Greil Marcus – författare

Sardonic, bitter, threatening, compassionate, gleeful, and most of all loud, 'Like a Rolling Stone' is much more than a song. Six minutes and six seconds in length, it was released by Dylan despite the received wisdom of the day as to what constituted a single. Originally published on the 40th anniversary of its release and recording, Greil Marcus' extraordinary book reconstructs the context in which the song first appeared, in terms of Dylan's own career (his controversial transformation from folk singer into rock n roll singer) and the world at large (Vietnam, the Watts Riots, the burgeoning counter-culture of the time). This is itself the stage for Marcus' recreation of the song on the page - its emergence from fragments, its words, its sound, its discovery of itself. An analysis and critique of an artist at the height of his creative powers, it affords a unique insight into the mistakes, inspirations and bloody mindedness that come together only in the very highest cultural moments.

Greil Marcus weaves individual moods and moments into a brilliant history of their changing times. The book begins in Berkeley in 1968, and ends with a piece on Dylan's show at the University of Minnesota on election night 2008. In between are moments of euphoric discovery: from Marcus' sleeve notes for the 1967 Basement Tapes to his exploration of Dylan's reimagining of the American experience in 1997's Time Out of Mind. And rejection; Marcus's Rolling Stone piece on Dylan's album Self Portrait - often referred to as the most famous record review ever written - began with 'What is this shit?' and led to his departure from the magazine for five years. Marcus follows not only recordings but performances. books, movies, and all manner of highways and byways in which Bob Dylan has made himself felt in our culture. Together, the dozens of pieces collected here comprise a portrait of how, throughout his career, Bob Dylan has drawn upon and reinvented the landscape of American song, its myths and choruses, heroes and villains. They are the result of more than forty years' engagement between an unparalleled artist and a uniquely acute listener.

One of our finest critics gives us an altogether original history of rock ’n’ rollUnlike all previous versions of rock ’n’ roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points that everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008, then proceeds to dramatize how each embodies rock ’n’ roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out—a new language, something new under the sun.  “Transmission” by Joy Division. “All I Could Do Was Cry” by Etta James and then Beyoncé. “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” first by the Teddy Bears and almost half a century later by Amy Winehouse. In Marcus’s hands these and other songs tell the story of the music, which is, at bottom, the story of the desire for freedom in all its unruly and liberating glory. Slipping the constraints of chronology, Marcus braids together past and present, holding up to the light the ways that these striking songs fall through time and circumstance, gaining momentum and meaning, astonishing us by upending our presumptions and prejudices. This book, by a founder of contemporary rock criticism—and its most gifted and incisive practitioner—is destined to become an enduring classic.

For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear--a dialectic of "love and theft"--the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery.

From the author of The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs comes his “Basement Tapes”: the complete “Real Life Rock Top 10” columnsFor nearly thirty years, Greil Marcus has written a remarkable column called “Real Life Rock Top Ten.” It has been a laboratory where he has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements. Taken together, his musings, reflections, and sallies amount to a subtle and implicit theory of how cultural objects fall through time and circumstance and often deliver unintended consequences, both in the present and in the future.  Real Life Rock reveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.

A funny, fierce, and uninhibited musical chronicle of the convulsive recent past from one of our finest cultural critics  "A one-of-a-kind guide to rock music’s resonance in every aspect of our lives.”—David Kirby, Wall Street Journal  “A smart set of suggestions for further reading, viewing, and listening by a most trustworthy guide.”—Kirkus Reviews  For decades, celebrated author Greil Marcus has applied his unmatched critical apparatus to everything from music, television, radio, and politics to overheard comments, advertisements, and happenstance street encounters—an eclectic collection of what he calls “everyday culture and found objects.”  This book collects hundreds of items from the crisscrossing spectrum of culture and politics throughout the tumultuous past six years of American life, an essential travel guide to the scorched landscape of recent history. Tracking the evolution of national identity during the Trump administration, Marcus spotlights the most whip-smart cultural artifacts to compose a mosaic portrait of American society, replete with unexpected heroes and villains, absurdity and its consequences, humor and despair, terror and defiance—as seen through media, music, and more.  Bursting with Marcus’s effortless, no-nonsense, unapologetic verve, this book features seventy-three columns from 2014 through February 2021.

