Greil Marcus

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.

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.

Addicted to Noise collects the best interviews, profiles, and essays Michael Goldberg has written during his forty-plus years as a journalist. From combative interviews with Frank Zappa and Tom Waits to essays on how Jack Kerouac influenced Bob Dylan and the lasting importance of San Francisco’s first punk rock club, Goldberg, as novelist Dana Spiotta wrote, “shows us how consequential music can be.”Contained within these pages: interviews with Sleater-Kinney, Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Flipper, John Fogerty, Neil Young, and Rick James, along with profiles of Robbie Robertson, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, the Clash, Prince, Michael Jackson, the Flamin’ Groovies, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, X, Laurie Anderson, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Devo, San Francisco punks Crime, and more. Plus short takes on Muddy Waters, Townes Van Zandt, Captain Beefheart, Professor Longhair, and others. As Greil Marcus writes in the Foreword, “You can feel the atmosphere: someone has walked into a room with a pencil in his hand—as the words go in perhaps the first song about a music critic, not counting Chuck Berry’s aside about the writers at the rhythm reviews—and suddenly people are relaxed . . . He isn’t after your secrets. He doesn’t want to ruin your career to make his. He doesn’t care what you think you need to hide. He actually is interested in why and how you make your music and what you think of it. So people open up, very quickly, and, very quickly, as a reader, you’re not reading something you’ve read before.”

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.

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.

An "astute, challenging, and far-reaching” look (Kirkus Reviews, starred) at how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of the American Dream has been understood, portrayed, distorted, misused, and kept alive “I found great pleasure in . . . Under the Red White and Blue . . . about the idea of the American dream, its allure, the exploitation of it.” —Percival Everett, New York Times Book Review, “By The Book” section Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald’s story has become a key to American culture and American life itself. Marcus follows the arc of The Great Gatsby from 1925 into the ways it has insinuated itself into works by writers such as Philip Roth and Raymond Chandler; found echoes in the work of performers from Jelly Roll Morton to Lana Del Rey; and continued to rewrite both its own story and that of the country at large in the hands of dramatists and filmmakers from the 1920s to John Collins’s 2006 Gatz and Baz Luhrmann’s critically reviled (here celebrated) 2013 movie version—the fourth, so far.

"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.

Re-release of the first book ever published in America about the legendary Motown Record Company, with a new foreword by legendary music journalist Greil Marcus!In January 1959 Berry Gordy borrowed $800 from his family and founded the Detroit-based record company that in less than a decade was to become the largest black-owned business in the United States. It also became one of the most productive and influential producers of popular music anywhere in the world, mainly by combining the best features of black and white American popular music.Even a short list of the recording and performing talent that Gordy recruited, trained and produced for his company is awesome: Diana Ross, The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells.The Story of Motown is the story of Berry Gordy’s triumph over powerful, established financial interests, entrenched popular taste, bigotry and racism. By inventing a sound that appealed to whites as well as blacks, and that was immediately identifiable to an entire generation of listeners, Gordy demonstrated his genius as a producer; by breaking the exploitive practice of "cover" records, he helped black artists control their own music and share in the proceeds of hits; and by the sheer force of his will, courage, and intelligence, he demonstrated that a black man from the urban ghetto could aspire to and conquer the heights of traditional American business, including the movie business.Unfortunately, while doing all of this, he also found new ways to exploit his talented artists and eventually lost many of them to companies that paid them more.The Story of Motown is the story of the rise and fall of one of the most important cultural touchstones in American history

From the author of The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs comes his “Basement Tapes”: the complete “Real Life Rock Top 10” columns For 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.

One of our finest critics gives us an altogether original history of rock ’n’ roll Unlike 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.

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.

Greil Marcus's study of American rock 'n' roll is justly regarded as one of the most accomplished examples of contemporary music writing. Using a handful of artists -- a brace of bluesmen, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley -- Marcus illuminates and interprets the American Dream in rigorous prose, touching on myth, landscape and oral tradition. The result is an invigorating and wholly original study -- here in its revised, sixth edition -- that remains a high watermark in cultural criticism.

The perfect gift for music fans and anyone who loves artists like Elvis Presley, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, Robert Johnson, and Harmonica Frank. In 1975, Greil Marcus's Mystery Train changed the way readers thought about rock 'n' roll and continues to be sought out today by music fans and anyone interested in pop culture. 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. In this latest edition, Marcus provides an extensively updated and rewritten Note and Discographies section, exploring the recordings' evolution and continuing impact.

Stanley Booth, a member of the Rolling Stones' inner circle, met the band just a few months before Brian Jones drowned in a swimming pool in 1968. He lived with them throughout their 1969 tour across the United States, staying up all night together listening to blues, talking about music, ingesting drugs, and consorting with groupies. His thrilling account culminates with their final concert at Altamont Speedway--a nightmare of beating, stabbing, and killing that would signal the end of a generation's dreams of peace and freedom. But while this book renders in fine detail the entire history of the Stones, paying special attention to the tragedy of Brian Jones, it is about much more than a writer and a rock band. It has been called--by Harold Brodkey and Robert Stone, among others--the best book ever written about the 1960s. In Booth's afterword, he finally explains why it took him 15 years to write the book, relating an astonishing story of drugs, jails, and disasters. Updated to include a foreword by Greil Marcus, this 30th anniversary edition is for Rolling Stones fans everywhere.

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.

Since it was first published in 1975, "Mystery Train" has cemented itself in the canon of great rock literature, offering one of the most astute, fascinating visions of the genre. Greil Marcus traces the emotional landscape and zeitgeist of an entire continent through the lens of the music of six of the most influential bands and musicians: from the pioneering Harmonica Frank to the tortured universe of blues singer Robert Johnson; from The Band and their dream to create a community grounded in rootlessness to the chaotic friction of Sly and the Family Stone; and from Randy Newman s struggle for creative freedom to the larger-than-life talent and ambition, downfall, and reinvention of the iconic Elvis Presley. The second half of the book a masterwork of music criticism, focuses on the discography of the aforementioned artists and the evolution and continuing impact of their recordings."