Newspaper Article

From Lincoln to David Lynch

Smith, Kyle

2006

Overview

After such a paring down, a less pretentious book might have emerged, one called, say, \"American Noir.\" Mr. [Greil Marcus] does know pop culture and might as well stick to it without over-reaching. He makes (some) sense of the splintered logic of \"Lost Highway,\" for instance. And when he departs the podium and becomes a fan, his writing unclogs: He compares a rock song's rhythm to \"a car trying to start on a cold morning,\" while a guitarist is \"one of Dr. Moreau's mistakes.\" But in the final pages, when Mr. Marcus calls punk \"a sense of humor and a sense of doom,\" he unintentionally reminds the reader that this book could have used a lot more of the former and a lot less of the latter. \"The Shape of Things to Come\" is still waiting for its own shape to arrive. It aims to be breathtaking in its range, but really it's just a breathtaking mess, desperately trying to unite, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. and the obscure Cleveland rock band Pere Ubu or Abraham Lincoln and \"Twin Peaks.\" In the book's acknowledgments, rock critic Greil Marcus thanks his editor for \"never losing sight of a book's argument (or finding one when the author could not).\" That is indeed one talented editor.

• Publisher: Dow Jones & Company Inc
• Subject: Books-titles / Marcus, Greil / Nonfiction / Popular culture / Punk rock music / Shape of Things to Come, The