From a celebrated critic, a heartfelt and adventurous reflection on the art of writing about art  “Essential for fans of Marcus and fruitful reading for anyone reflecting on the mysteries of art.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)  “Writers write. They can’t help it. They can’t not.” In this spirited book, the revered cultural critic Greil Marcus explains his compulsion as a yearning for fun, for play, and, most of all, to discover—to feel the moment when a creation speaks in its own voice.  Marcus reflects on over half a century spent honing the art of attention—from his California childhood, overshadowed by mystery and silence surrounding his father’s death, to his discovery of the critic Pauline Kael, to a confrontation with a sixteenth-century painting in Venice. Through it all, he invites readers to join him in exploring the revolutionary power of art: what it is, why it captures us, and how it forces us to confront what we think we know and who we think we are. Art challenges us to see the world differently, Marcus argues, and the role of the critic is to enact this perspective.  Funny and poignant, What Nails It is a tribute to the indispensable art of criticism by one of its greatest practitioners.

Acclaimed cultural critic Greil Marcus tells the story of Bob Dylan through the lens of seven penetrating songs  “The most interesting writer on Dylan over the years has been the cultural critic Greil Marcus. . . . No one alive knows the music that fueled Dylan’s imagination better. . . . Folk Music . . . [is an] ingenious book of close listening.”—David Remnick, New Yorker  Named a Best Music Book of 2022 by Rolling Stone  “Further elevates Marcus to what he has always been: a supreme artist-critic.”—Hilton Als  Across seven decades, Bob Dylan has been the first singer of American song. As a writer and performer, he has rewritten the national songbook in a way that comes from his own vision and yet can feel as if it belongs to anyone who might listen.  In Folk Music, Greil Marcus tells Dylan’s story through seven of his most transformative songs. Marcus’s point of departure is Dylan’s ability to “see myself in others.” Like Dylan’s songs, this book is a work of implicit patriotism and creative skepticism. It illuminates Dylan’s continuing presence and relevance through his empathy—his imaginative identification with other people. This is not only a deeply felt telling of the life and times of Bob Dylan but a rich history of American folk songs and the new life they were given as Dylan sat down to write his own.

From a celebrated critic, a heartfelt and adventurous reflection on the art of writing about art  “Essential for fans of Marcus and fruitful reading for anyone reflecting on the mysteries of art.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)  “Writers write. They can’t help it. They can’t not.” In this spirited book, the revered cultural critic Greil Marcus explains his compulsion as a yearning for fun, for play, and, most of all, to discover—to feel the moment when a creation speaks in its own voice.  Marcus reflects on over half a century spent honing the art of attention—from his California childhood, overshadowed by mystery and silence surrounding his father’s death, to his discovery of the critic Pauline Kael, to a confrontation with a sixteenth-century painting in Venice. Through it all, he invites readers to join him in exploring the revolutionary power of art: what it is, why it captures us, and how it forces us to confront what we think we know and who we think we are. Art challenges us to see the world differently, Marcus argues, and the role of the critic is to enact this perspective.  Funny and poignant, What Nails It is a tribute to the indispensable art of criticism by one of its greatest practitioners.

In 1978, Greil Marcus asked twenty writers on rock-including Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, Ellen Willis, and Robert Christgau-a question: What one rock-and-roll album would you take to a desert island? The resulting essays were collected in Stranded , twenty passionate declarations to such albums as The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet , the Ramones' Rocket to Russia , Something Else by the Kinks, and more. Universally revered as the ur-text of rock journalism, Stranded is an indispensable classic.

