Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

"Today, so many years later, the shock of punk is that every good punk record can still sound like the greatest thing you've ever heard… the power in these bits of plastic, the tension between the desire that fuels them and the fatalism waiting to block each beat, the laughter and surprise in the voices, the confidence of the music, all these things are shocking now because, in its two or three minutes, each is absolute. You can't place one record above the other, not while you're listening; each one is the end of the world, the creation of the world, complete in itself."

He's like a five time Oscar winner looking for a project.

I would love to have him pitch me so that I could muster my sub-100 IQ and tell him I didn't have the space.

Salon.com deserves to leave us. My only hope is that they didn't still GM on the way out. Like some other writers I know, who got the privilege of waiting a long time for checks.

Why? I think they've done some great things. Eric Boehlert's Clear Channel series sticks out in my mind.

http://www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/index.html

No one reads Salon. Well, at least not many of us. It's too expensive, for one. It began as a great idea and then caterwauled into a predictably shrill shill for "progressives." Frankly, as soon as it become monochromatic it got boring. The problem is that no one will tell David Talbot that to his face, apparently. I mean, if his solution was to employ the predictable rantings of dudes like Andrew Sullivan--it's not really exclusive to publish a guy who already heavily blogs--I have to think that Talbot was not the man to be leading Salon to the promised land.

2-3 years ago I might have missed Salon. But what I've noticed was that I don't miss it much at all--ever since they introduced the high subscription price, people have been leaving in droves.

Ah. There's our difference. I just paid. Go ahead, call me a sucker.

Salon is seriously about to go under. They allegedly are having trouble paying rent and are in dire need of a wealthy suitor.

Hats off to you anyway. Nighty night.

I will report back (maybe on ILE/F).

Will I learn anything?

marcus isn't particularly rockist for a guy who likes rock, actually.

amt- yes, we get it, you don't like music writers.

my friend saw him a few weeks ago and said in an email that he was "arrogant"

i was just telling adam what to expect

Big news for me, maybe not for you: Scott Woods launched a new website yesterday that will collect a lot of Marcus’s writing going back to the beginning.

http://greilmarcus.net/

He’s got about 25 posts up so far. Scott has Marcus’s cooperation, so there should be no end to the amount of stuff that turns up there. There’s so much that I haven’t read in ages, or haven’t read at all: the "Real Life"s from the Voice, the Artforum columns, book reviews from Rolling Stone, stray pieces from wherever. There was a Marcus site a few years ago (forget the name—“Attic” was in there somewhere), but there wasn’t a great deal to it beyond a few links, and it eventually disappeared. I’m hoping--and knowing Scott, I think it will--this one becomes as necessary a reference tool as Christgau’s site.

I've been helping Scott set up Grooveshark playlists based on the Stranded discography; he's doing singles, working forwards through the alphabet, and I've started on album cuts in the opposite direction.

http://grooveshark.com/#!/greilmarcus/playlists

Three or four pages in, I've already confronted three or four blues albums I didn't know at all. I've written a lot over the years about my ambivalence towards electric blues, so auditioning these records and finding a representative song has been a challenge. With the likes of Wire and the Who and Frankie Lymon, I do the honorable thing and ignore Marcus's words in favor of what I love.

A nice write-up on the site:

http://www.wonderingsound.com/news/greil-marcus-rock-critic-archive-online/

I have a kinda love/hate relationship with Marcus' writing, so I am glad to see this (even if some of it will irritate me, while other things will open me up to new thoughts and ideas and approaches and music).

He's polarizing, for sure. More so than even Christgau, I think.

yeah i love/hate marcus

i don't even really rate christgau in anyway though...like even when marcus is bonkers i feel like he's trying to do something at least. christgau seems like he does nothing poorly.

marcus's daughter lived in minneapolis for awhile and was involved with the local radio station. he wrote this thing on some local rappers i played bass for for awhile....they were mid 90s indie dudes, used a lot of classical record loops which was pretty common back then, anyway marcus wrote a thing about them in interview magazine! it was hilarious, one guy has a copy in his studio, marcus was on this whole thing about how they were intentionally debasing european culture by sampling and cutting up and marring classical music records....the dudes were like "i have no fucking idea what he's talking about" haha

i like marcus, though like any cultural critic he has tics and hobby horses that can get tiresome if you read too much of him. i remember someone calling his style "six degrees of abraham lincoln," I think.

Hahaha, that's perfect. I like some of his writing -- his take on Keith Moon's playing as part of RS' Moon obit is among the clearest, most concise, and most insightful assessments of any instrumentalist's approach that I've ever read -- but too much of the time I feel like I've read this story about the one-legged mule that played banjo during the Civil War before.

