP3s as an analogy: wary of word counts, these writers try to compress large amounts of data into smaller spaces without losing “sound quality.” This leads to a style in which cultural references pile up quickly and it takes a knowledgeable reader to pick everything apart. A representative sentence, pulled from Nate Patrin’s Prefuse 73 review I linked to earlier this week: “On Prefuse 73's fourth album, Herren, who also records as Savath vs. Savalas [sic], uses his guests in much the same airy, window-dressing manner he uses his ‘Windowlicker’-lite vocal samples; e.g., Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino's turn on ‘We Go Our Own Way’ and the A Day at the Races stateroom-scene claustrophobia of ‘Am I Gone’ (featuring Piano Overlord, Broadcast, and Cafe Tacuba, pitted ‘vs.’ each other in the album credits like the song was a sort of indie-mellow Hell in a Cell).”
With references to electronic music acts, Mexican rock stars, a Marx Brothers film, and pro wrestling, it wouldn’t make much sense to anyone not invested in pop culture. Yet I’m unexpectedly attracted to this writing style when it concerns film, music, or literature, perhaps because it encourages a certain pride when I catch all the casual nods. But does it translate to discussion of visual art? Because many of the above references are to songs or films, which are much more easily disseminated than individual artworks (or even images of them), I suspect this shorthand-for-the-cognoscenti would be harder to pull off when reviewing or commenting upon exhibitions. Can anyone provide me with good examples? I just glanced through two dozen of my Artforum.com “Critics’ Picks” and found few examples. (One is a parenthetical aside, in this review of Valerie Hegarty’s recent New York solo debut: “Picture what Adriana Varejão might make after reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden.”)
Here are links to site search results for some of my favorite writers in this style. Dennis Lim at the Voice, who writes about film and books; Patrin at the Seattle Weekly, who writes about music; and Matthew Wilder at CityPages, who writes about film, music, and books. (Why are they all men? Where are the shorthand-slinging women?)