The Essential Ellen Willis

Introduction: Transcendence

xi When a collection of my mom Ellen Willis’s rock criticism, called Out of the Vinyl Deeps, was released in the spring of 2011, it fell into open arms. Veteran music writers rediscovered forty-year-old writings, while brand-new cultural critics reblogged her photos and quotes on Tumblr. It was a multigenerational outpouring of appreciation, a sense that this collection really did fill a void, really had revised the lineup of Important Rock Writers. But something wasn’t quite right. People who were just picking her up labeled her a “rock critic” first and foremost, even though she’d written about music for really only the first seven years of her career. Many fans were completely unaware that after and during her stint as the first pop music critic at the New Yorker she was a contributing columnist for Rolling Stone, a longtime Village Voice staffer, a feminist activist—the take-to-the-streets kind—and eventually a professor who invented a new and still unrivaled cultural reporting program at New York University. One reviewer wrote that she “left the profession” after The New Yorker to “pursue academia.”1 My mother would be mortified. Cultural critic Sara Marcus came to her defense in the Los Angeles Review of Books shortly after Out of the Vinyl Deeps was published: “All you goobers care about is Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, I want to grumble, when Willis went on to become one of the most ecstatic, intellectually astute, and readable thinkers ever to come out of the radical feminist underground.”2 She ended her long essay by calling for an Essential Ellen Willis anthology that would put together all her work on sex, politics, feminism, and culture in one volume, “not walled off from each other in ghettos, but occupying a brilliant landscape together, expansive, joyful, alive.” At that moment, it was clear the narrative needed tweaking again, in order to put Mom’s work in context of an incredibly daring, restless forty-year career. INTRODUCTION: TRANSCENDENCE Nona Willis Aronowitz xii Introduction Ellen Willis was born in 1941 in the Bronx, to a police lieutenant and a college-educated housewife, and was raised in suburban Queens. Her adult life started out relatively conventional for a studious, introspective, middle-class woman: she got married to a nice Jewish boy from Columbia while majoring in English at Barnard and eventually moved to Berkeley with him to study comparative literature. But by twenty-four, she was a divorced grad-school dropout living in a tiny apartment in the East Village who knew she wanted “some kind of writing job,” although at first she wasn’t sure how to make that happen in prefeminist New York City. She managed to score a staff writer position at Fact magazine (the ad was in the “help wanted male” section), but eventually, with the help of her downtown neighborhood—and boyfriend and rock critic Robert Christgau—she began to craft her personal Venn diagram: rock music, women’s lib, and grand, deliberately non-Washington politics. Mom would have a hard time crafting her “brand” nowadays. She was intellectual but not academic. She was a journalist but not primarily an “objective” reporter. She poached from her life and detailed her thought processes without devolving into memoir. It’s not that the identities of “rock critic” and “feminist writer” aren’t valuable, but my mother refused to devote herself exclusively to either; she used both more as touchstones, as lenses through which to see the world. One of the most astounding things about her was how many facets of culture she engaged herself in, depending on the pulse of the decade. In the sixties, she reported on rock music and counterculture for The New Yorker, while also immersing herself in the burgeoning women’s liberation movement (she founded the radical feminist group Redstockings along with Shulamith Firestone). As the backlash of the 1970s set in, she wrote about sex, abortion, marriage, and religion. She tackled parenting, drugs, race, and cultural backlash in the eighties; political psychodramas in the nineties; war, class, and the cultural unconscious in the aughts. But even if she isn’t easily categorized, she still had a crystalline worldview, one that was highly influenced by both her secular Jewish upbringing in New York, where she lived for most of her life, and her rebellion against those old models. She continually used the word “transcendent,” which aptly describes the way she sidestepped any neat category. It was...