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Real life rock : the complete top ten columns, 1986-2014
The Washington Post hails Greil Marcus as our greatest cultural critic. Writing in the London Review of Books, D. D. Guttenplan calls him probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson. For nearly thirty years, he has written a remarkable column that has migrated from the Village Voice to Artforum, Salon, City Pages, Interview, and The Believer and currently appears in the Barnes & Noble Review. It has been a laboratory where Marcus has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements, teasing out from the welter of everyday objects what amounts to a de facto theory of cultural transmission. Published to complement the paperback edition of The History of Rock & Roll in Ten Songs, Real Life Rock reveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, astute, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.
Book
Conversations with Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus once said to an interviewer, \"There is an infinite amount of meaning about anything, and I free associate.\" For more than four decades, Marcus has explored the connections among figures, sounds, and events in culture, relating unrelated points of departure, mapping alternate histories and surprising correspondences. He is a unique and influential voice in American letters.
Marcus was born in 1945 in San Francisco. In 1968 he published his first piece, a review ofMagic Bus: The Who on Tour, inRolling Stone, where he became the magazine's first records editor. Renowned for his ongoing \"Real Life Top Ten\" column, Marcus has been a writer for a number of magazines and websites, and is the author and editor of over fifteen books. His critique is egalitarian: no figure, object, or event is too high, low, celebrated, or obscure for an inquiry into the ways in which our lives can open outward, often unexpectedly.In Conversations with Greil Marcus, Marcus discuses in lively, wide-ranging interviews his books and columns as well as his critical methodology and broad approach to his material, signaled by a generosity of spirit leavened with aggressive critical standards.
eBook
Conrad in Trump Country
A meditation on the relevance of Conrad's \"mythic realism\" for an understanding of the fears, angers, and desires that have surfaced in a volatile contemporary American populism. Drawing on D.H. Lawrence, Greil Marcus, Michael Taussig, and on a reading of Heart of Darkness, the essay argues that we need to go beyond critical distance and rationality to grapple with the violence that both supports and subverts liberal moral and social orders.
Journal Article
The Jumbies' Playing Ground
During the masquerades common during carnival time, jumbies (ghosts or ancestral spirits) are set free to roam the streets of Caribbean nations, turning the world topsy-turvy. Modern carnivals, which evolved from earlier ritual celebrations featuring disguised performers, are important cultural and economic events throughout the Caribbean, and are a direct link to a multilayered history.
This work explores the evolutionary connections in function, garb, and behavior between Afro-Creole masquerades and precursors from West Africa, the British Isles, and Western Europe. Robert Wyndham Nicholls utilizes a concept of play derived from Africa to describe a range of lighthearted and ritualistic activities. Along with Old World seeds, he studies the evolution of Afro-Creole prototypes that emerged in the Eastern Caribbean--bush masquerades, stilt dancers, animal disguises, she-males, female masquerades, and carnival clowns.
Masquerades enact social, political, and spiritual roles within recurring festivals, initiations, wakes, skimmingtons, and weddings. The author explores performance in terms of abstraction in costume-disguise and the aesthetics of music, songs, drum-rhythms, dance, and licentiousness. He reveals masquerades as transformative agent, ancestral endorser, behavior manager, informal educator, and luck conferrer.
eBook
Re-flections on the Cover Age: A Collage of Continuous Coverage in Popular Music
Since the 1980s, \"Re\" has been the predominant cultural mode. This condition is an endless lifestyle loop of repeating, retrieving, rewinding, recycling, reciting, redesigning and reprocessing. Popular music's backward spin accelerated and diversified dramatically during the Re Era. The past quarter century's \"like a version\" loop invites \"The Cover Age\" as a fitting characterization. Standardization, interpretation, incorporation, adaptation, appropriation and appreciation have been manifest in a multitude of musical manners and methods, including retrospectives and reissues, the emergence of rap and sampling as commercially dominant pop styles, karaoke, and a steady flow, if not stream, of cover compilations and tribute recordings which revisit a significant cross section of musical periods, styles, genre and artists and their catalogs of compositions. This essay is a collage and chronicle of the continuous coverage, intertextuality, and issues (imitation, ownership, apprenticeship, and preservation) within the karaoke climate of the music, mass media and marketplace triad, with artists, producers, record companies and consumers cohorts in the massive cover up.
Journal Article
The Shape of Things To Come: Prophecy and the American Voice
Marcus, Greil. The Shape of Things To Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. Farrar. Sept. 2006.336p.
Trade Publication Article
Dylan From the Ground Up; `The Basement Tapes' and the Birth of Obscurantist Rock
INVISIBLE REPUBLIC Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes By Greil Marcus Holt. 286 pp. $22.50 Sometimes I think Bob Dylan deserves the blame for the decline and fall of rock-and-roll. Before Dylan, it was all right to rhyme moon with June, and a rock song need be about nothing more than fast cars, young love and the big beat. After Dylan, everything changed -- rock songs needed to mean something, or at least pretend to. In \"Invisible Republic,\" Greil Marcus (author of \"Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock `n' Roll Music,\" one of the most important books to come out of the '70s along with Peter Guralnick's \"Feel Like Going Home\" and \"Lost Highway\") tries to make the case that Dylan's Basement Tapes represent a seminal moment in American popular music. Only a portion of the Basement Tapes, recorded 30 years ago in the basement of a house in Upstate New York with members of the group that would become the Band, has ever been officially released. The complete set -- five CDs worth -- is available only as a bootleg.
Newspaper Article
