Bohemian Rhapsody

Ann Powers was an editor at the Village Voice when she and fellow journalist Evelyn McDonnell published Rock She Wrote in 1995. It was the first anthology of music writing by women, and revealed a side of women's experience as creators, critics, and chroniclers of music that, until then, had been given very little consideration. Since then, Powers has continued to write about music from a much-needed feminist perspective, and is currently the New York Times' regular pop-music critic. By looking at rock and pop music within the context of the larger culture, Powers brings insight to musicians and events that other magazines gloss over with big numbers and flashy hyperbole -- her look at the recent resurgence of rock misogyny and how it converged with the events at Woodstock 99, for example, was the most thoughtful and nuanced consideration of the subject in any major publication.

With her new book, Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, Powers turns her attention to alternative culture and its influence on her own life. Offering up an engaging, witty valentine to the improvised life and an equally impassioned rebuttal to the idea of the bohemian as a bongo-beating caricature (think Pia Zadora in Hairspray, listening to Odetta and ironing her hair), Weird Like Us is equal parts memoir and manifesto. Powers takes us through her San Francisco post-adolescence -- a dumpster-diving, working-in-a-record-store, living-with-seven-roommates bohemian rhapsody -- and into adulthood, discovering it's possible to face maturity with both ideals and Buzzcocks records firmly in hand. She visited old friends, housemates, and co-workers from her years in San Francisco, checking in to see how their own idealism has weathered the years. The resulting accounts -- of people turning personal passions into passionate careers; forging new definitions of love, sex, and marriage; and redefining previous generations' ideas of idealism and success -- round out her own story.

Bitch met up with Ann to chat in a cafe in Manhattan's West Village, where Leonard Cohen alternated with French electronica on the sound system and people nursed cranium-sized bowls of latte and smoked cigarettes that were probably hand-rolled. Does it get any more boho than that?

AZ: Weird Like Us is an autobiography that's kind of in the service of defining a larger concept. I'm interested in why you decided to approach it that way.

AP: The original idea of the book came from a column I used to write for the SF Weekly -- it started out as a listings column, but I made it into an arts/music/culture column. It was very personal, and I often wrote things about things that happened in my personal life that I felt connected with the larger issues. It was very exciting because I felt truly in touch with a community at that time; I really felt like I was chronicling a world. And when it came time for me to think about [writing a] book, that was the world I wanted to talk about. I knew it was vital and happening, but I felt it was very underrepresented in the mainstream media -- I mean, it's represented in things like the trend of the moment, but not in terms of the values or the private life of bohemia.

When I worked at the Village Voice, I became aware that here's a long tradition, now less common -- in fact, now not really happening in the Voice at all -- of personal essays that would combine reporting, autobiography, and analysis. It's a real New Journalistic, counterculture style of approaching things, and I wanted to do that.

AZ: I liked the idea of you going back years later on a sort of "Where are they now, my bohemian friends?" mission.

AP: [Laughs.] That was pretty intense, on a personal level ... I mean, gathering together people who I hadn't seen, some of them, or heard from, for 15 years. It was really interesting, and a good corrective, too. Like in the work chapter, when I talk about the whole Planet Records part of my life ... I mean, I went into it feeling very positive about what had happened [at that job], having almost a nostalgic view. But it was good to talk to some of my coworkers, who had a more negative take on the experience. I would have just written a paean to it, and wouldn't have talked about the fact that maybe we sabotaged ourselves a little bit by not organizing in a labor union. I needed the other points of view to check my own.