Talking About the Village Voice, the “Paper That Couldn’t Be Bought”

Rock ’n’ politics, read all about ’em: Two covers from the Village Voice Archive featured in Romano’s oral history.

"Imagine: Your Facebook feed is suddenly free of ads, and every post in it comes from one of your favorite Village Voice writers, cartoonists, or photographers. Staffers and freelancers at the legendary alternative weekly, alive and gone, are talking to you in the privacy of your room or on the bus or at the beach, their pithy comments bouncing off one another, sharing their memories and their inside scoops, assembling a saga that reaches back to 1955, when a trio of World War II vets — psychologist Ed Fancher, encyclopedia scribe Dan Wolf, and novelist Norman Mailer — threw 15 grand together, rented an office, and made publishing history. And imagine that this feed goes on for a hundred hours, that you keep scrolling and the stories keep rolling out, in the inimitable voices of people you knew — or wished you knew — and loved. That’s how I — a Voice contributor since the early ’80s, a senior editor from 1992 until 2006, and a contributor, again, from 2015 until, well, now — felt reading Tricia Romano’s extraordinary new oral history, The Freaks Came Out to Write, subtitled The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture.  ..."

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