Here's the stuff that's so easily parodied. I remember giggling at the time:

Then “Lose Yourself” begins to play under the closing credits, and in an instant it blows the film away. The music dissolves the movie, reveals it as a lie, a cheat, as if it were made not to reveal but to cover up the seemingly bottomless pit of resentment and desire that is the story’s true source. Again and again the piece all but blows up in the face of the man who’s chanting it, Eminem lost in his rhymes until suddenly people are shouting at him from every direction and the music jerks him into the chorus, which he escapes in turn. The piece builds into crescendos of power, climbing ladders of refusal and willfulness step by step, rushing nothing, never reaching the top because it is the music itself that has put the top so high.
It’s Eminem’s greatest single recording, but it’s more than that. As with Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You),” the Miracles’ “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it’s one of those moments in pop music that throws off everything around it, setting a new standard, offering a new challenge, proving that, now, you, whoever you are, can say anything, and with a beauty no one can gainsay. That’s what’s happening here. The cutting contest at the end of 8 Mile is a small thing compared to the cutting contest “Lose Yourself” throws down on pop music as such.

As with Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You),” the Miracles’ “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it’s one of those moments in pop music that throws off everything around it, setting a new standard, offering a new challenge, proving that, now, you, whoever you are, can say anything, and with a beauty no one can gainsay.

i love a lot of marcus' writing but jesus, bob lefsetz could have written that.

except for the word "gainsay." lefsetz probably doesn't know that one.

Marcus's writing shaped my thinking about music in a lot of ways and I'd say generally for the good at the time, but I think I outgrew the grand-pronouncement style a couple years back - I'm always wanting him (and all my friends) to quit milking the same cows. there are other cows!!

but abraham lincoln once milked this cow!!!

His love for "Lose Yourself" completely lost me at the time. I thought it belonged to a genre he usually makes fun of: the heavy-handed, look-at-me-I'm-a-survivor record.

UMS's story is great. I often refer to this in trying to figure out where he's coming from--had a big influence on me:

What I'm interested in is what happens when you listen. If the artist made a record intending to convince all right-thinking people to send money to the I.R.A., but the record is in Swedish and nobody can know that, it's sort of pointless to discuss the guy's intentions. What you really have to discuss is what is it like to hear a record in Swedish, and does it have a good beat?

(As someone pointed out, maybe on here--nobody can know that, unless they happen to be Swedish, that is.)

If you're someone who makes music, I can understand how his reactions would drive you around the bend. But for me, it's always been a valid way to approach what you're trying to write about.

Lucinda Williams never even milked a cow!!

There's a weird review of Steely Dan's Aja on there where he employs the tactic of comparing the emotional core of Lynyrd Skynyrd to the anti-emotionalism of Steely Dan. Don't really know that comparing and contrasting these two groups provides any real insight into either.

that's the problem with a lot of these romantic rock writers though - SD is not un/anti-emotional. they're just precise. those terms aren't antagonistic, but romantics think they are. "deacon blues" is so dense with pain it's almost impossible to bear, but it doesn't overemote - that doesn't detract from its emotional nature. guh these dudes and their meaning-it tropes

i'm probably as big a GM fan as anyone around here, so i'm delighted to see this website and will def be checking back.

i remember GM once said he thought the best writing he ever did was a series of short movie reviews for a short-lived '70s newspaper that no one read, most of which he'd written without seeing any of the movies. i found that both absolutely maddening and kind of hilariously characteristic -- of course he'd say that!

Looking forward to this because I'm not very interested in reading his books about the Doors and the Van Morrison or his umpteenth dissertation on Dylan. More fun to go back and find his surprising enthusiasms over the years.

that's the problem with a lot of these romantic rock writers though - SD is not un/anti-emotional. they're just precise. those terms aren't antagonistic, but romantics think they are. "deacon blues" is so dense with pain it's almost impossible to bear, but it doesn't overemote - that doesn't detract from its emotional nature. guh these dudes and their meaning-it tropes

― Now I Am Become Dracula (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned),

Thank you! That review of Aja irritated me too and your response is exactly right. Interesting to hear how at the time that Aja came off as unemotional, etc...how wrong even the greats can be!

the dudes were like "i have no fucking idea what he's talking about" haha

I got a somewhat similar but more restrained response from Mike Seeger once about GM's writings on Dock Boggs. Something like, "He can go a little overboard...," with a polite grin. (Seeger was a very polite guy.)

But I enjoy his writing in small doses -- always liked the Real Life Top 10 format -- so this should be fun to read.

the doors book was actually really good, i think the best thing he's done in years. a subject he'd almost never written about before (and a subject that's rarely written well about), and it seemed to bring out something new in his writing. elvis and punk aside, i actually don't share a lot of his ongoing enthusiasms; i like seeing him react to something unexpected.

it has always bugged me when people characterize GM as a 'cold' or 'academic' writer because at his best he's the opposite of that, someone who's very in tune with his initial gut reactions to songs and who's very good at conveying that in his writing even when what he's saying is vaguely ridiculous. i think part of the reason the "lose yourself" review seems lame and self-parodic is that the response it provokes from GM is completely predictable -- that's the way GM always reacts when he hears a song he likes it -- but he seems determined to paint it as yet another life-changing capital-e Event. which it really wasn't; it's a decade later, and liking "lose yourself" didn't appear to change anything in his listening habits or make him write in a new, unexpected way. whereas when he writes about how he responded to the sex pistols, slits, and adverts tracks in "lipstick traces," it seems like those songs really did take him by surprise, and his writing communicates that shocked -- even kind of horrified -- response very vividly and convincingly.

