City Pages, the Alt-Weekly Where Music Writing Reigned Supreme
The Minneapolis newspaper, which closed last week after four decades, was a home and a launchpad for a generation of pop journalists.
When a young music journalist moved to New York in 2006 looking for work, she didn’t quite grasp the power of her résumé.
Noticing that her most recent job was as music editor for the Minneapolis alternative weekly City Pages, the editor interviewing Lindsey Thomas for a position at MTV News playfully dropped a phrase she’d never heard: “So you’re part of the Minnesota music critic mafia, huh?”
She got the gig.
Since the days when Prince vaulted to stardom and the Replacements and Hüsker Dü established the gold standard for raw indie-rock, Minneapolis has always punched above its weight, musically. And City Pages, the free weekly that documented those artists, developed an outsized reputation all its own.
While it outlasted many of its kin, including the Village Voice, City Pages was shut down suddenly last Wednesday by its current owner, the Minneapolis daily newspaper the Star Tribune, which said challenges brought by the pandemic made the paper “economically unviable.”
Throughout its four-decade run, a disproportionate number of City Pages alumni went on to work at national musical magazines, to publish definitive books of music history and criticism, and to foster a tone that was envied and emulated throughout the industry. Even City Pages’ readership proved influential.
“It was absolutely essential as a local road map to arts culture,” said Ryan Schreiber, the founder of the music website Pitchfork, who grew up in the Twin Cities suburbs. “City Pages led me to weird places where I made weird friends, and it taught us about all the weird art that brought us together. Its 2006 cover story on Pitchfork is the only press that’s ever meant enough to me to have framed.”
Before the web made every publication instantaneously available to every reader, a newspaper assumed its audience was primarily local. But media on the coasts kept tabs on City Pages — especially its music section. The rock criticism pioneer Greil Marcus, who published his “Real Life Top 10” column in City Pages from 2003 to 2004, once called it “the best alternative weekly in America.” Talented writers from out of town sought to contribute (a young Ta-Nehisi Coates unenthusiastically reviewed Ghostface Killah’s “Supreme Clientele” in 2000) and even moved across the country to work there. (I relocated to Minneapolis in the late ’90s and was the music editor from 2000 to 2001 and again from 2017 until they shut off the lights.)
“Reading City Pages was the first time I realized music criticism didn’t have to be about, ‘Is this album good or bad?’” said the writer Melissa Maerz, who worked there in the early ’00s and later was a staffer at Spin and Rolling Stone. “The writing could be kind of experimental, almost novelistic, and it could be funny or high-concept.”
The City Pages story began in 1979, a decade after the births of the music magazines Rolling Stone and Creem, when the publisher Tom Bartel started a music paper called Sweet Potato that was written almost exclusively (and often pseudonymously) by the editor Martin Keller. Rechristened as City Pages, the publication added arts and news coverage, but its main draw remained its music reporting and criticism, including some of the earliest published stories on the Replacements and Hüsker Dü — and, of course, Prince, who Keller once offhandedly referred to as “Your Royal Badness” in a column, an epithet he was shocked to hear the VJ Mark Goodman use on MTV a short while later.
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