Previously published as Invisible Republic and already considered a classic of modern American cultural criticism, this is an updated edition of Greil Marcus's acclaimed book on the secret music made by Bob Dylan and the Band in 1967, which introduced a phrase that has become part of the culture: "the old, weird America."

Praised by Robbie Robertson of The Band as "a classic & a ticket to ride," The Rose & the Briar assembles an astonishing group of writers and artists: Paul Muldoon, Stanley Crouch, R. Crumb, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Sharyn McCrumb, Luc Sante, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Marsh, and more than a dozen other novelists, essayists, performers, and critics; to explore the ineffable power of the American ballad. From "Barbara Allen" through "The Wreck of the Old 97" to contemporary ballads by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, The Rose & the Briar is, as Geoffrey O'Brien hailed in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "a book full of internal echoes and provocative coincidences," featuring "historical investigation, shamanistic trance-journey, memoir, novella and cartoon," where "names and costumes change, soldiers become cowboys, demon lovers become backwoods murderer; the voices are unmistakably distinct but they share a common ground."

Listening to Van Morrison represents Greil Marcus's quest to trace Morrison's particular genius through seminal moments in his long career, beginning in 1965, breaking open in 1968 with the incomparable Astral Weeks, and continuing in full force to this day. This is a portrait of a perplexing, mysterious and terrifyingly gifted artist and vocalist at the height of his powers, written by one of our most thoughtful cultural critics.

In 1975, Greil Marcus's Mystery Train changed the way readers thought about rock 'n' roll and is to this day justly regarded as one of the most accomplished examples of contemporary music writing. Looking at recordings by six key artists-Robert Johnson, Harmonica Frank, Randy Newman, the Band, Sly Stone, and Elvis Presley-Marcus offers a complex and unprecedented analysis of the relationship between rock 'n' roll and American culture. This fiftieth-anniversary edition features new introductions by both the author and the New York Times' critic and editor Dwight Garner, alongside completely rewritten discographies. The result is an invigorating and wholly original study that remains a high watermark in cultural criticism.

Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. “I am an antichrist!” shouted singer Johnny Rotten—where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise. This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands—demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life—seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris—based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and ’60s; the rioting students and workers of May ’68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen.” Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick Traces is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along—a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history.In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric—cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

Greil Marcus has been one of the most distinctive voices in American music criticism for over forty years. His books, including Mystery Train and The Shape of Things to Come, traverse soundscapes of folk and blues, rock and punk, attuning readers to the surprising, often hidden affinities between the music and broader streams of American politics and culture.Drawn from Marcus’s 2013 Massey Lectures at Harvard, his new work delves into three episodes in the history of American commonplace song: Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” Geeshie Wiley’s 1930 “Last Kind Words Blues,” and Bob Dylan’s 1964 “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” How each of these songs manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one illuminates different aspects of the commonplace song tradition. Some songs truly did come together over time without an identifiable author. Others draw melodies and motifs from obscure sources but, in the hands of a particular artist, take a final, indelible shape. And, as in the case of Dylan’s “Hollis Brown,” there are songs that were written by a single author but that communicate as anonymous productions, as if they were folk songs passed down over many generations.In three songs that seem to be written by no one, Marcus shows, we discover not only three different ways of talking about the United States but three different nations within its formal boundaries.

In life, Elvis Presley went from childhood poverty to stardom, from world fame to dissipation and early death. As Greil Marcus shows in this remarkable book, Presley's journey after death takes him even further, pushing him beyond his own frontiers to merge with the American public consciousness—and the American subconscious. As he listens in on the public conversation that recreates Elvis after death, Marcus tracks the path of Presley's resurrection. He grafts together scattered fragments of the eclectic dialogue—snatches of movies and music, books and newspapers, photographs, posters, cartoons—and amazes us with not only what America has been saying as it raises its late king, but also what this strange obsession with a dead Elvis can tell us about America itself.