Then Charli XCX's bit on "Fancy" starts, and in an instant it blows Iggy Azalea away. The music dissolves the movie, reveals it as a lie, a cheat, as if it were made not to reveal but to cover up the seemingly bottomless pit of resentment and desire that is the song’s true source. Again and again the piece all but blows up in the face of the woman who’s chanting it, Charli lost in her rhymes until suddenly people are shouting at her from every direction and the music jerks her into the chorus, again and again, which he escapes in turn.

also i should have added the rappers in question, of course, were also big fans of classical loops because there were fewer worries abt sample clearances, like of course marcus would never suspect an actual logistical/business reason

ums i would actually like some pointers to hip-hop acts who were ditc of classical stuff, I love that shit when I happen across it but idk who made a specialty of it.

Was going to quote his Midnight Vultures review ("This is embarrassing.") and searching for it found this page of correspondence:
http://rockcriticsarchives.com/interviews/greilmarcus/01.html

well this thread revive is not making me want to read any greil marcus. sorry greil marcus.

that's the problem with a lot of these romantic rock writers though - SD is not un/anti-emotional.

Pretty sure Marcus's problem is with Aja, not Steely Dan in general, certainly not early Steely Dan. Three of the first four Steely Dan albums are in the Stranded discography, with comments like "in all the despair." I can even think of someone else where he basically makes the same point as you: the Pet Shop Boys. Posted today, writing about "Rent" in 1988: "And I don’t understand, just don’t get, the people who say the singing is flat, wimpy, pallid, emotionless, and so on. It’s anonymous--like all the best early punk voices."

oh man! Thanks so much for adding those PSB comments. I've paraphrased them for years.

His review of Lodger strikes me as a classic example of being right about the artist and wrong about the album; it's one of my favorites.

ILM's heavy Lodger jones has always confused me so much

I'll never understand GM's heavy Pin Ups jones. Thanks for pointing out that review, Alfred.

For a second thought aero was assigning or using a nickname there: David "Lodger Jones" Bowie

It's not better than Low but it's a near-great record.

btw "it's one of my favorites" refers to his review, not Lodger.

Truth be told though, never have warmed to Lodger myself either. Prefer the Hitchcock film of the same name. The career overview in that review is indeed great.

The old school rock critics were pretty important to the formation of the tastes of James Redd at Fifteen but now that the building has been built the scaffolding can be removed. Furthermore, end up finding many of their stylistic tics wearying, don't feel up to the challenge of wading through without some kind of cherry-picking or curating by someone else or the buddy system of one of these threads- "Did you read what I read?" Of course if I saw him in person I'd be all like "Greil Marcus, you da man!"

In other words, at this point complaining about one of them is more like griping about an old friends with other old friends rather than a serious dismissal.

David "Lodger Bowie" Jones

Final iteration:
David "Bowie: Lodger" Jones

In person G. Marcus is a total bro. He wears his Harry Potter specs well.

Oh yeah, think I saw those photos of youse at the EMP.

xpost genuine question to upper mississippi sh@kedown: Did another rap group circa '01 really sample all classical music? (I'm sure I was listening to a lot less than you were then and now...)

By coincidence I recently re-read the musical portions of Lipstick Traces (plus the Free Speech Movement coda) and they are still the writing of someone seized by ideas like electrical volts going through his body for days...

Classic Marcus line, in that it sounds great but I have no idea what he's getting at.

Is it just that (Bowie) succeeded in replacing Marvin Gaye as rock's Peter O'Toole?

This on the other hand is a wonderful observation:

I've never known anything that people otherwise seemingly in sympathy disagree about more predictably than movies. That's what movies are for--for people who think they understand each other to disagree about.

otm

jiminy cricket, i had no idea marcus was still writing the real life Rock top ten - or rather top 3 or 4

