Greil Marcus
|
|
Greil Marcus is an US-American author, music journalist and cultural critic.
Marcus was born in 1945 in San Francisco. He earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley where he also did graduate work in political science. He has been a rock critic for Rolling Stone (where he was the first reviews editor at $30 a week) and other publications. His column "Real Life Top Ten" started in the Village Voice, moved to Artforum, to Salon then to City Pages and is currently inactive. He also writes the column Days Between Stations (named after the Steve Erickson novel) for Interview. From 1983 to 1989, Marcus was on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Cirle Award.
He is famous (some would say notorious) for his quote concerning Bob Dylan's then-latest album Self Portrait: "What is this shit?"
Fans of his work praise his scholarship and discoveries of cross-currents between music and culture.
Detractors cite his over-the-top prose (Dylan's Blonde on Blonde consists of "instrumentalists and singer all peering into a deeper abyss than anyone had previously imagined existed") and inapt metaphors (Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story gave "room to breathe as the Allies stormed the beach at Normandy").
Bibliography
- Rock & Roll Will Stand (1969), edited anthology
- Double Feature: Movies & Politics (1972), co-authored with Michael Goodwin
- Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'N' Roll Music (1975, fourth revision 1997), seminal work which treated rock and roll not just as popular music, but as as a form of American art and culture.
- Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (1979, editor and contributor)
- Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), a book on 20th century avant-garde art movements like Dadaism, Lettrist International and Situationist International and their influence on late 20th century counter-cultures
- Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991), about the phenomenon of Elvis Presley in the years since his death
- In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992 (1993, originally published as Ranters and Crowd Pleasers)
- The Dustbin of History (1995)
- Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1998; also released as The Old, Weird America: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, 2001), a treatise on America as seen through Dylan's famous Basement Tapes recordings
- Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2001)
- The Manchurian Candidate (2002)
- The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (2004, co-edited with Sean Wilentz)
- Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005), a "biography" of the Dylan songde:Greil Marcus