"How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?" Robert Palmer wondered in Deep Blues. Greil Marcus answers here: more than we will ever know. It is the history in the riff, in the movie or novel or photograph, in the actor's pose or critic's posturing--in short, the history in cultural happenstance--that Marcus reveals here, exposing along the way the distortions and denials that keep us oblivious if not immune to its lessons.Whether writing about the Beat Generation or Umberto Eco, Picasso's Guernica or the massacre in Tiananmen Square, The Manchurian Candidate or John Wayne's acting, Eric Ambler's antifascist thrillers or Camille Paglia, Marcus uncovers the histories embedded in our cultural moments and acts, and shows how, through our reading of the truths our culture tells and those it twists and conceals, we situate ourselves in that history and in the world. Rarely has a history lesson been so exhilarating. With the startling insights and electric style that have made him our foremost writer on American music, Marcus brings back to life the cultural events that have defined us and our time, the social milieu in which they took place, and the individuals engaged in them. As he does so, we see that these cultural instances--as lofty as The Book of J, as humble as a TV movie about Jan and Dean, as fleeting as a few words spoken at the height of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, as enduring as a Paleolithic painting--often have more to tell us than the master-narratives so often passed off as faultless representations of the past.Again and again Marcus skewers the widespread assumption that history exists only in the past, that it is behind us, relegated to the dustbin. Here we see instead that history is very much with us, being made and unmade every day, and unless we recognize it our future will be as cramped and impoverished as our present sense of the past.

Was punk just another moment in music history, a flash in time when a group of young rebels exploded in a fury of raw sound, outrageous styles, and in-your-face attitude? Greil Marcus, author of the renowned Lipstick Traces, delves into the after-life of punk as a much richer phenomenon—a form of artistic and social rebellion that continually erupts into popular culture. In more than seventy short pieces written over fifteen years, he traces the uncompromising strands of punk from Johnny Rotten to Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, even Bruce Springsteen. Marcus's unparalleled insight into present-day culture and brilliant ear for music bring punk's searing half-life into deep focus. Originally published in the U.S. as Ranters and Crowd Pleasers.

This book is a quest to understand Van Morrison's particular genius through a close look at the most extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in his long career, beginning in 1965 and continuing in full force to this day: sometimes entire songs, sometimes single words or even the guttural spaces between words that become musical events in themselves.

Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's life in music is revisted by his foremost interpreter,weaving individual moods and moments into a brilliant history of their changing timesThe book begins in Berkeley in 1968, and ends with a piece on Dylan's show at the University of Minnesota,his very first appearance at his alma mater,on election night 2008. In between are moments of euphoric discovery: From Marcus's liner notes for the 1967 Basement Tapes (pop music's most famous bootlegged archives) to his exploration of Dylan's reimagining of the American experience in the 1997 Time Out of Mind . And rejection Marcus's Rolling Stone piece on Dylan's album Self Portrait ,often called the most famous record review ever written,began with What is this shit?" and led to his departure from the magazine for five years. Marcus follows not only recordings but performances, books, movies, and all manner of highways and byways in which Bob Dylan has made himself felt in our culture. Together the dozens of pieces collected here comprise a portrait of how, throughout his career, Bob Dylan has drawn upon and reinvented the landscape of traditional American song, its myths and choruses, heroes and villains. They are the result of a more than forty-year engagement between an unparalleled singer and a uniquely acute listener.

"It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," film critic Pauline Kael wrote of John Frankenheimer's terrifying 1962 political thriller about an American serviceman brainwashed in Korea and made into an assassin. Sophisticated to be sure, it's also a headlong fall through the looking-glass of American politics and the most deeply prophetic film of the second half of the American century. As Greil Marcus reconstructs the drama, The Manchurian Candidate is a movie in which the director and actors, including Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in an Academy Award-nominated performance, were suddenly capable of anything, beyond any expectations. This edition includes a new foreword highlighting the movie's terrifying contemporary relevance in the age of Trump and Russian interference in the US Presidential election.