http://www.believermag.com/contributors/?read=marcus,+greil

(1) Counting Crows, Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did on Our Summer Vacation) (Collective Sounds/Tyrannosaurus). After five top-ten albums on a tony major, the last in 2008, Counting Crows have put out a set of covers on their own label, some of them from little-known or never-heard bands they came up with in Berkeley in the late 1980s and early ’90s. “Every last bit of it,” singer Adam Duritz writes, “felt utterly unique and every last bit of it was being repeated somewhere else, lived by somebody else, experienced by a thousand ‘someone else’s’ in places all over like Minneapolis and Seattle and Boston and New York City and, of course, in a little town called Athens, Ga., not to mention London and Dublin and Glasgow.” As in those words, and as in all of Counting Crows’ best work, Duritz is sentimental, nostalgic, pleading, shameless; he wears his heart on his sleeve while the band, especially guitarists Dan Vickrey and David Immerglück, do their best to tear it off and throw it around the room. It becomes clear that with no period affectations, no genre inflections, Duritz is a soul singer; he sings to plumb the depths. Whether on Kasey Anderson’s 2010 “Like Teenage Gravity” or Fairport Convention’s 1969 “Meet on the Ledge,” he demands the songs explain themselves to him—why this word leads to that one, why the melody curves away from him when he thought he had it in his grasp, why the song cries out for something he can’t give but the musicians can, must—and the only way to make the songs do that is to sing them. It happens most acutely with Dawes’s 2010 “All My Failures.” In the original, the vocal is thin to the point of preciousness; you can hear the singer listening to himself. You can hear vanity, the way the song may not need you at all—and, for that matter, you don’t necessarily believe the singer believes he ever failed at anything. Counting Crows pushes hard from the start, and in the play that’s instantly under way, Duritz is a witness—to his own failures, sure, but also to yours. And then you are a witness to his, and to your own. And then you play it again, wondering why it sounds so good.

haha oh wait these are excerpts...gotta go to the newstand to read more

someone help me out with this, is it a Berkeley thing or something?

i liked this guy as a teenager but i find it a little hard to believe that people actually read him anymore or find much of his work of value. mystery train opened me up to some new ways to think about popular music and i guess i'm grateful for that but i find it hard to read now. i think the last time i gave half a shit was just before the basement tapes thing. i heard him give a talk and he was disappointing, then i actually read the book and its whole americana mythologizing project seemed risible to me. i haven't bothered w/ anything he's done since, but the excerpts from his recent (?) columns that have been posted above are pretty damning. his writing style has really curdled, hasn't it?

he's become pretty much the model of a shitty cultural critic to me, all "insight" and grandiose revelations and a jivey, run-on style. but no (or low) information, no evocative description, no precision, just... nothing.

I still find lots and lots of his work of value. I have left behind a few of my early influences, but not Marcus.

would you agree that the counting crowes and eminem "reviews" above are total bunk?

humanities in general = total bunk

but i find it a little hard to believe that people actually read him anymore

You're doing that thing again that you do.

No, like the Counting Crows comment. I think Eminem's "Lose Yourself" is bunk, so obviously I don't agree with his enthusiasm, but if the record affected him that much, then I think he should go with that wherever it takes him.

"I like"

wherever it takes him.

grotesque but still somehow warmed-over hyperbole?

i guess we have different tastes. by which i mean, you like really awful writing and, well, i probably do too but not this particular brand of really awful writing.

Yes--I and the numerous people who've been influenced by Marcus over the years, we all love awful writing. It's the tie that binds us.

the "influence" thing is a red herring. i was influenced by marcus too, but i find most of his stuff hard to read now, and the excerpts from his recent work posted above suggest he's curdled into self-parody.

thousands of greil marcus fans cannot be wrong!

someone photoshop greil marcus in a gold lame jumpsuit onto that bon jovi elvis album cover

GreilAsElvis.jpg

Rock and roll music, if you like it, if you feel it, you can't help but type a lot of words about it. That's what happens to me, I just can't help it.

http://measurablewords.com/images/word-logorrhea.png

recently was flipping through some old pauline kael reviews, and man, i hate that 2nd person style of critical writing more and more. don't push your hyperbole on me! dare to stand by your corny-ass euphoria without suggesting we'll all experience it!

yeah i have this immediate feeling that someone is invading my personal space

Lol at da croupier, that was a perfect description of why that style ultimately aggravates.

Like, if he'd written this:

Whether on Kasey Anderson’s 2010 “Like Teenage Gravity” or Fairport Convention’s 1969 “Meet on the Ledge,” he demands the songs explain themselves to him—why this word leads to that one, why the melody curves away from him when he thought he had it in his grasp, why the song cries out for something he can’t give but the musicians can, must—and the only way to make the songs do that is to sing them. It happens most acutely with Dawes’s 2010 “All My Failures.” In the original, the vocal is thin to the point of preciousness; I can hear the singer listening to himself. I can hear vanity, the way the song may not need a listener at all—and, for that matter, I don’t necessarily believe the singer believes he ever failed at anything. Counting Crows pushes hard from the start, and in the play that’s instantly under way, Duritz is a witness—to his own failures, sure, but also to mine. And then I am a witness to his, and to my own. And then I play it again, wondering why it sounds so good.

