Beginning to See the Light by Ellen Willis (.PDF)
File Size: 14.1 MB
Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll by Ellen Willis
Requirements: .PDF reader, 14.1 MB
Overview: From the New Yorker’s inimitable first pop music critic comes this pioneering collection of essays by a conscientious writer whose political realm is both radical and rational, and whose prime preoccupations are with rock ‘n’ roll, sexuality, and above all, freedom. Here Ellen Willis assuredly captures the thrill of music, the disdain of authoritarian culture, and the rebellious spirit of the ’60s and ’70s.
Beginning To See the Light is subtitled “Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll” and collects pieces Willis wrote between 1967 and 1980. The nominal topics of the individual essays run the gamut from Bob Dylan to Deep Throat, from the legacy of Herbert Marcuse to the rhetoric of the abortion debate; the tone and approach veers wildly, from more-or-less traditional concert review (“Elvis in Las Vegas”) to satiric service journalism (“Glossary for the Eighties”) to blisteringly honest advocacy journalism (“The Trial of Arline Hunt,” an after-the-fact procedural of a rape case). They’re united by a kind of antebellum urgency.
In the second of two introductions, Willis, writing with a decade of hindsight, notes that the pieces in the book “reflect the tension between my belief in the possibilities the sixties had opened up and my life in a society that was closing down.”
Genre: Non-Fiction > General
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