City Pages, the Alt-Weekly Where Music Writing Reigned Supreme

As someone who lives in Minneapolis, City Pages was also invaluable as a source of info on good places to eat and drink around these parts.

Sad to see it go.

There were alt-weeklies everywhere before the early 90s, largely surviving by being where you would find out all the bands that were playing that week, all of the plays if your city had theater, new restaurants and clubs opening up, and the drink specials at the places you knew and loved. At some point one figured out that they could make their personal ads into "1-900" numbers, and rolled every free paper up all over the country within a few years, first making them bland, then shutting most of them down after people stopped reading them. A very few survived when their parent decided to spend a minimal amount of money on them (as the bottom fell out of the "900" number biz.)

I guess you take independent writing anywhere you can get it these days, but I'm not sure much has been lost. There will still be a market for those papers after covid, because they're basically entertainment programs, like maps to amusement parks. Maybe if what is now Village Voice Media are out of the business, they'll have a chance to flourish again.

I was not surprised when they shut down the City Pages. It had become a shadow of its former self (and its former self was OK, but I can't imagine it deserving a write up in a national paper?). Any kind of credible music journalism had been gone for years. Honestly, reading this review I have to wonder, did the author even read the City Pages very often? For the last few years it was mostly a regurgitation of what was popular on Twitter with some salacious headlines thrown in.

The cover and inner page from this year's annual "Best Of" issue.

https://imgur.com/a/kPR5uj2

It's usually the biggest issue of the year, thick with articles and ads—but this year it was thin and filled with hilarious fake awards all related to the COVID and the statewide stay-at-home order, which had started two weeks earlier and would run for another month.

It was exactly the laugh I needed then; I'll be super sad to see this paper go.

Minnesota native here: Really sad to see it go.

City Pages had a lot of really great information on everything from music to food. It and its writers took things too seriously, either, which was rather refreshing, regardless of your social or political viewpoint.

Wow, I live in Minneapolis and love this paper, but did not know it was dead. Sad.

Damn