I could at least say, "damn, that is a beautiful way to describe losing your shit to a counting crows song."

ha has anyone actually read any of jay mcinerney's wine crit? i wonder if he goes second person in it

even with the pronouns replaced, it still is just one long, imprecise, rather far-fetched attempt to universalize some obscure reaction marcus had to the song. i have no idea how to even approach it except to say, "that's nice for you, greil."

xpost

man that reads so much better in first person and it really helps reduce the ridiculousness of it being about counting crows

xpost

someone's going to write, "but isn't that what criticism is?" aren't they?

i have no idea how to even approach it - lol, no shit

it's actually counting crowes, which is actually quite tough. there's cameron crowe, of course, there's sir sackville crow, 1st baronet. after that they come thick and fast.

xpost

balls, is that empathy or a dig?

https://twitter.com/CountingCrows_

Wonder if the Stranded "Treasure Island" section still holds up. Haven't looked at it in decades, but still remember fondly some of the phraseology. Maybe at this point like GM better in the short form and Xgau in the long form, either because of contrarianism or because it reins in each one's worst habits.

I know there's great music in that list but writing wise I only remember all those "sexual tours" the stones were taking

Marcus' Beatles entry in the RS Illustrated History struck me as one of the best things about them I'd ever read.

damn jay mcinerney has been married four times. he's married to patty hearst's sister now.

The Beatles thing was posted on the site earlier today, Tim.

Will take a look at that, thanks.

yeah i enjoyed it. also enjoyed this on one of his favorite nemeses (so weird he hated chris barron so much but love adam duritz so much, talk about confusing proxies for the real thing)(clem will love the shot in passing at 'sugar shack'), seems to articulate some things amateurist is struggling to get out -

Weiland, the singer in Stone Temple Pilots, wants to look like a goat, but that little goatee is all he’s got going, and it’s not enough. His face is too puffy, his demeanor too earnest: The way he tries to get anger going in his eyes, his mysterioso gloom in the band’s videos, the bombast of his songs (“… And to you, dead and bloated nation of sleepwalkers, so content to drown in your own rancid apathy” is a liner-note rant, but it’s what the songs want to be). That I’ve-forgotten-more-than­-you’ll-ever-know look of a real goat’s face is beyond Weiland; you know he doesn’t have a clue.

Chris Barron, the singer in the Spin Doctors, re­ally does look like a goat. It’s not just the straggly blond pubic-hair beard, either–he’s got that goat­ish all-knowingness in his eyes, a smugness beyond human ken. Combine that with a goat’s dis­tant, unfocused gaze, that weird suggestion that its eyes don’t see you because there’s nothing about you worth knowing, and you have, in the Spin Doctors’ spectacularly casual, winning manner, a veritable aura of smarm and scorn.

In the vast spectrum of prizes offered by pop music, from its promise to reveal the meaning of life in the way a singer turns a phrase to its provision of a good beat you can dance to, hating a band is a pleasure that at times can bring satisfactions that loving a band can’t touch. It might start with some small irritation, the way some guy cuts his hair, the treacle in Juliana Hatfield’s voice, but soon enough it’s under your skin, the music is a disease, and you don’t need no doctor, you just need a gun.

The idiosyncrasy of your own dislike expands into a metaphor out there in the world–people are buying this stuff, can you believe it?–that somehow sums up everything that’s wrong with society, the country, the vile behavior of that clerk at the bank yesterday, the moron who cut you off on the freeway, or Phil Gramm. (This guy is running for president? Of the United States?) It’s wonderful to be able to hate something as safe and harmless as a band, espe­cially when the hideousness of the music has convinced you that true evil lurks in the most trivial gesture–it can make you feel more alive, determined, even heroic in your outrage. That’s why I know I’ll never forget Journey, or the Doobie Brothers, or Jimmy Gilmer’s “Sugar Shack,” or Rupert Holmes’s “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” or the Spin Doctors. I know I’ll forget Stone Temple Pilots.

Sorry, couldn't make it. At this point reading GM writing about The Beatles is a double whammy.

Thinking about reading the Bob Stanley book, is there any of that second person stuff in there?

The problem with mythmaking is the generalizational haze of the writing makes the subjects interchangeable. He could have written that gross paen upthread about Chris Barron instead of Duritz.

I love the writing there--he was great hating on C&C Music Factory and EMF, too--but as someone who loves "Two Princes," and once had "Sour Girl" #1 on my singles list, I've always found the depth of his loathing funny and a little puzzling. I've also never quite understood why he thought Eddie Vedder was any less of a Cobain imitator that Scott Weiland. Vedder just seemed like a lot less livelier imitation to me.

No accounting for the stuff we loathe, though.

In fairness, I think that was written at a point before the Stone Temple Pilots turned into the Ohio Express.

you keep holding on to the dream that that actually happened clem

The dream must never die...Trying to remember them all: I think "Sour Girl," "Vaseline," "Interstate Love Song," and "Big Bang Baby" were all pretty good-to-great junky pop-grunge songs. Probably one or two more, maybe.

i hated the fuck out of spin doctors at the time, i grew to appreciate 'two princes' after the fact (if you have a great drummer eventually i'll cave) but man ugh 'jimmy olsen's blues'. stp i found hilarious immediately and was instantly on the 'better than pearl jam' challops which by the time 'big empty' came out i was a true believer and held on to thru 'sour girl' (smg played a role no doubt there).

