"One of the Canonical Documents of Early Pop Music Criticism"

"Today, almost every critic bows down to the Velvets, but Willis 'got' those proto-punks early. Her 1979 essay from the anthology 'Stranded' (included here) remains a foundational, luminous analysis of Lou Reed’s street-hassle humanism—and a statement of Willis’s own purpose. 'What it comes down to for me—as a Velvets fan, a lover of rock ’n’ roll, a New Yorker, an aesthete, a punk, a sinner, a sometime seeker of enlightenment (and love) (and sex)—is this: I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism. I believe that body and spirit are not really separate, though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal,' she wrote, then ended wryly with the refrain from 'Heroin': 'But I guess that I just don’t know.'"

In The New York Times, Evelyn McDonnell reviews Ellen Willis's Out of the Vinyl Deeps.