Greil Marcus

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Greil Marcus (2007)

Greil Marcus (born 1945) is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.

Biography

Marcus was born in San Francisco and earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also did graduate work in political science. He has been a rock critic and columnist for Rolling Stone (where he was the first reviews editor, at $30 a week) and other publications, including Creem, The Village Voice, and Artforum. From 1983 to 1989, Marcus was on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle.

His 1975 book, Mystery Train, re-defined the parameters of rock music criticism. The book places rock and roll within the context of American cultural archetypes, from Moby-Dick to The Great Gatsby to Stagger Lee. Marcus's "recognition of the unities in the American imagination that already exist"^{[citation needed]} inspired countless rock scribes.

His next book, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), stretched his trademark riffing across a century of Western civilization. Positing punk rock as a transhistorical cultural phenomenon, Marcus examined philosophical connections between entities as diverse as medieval heretics, Dada, the Situationists, and the Sex Pistols.

In 1991, Marcus published Dead Elvis, a collection of writings about Elvis Presley, and in 1993 published Ranters and Crowd Pleasers, an examination of post-punk political pop. In 1997, using old Bob Dylan bootlegs as a starting point, Marcus dissected the American subconscious with Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes.

He currently writes the "Elephant Dancing" column for Interview, "Real Life Top 10"^[1] for The Believer and occasionally teaches graduate courses in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He also teaches a lecture class at the New School University called "Old Weird America."^{[citation needed]} His book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006.

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, fifth revision March 25, 2008)
• Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (1979, editor and contributor)
• Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989)
• Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991)
• In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992 (1993, originally published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers)
• The Dustbin of History (1995)
• Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1998; also published as The Old, Weird America: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, 2001)
• 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)
• The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice (2006)
• A New Literary History of America (2009), co-edited with Werner Sollors

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Greil Marcus

• Video interview with Greil Marcus on "The Shape of Things to Come" on The Alcove with Mark Molaro
• "Obsessive Memories," essay on memory and his father, Greil Gerstley, who died in World War II.
• Exchange with Greil Marcus at rockcritics.com
• "The Shape of Things to Come" at fora.TV