That paragraph in the middle of the Beatles piece where he talks about how they were their influences and how the shock of the Beatles was not just the shock of novelty but the shock of recognition - he nails it there.

xp: "You" doesn't phase me--it's a conversational or literary substitute for "one." You get used to it, meaning one gets used to it.

or, one gets sick of it

i certainly didn't mind it when i was younger, and probably inclined to assume they're right. but now, i'm far more interested in how greil marcus reacts to counting crows songs than how he thinks ONE does, cuz when it comes to himself he's got more of a leg to stand on.

^^
Reasons why it is hard to go back and read the original stuff or why this style grows stale are overdetermined, but that is probably the primary one.

what's funny is critics so rarely use it to describe actual banal universals - stuff you really can assume ONE would react to. It's really a deflection of vulnerability.

i.e. from kael's review of yojimbo

There is so much displacement of the usual movie conventions that we don't have the time or inclination to ask why we are enjoying the action; we respond kinesthetically.

now extracting US from the sentence you get

There is so much displacement of the usual movie conventions that I don't have the time or inclination to ask why I am enjoying the action; I respond kinesthetically.

which is a more honest, more brave thing to say. let US say "yes, i had the same reaction," and risk coming out as an overemotional fruitcake rather than suggesting those who don't have the same experience are the odd ones.

rather than suggesting those who don't have the same experience are the odd ones.

Oddly enough, that's my problem with some of amateurist's voice-of-God dismissals.

i find it a little hard to believe that people actually read (Marcus) anymore
― I dunno. (amateurist), Friday, July 11, 2014 7:42 PM

i just can't get over the fact that someone actually reads john simon. why do that to yourself? ::shakes head::
― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist)

now imagine if he used the first person plural

amst isn't really doing voice of god - he's being mean, perhaps, but expressing HIS reaction and not suggesting its shared by all.

it allows for that "hey, maybe I'M the weirdo but..."

Critics using "we" is probably the thing I hate the most. "Why Do We Love Bruce Springsteen So Unconditionally?" Um, who the fuck is this "we"?

croup the crit you're looking for is pitchfork 1998-2003, cf amy phillips, the collected writings

I'd probably bring James Agee up first, as someone who did great film critic without fearing a more diary-like tone

Between the fear of standing alone and the relative profitability of suggesting those who agree with you are legion - I'm sure more people want to read (and publish) Why Do We Love Bruce Springsteen than Why Do I Love Bruce Springsteen - I totally get why it's done, though

He's expressing his reaction, yes, but there's the clear suggestion, via theatrical incredulity, that anyone who doesn't have the same reaction isn't just odd, but quite probably stupid. Anyway, I'm with Pete above--the "you" construction is just a stylistic construction that doesn't bother me a bit. (Unlike, say, what Chuck Eddy calls the "royal we" construction--that does bother me.)

great film criticism, rather xpost

Warning: overuse of the word "construction" ahead.

YOU presupposes some idealized community of ideal listeners of which YOU can become a member. But then you grow up and realize it didn't quite materialize as promised, so you have less time for YOU.

lol funny rickover quote in this piece on royal we - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/magazine/03FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=0

pluralis maiestatis is pretty different in tone, intent, and effect than pluralis modestiae though. latter is common usage in scientific and (apparently) mathematic lit, i would guess that it's usage in humanities crit, etc is aiming for similar effect but ending up this muddled mix of the two. w/ science and math though demonstration and replication are possible and u + k. w/ humanities not nearly as much the case. it's almost like a cargo cult effect, that if they cop the style tic of 'we' they're going to get the demonstrative rigor that accompanies it. lazy.

Tbh, as time marches on, youone some of us get less interested in motivation material relating rock to discomysticpizza medieval monks and just want to hear behind the scenes stuff like how napping-on-a-sofa Wayne Jackson overhead Jim Stewart and Chips Moman fighting over Stax or which stories about James Jamerson were true and which made up by Jack Ashford.

lol at that article and quote

Oh wait wasn't a quote. Lol anyway. Or otm

That paragraph in the middle of the Beatles piece where he talks about how they were their influences and how the shock of the Beatles was not just the shock of novelty but the shock of recognition - he nails it there.
― timellison, Friday, July 11, 2014 8:53 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, that's one of his best essays and I remember that point very well too, despite not having read it since whenever. i think he did a good job dismantling some critical canards in that one, just as he did in his reevaluation of elvis's post-sun records in "mystery train." there are some really lucid and insightful sections of that book, which i figure must be his best (I haven't written anything he's published since about 2003). i didn't mean to imply that his writing was worthless, just that i can scarcely imagine anyone wanting to read him now. which i can't! (fwiw i'm even more mystified by anyone reading and enjoying john simon, which i'll have to chalk up to masochism unless someone can point me to a really interesting simon article.)

