If you don’t already know, the issue of The Stranger featuring this column celebrates the alternative newsweekly’s 25th anniversary. What does it mean to be 25? In marriage, the 25th year marks the silver anniversary, symbolizing worth and strength and repped by the gemstone tsavorite. In manhood, it marks the age males have hit their peak and begin ever-so-slowly receding to the rest of their lesser (in terms of biological vitality, at least) lives. And in the lifespan of the Rolling Stones, it marks the run-up to Steel Wheels, a serviceable collection of songs the Stones sprinkled amidst hits on a world tour fueled by nostalgia but not without its late-stage triumphs.
Of course, a more fitting subject is the Village Voice, the standard-bearing alternative newsweekly that turned 25 in 1980, when London Calling topped Pazz & Jop and a year before the Voice won its first Pulitzer. (So by at least one metric, The Stranger is lapping the Voice, having earned its first Pulitzer five years faster.) (Also, forgive my Pulitzer fixation, but the day Eli Sanders’s win was announced was easily one of the best days of my life. Everyone who read that story was taken somewhere almost sacredly terrifying, and to have Eli’s humane summation of this extreme local horror resonate beyond our city made my heart explode.)
