Culture June 13, 2011

Ellen Willis is credited with two firsts. She was the first great female rock critic and the first pop critic for the New Yorker (from 1968 to 1975), breaking the gender ceiling in a male-dominated field and the class ceiling by writing about low-culture in a high-middlebrow context. Willis’s music writing is compiled for the first time in Out of the Vinyl Deeps (edited by her daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz, with a foreword from current New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones). It’s guaranteed to stay at the top of the rock-critic canon. Writing in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Willis