i made the point on another thread that i think his writing got a lot less interesting once he encountered punk and post-punk. that music seems to satisfy some important need he had, and after that his writing seemed to indicate less of a struggle after ideas and more of a smug slotting everything into preexisting categories or heuristics.

also i think we all have a right to be utterly dismissive of something we don't like! as long as we respect the right of other folks to think we're a blowhard for being that way. :)

and i do really think the whole "you feel like this, you feel like that" is a big reason i find his writing a turn-off, but it's hardly the only reason. (it's something i can sometimes abide in other authors if i think they have something useful to say.)

i think this use of the 2nd person might have some influence from the cult-studies stuff marcus started reading and allying himself to in the 1990s(?). there's tons of use of that in that context. i'd say the same of marcus's increasing use of seemingly infinite subordinate clauses.

Excellent late-'70s photo of Marcus here, in advance of the original New West "Real Life" columns. I thought it was John Denver at first glance.

http://greilmarcus.net/2014/07/21/now-weve-got-greil-marcus-too-073178/

"Take me home, fascist bathrooms..."

that may be the only photo of GM i've ever seen where he's smiling!

It was 1978. "You're the Want That I Want" was on the radio, and magic was in the air.

Found this review of Robert Coover's A Public Burning fascinating:

http://greilmarcus.net/2014/08/22/undercover-an-absurdably-likable-nixon-100677/

It's like Marcus's "Campaigner": the only time I've ever seen him allow for the possibility that there was another Nixon there, more complicated than the Nixon he hated. (He goes even farther than that.) A friend sent me the Coover book a couple of years ago--it'll require some effort (I just don't read fiction anymore), but I should give it a go.

Slight error on the title there--The Public Burning.

new one! will probably read at some point: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-greil-marcus-20140824-story.html

well, what do you know, greil is a carl barks/scrooge mcduck fan!

http://greilmarcus.net/2014/08/19/natural-acts-book-reviews-0482/

my all-time favorite book foreword!

http://greilmarcus.net/2014/08/08/foreword-to-marooned-2007/

As I read Seward, he is saying that the challenge is to hear lines from an English-language pop composition as if they are not in English—to hear them as the desperate attempt to communicate, to hear the desperate attempt to connect (“I wanted to know everything that Rakim knew,” he says), and, in that abstraction, to begin again, from the beginning.

I think so, as I recall on an EMP Pop Conference thread I think, ILX's S saying Greil heard his presentation one year

he sat right in front of me at the last one i did. tried to stare me down. he's a good dude. he was the moderator at the emp i did in california. that was so much fun. i got to thank him for the marooned thing. you can still listen to it online. my ebay thing.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/2011-emp-pop-conference-at/id431416241?mt=10

i sound like a giddy schoolgirl.

every time i've seen him speak it has been memorable. i'm really no expert on his work or books. i've read him here and there over the decades obviously. i said it on here somewhere, but the dylan thing i saw him do at harvard was amazing. on "The Ballad of Hollis Brown". the dude can bring it.

we got wasted that night.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/3801_10152588755537137_256138507_n.jpg?oh=8b60005af542a63c1fa9017888f2ed4b&oe=547D6E66&__gda__=1416029144_121dc3f5afa2f71b9e0c3d71e0b2579e

I've never seen Greil drink at these things. I imagine him as a sip-a-single-malt guy.

Not sure how many people remember this, but it was such a big deal at the time:

http://greilmarcus.net/2014/09/09/pazz-jop-89-ive-decided-not-to-participate/

Had mixed feelings then, still do. I don't want to really get into how accurate Marcus's interpretation of Public Enemy was. He felt like he did, and he acted upon it, and that's fine. I wasn't sure then, and I'm still not sure now, if boycotting accomplishes anything. It's a poll; it's kind of meaningless (even though Pazz & Jop "meant" more then than now, simply by virtue that more people paid attention to it and more people talked about it). I used to joke that he boycotted mostly because he knew Don Henley wasn't going to win albums that year. Which, I realize, trivializes something he felt strongly about.

He boycotted Pazz and Jop because of Professor Griff? That's stupid. What does one have to do with the other?

Supporting Henley is trivial enough.

Well, yeah.

did Don 'n' Glenn appreciate the gesture?

I do like that it was a time where a year-end music poll was considered by someone (a prominent critic, no less) to be worth boycotting.

DON: We rarely saw eye to eye on host of issues over the years, I must admit I was impressed by Marcus' protest ballot in the '89 Pazz & Jop poll. To find a so-called rock critic willing to stick to his metaphorical moral guns was an act deserving of applause, even at the cost of a vote for The End of The Innocence, my new album at the time.

GLENN: Sometimes answers weren't so clear cut. I'm still waiting for his explanation for overlooking "Sexy Girl" on his singles ballot a couple years prior!

DON: Well, yeah.

Dave Marsh stopped voting in P&J because he thought Christgau's essays were getting crazy obfuscatory.

I think I like Marsh's reason better than Marcus'.

Marsh never came back; Marcus was back the next year, I believe (by '91 for sure), and continued to vote for a few years after that.

I think there's a Christgau interview somewhere where he says that he and Marcus didn't talk for a year after the '89 poll.

I think there's a Christgau interview somewhere where he says that he and Marcus didn't talk for a year after the '89 poll.

christgau and marsh, on the other hand, continued talking, but marsh didn't understand a single thing christgau said.

haha. Actually, Marsh did an interview in 2001 praising Christgau's skills as an editor to the skies.

Dave Marsh stopped voting in P&J because he thought Christgau's essays were getting crazy obfuscatory.

i always figured that those essays were weird and unreadable because ultimately the assignment is stupid: summing up "a year in music," as if that means anything at all.

Christgau's essays are far more intelligible than his blurbs!

yeah, i guess they're not so much unintelligible as just kind of ridiculous in trying to draw all these thematic parallels and rhymes out of a mass of stuff that really is only lumped together by historical accident

i find that i can usually unpack his blurbs, and maybe 50% of the time they are worth unpacking. the rest of the time i think he's (unconsciously?) trying to disguise having nothing to say by saying it in a knotty way.

hey man -- distinguishing between toasters is rough

The Oxford American's 86th issue features 112 pages of art and writing, including a reported essay by Patsy Sims on Edgar Ray Killen and the Klan-sponsored murders of Mississippi civil rights workers in 1964, and a new essay by the legendary rock critic Greil Marcus.

The site links to a long interview with Charles Taylor:

http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=89990

ah, god, the oxford american. i bought a subscription to that a year ago and really regret it. there are some good pieces but overall it just feels like a faintly intellectualized tourist brochure for northern liberals who want to travel and see "the real south." such bullshit.

i always wondered what happened to charles taylor, he sort of fell off the face of the earth after leaving salon. his un-google-able name doesn't help, of course.

Charles Taylor has a great article about the band Wussy in the LA Review of Books.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/support-local-wussy

Anyone have any idea how to get hold of "1972" by the Wilson Sisters?

http://greilmarcus.net/2014/10/30/real-life-rock-top-10-0886/

As someone who had my own experience of listening to the radio shaped in 1972--and therefore considers it a really mysterious year, if not scary--Marcus's entry always stuck in my mind. Can't find anything on Soulseek, and even a Google search just turns up stuff about Heart.

"Spooky," not scary. And records like "Slipping Into Darkness," "Family Affair," "Backstabbers," "A Horse with No Name," "Living in the Past," and others did seem spooky to me at the time, and some still do.

A short podcast (twelve minutes) of Scott talking to Marcus about Phil Spector's Christmas album.

http://greilmarcus.net/2014/12/19/a-christmas-gift-for-you/

Amazing photo of Spector and Marcus in 1967.

http://greilmsandbox.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/jbjhficg.jpg?w=700

look at those cuffs!

At the risk of obviousness, Phil and cuffs just go together naturally.

his lucinda williams 'thing' is still mad creepy imo

Real Life Rock Top 10 (06/11)

1. Gareth Liddiard, Strange Tourist (ATP)

The film critic Mick LaSalle, in the San Francisco Chronicle, recently answered a reader’s query as to why Never Let Me Go—the film about an English boarding school attended exclusively by boys and girls destined to be harvested for their organs—failed to receive an Oscar nomination as one of the ten best films of the year. “…a movie’s chances go down if viewers feel like killing themselves after an hour,” LaSalle replied. Strange Tourist is like that: over an hour’s worth of a man sitting in a room, hitting notes on an acoustic guitar, meandering through tales of one defeat after another, with alcohol leaving tracks on the songs like a snail. But Liddiard leads the Drones, who with far more drama, dynamism, and fury can also make you feel like killing yourself, or anyway wishing the world would end, or wondering if, in one symbolically complete event at a time—a school shooting here, a successful Republican filibuster there, a new Lucinda Williams album on the horizon—it hasn’t already. Here, in a quiet, artless, shamed, constricted way, a person emerges: a fictional construction, someone without a flicker of belief or, for that matter, interest in redemption, cure, or another life, against all odds, especially across the more than sixteen minutes of “The Radicalisation Of D,” the final track, he makes you want to know what happens next.

lol that's his best Lucinda zing though

pretty darn funny if you ask me.

Better say before committing the rest of this post: loved the interview.

Marcus has always had a bizarre penchant for random assassination attempts on innocuous acts: Lucinda Williams, Ry Cooder, The Roches. Who exactly has ever been forced to listen to these groups?

Somebody should have laughed in his face when Marcus felt the need to bring in Alexis de Toqueville to attack America (the band!) in Mystery Train. About twenty years later Harold Bloom felt the need to invoke George Eliot to explain why he didn't like MTV Raps. People make fun of Bloom for this kind of thing. Marcus remains untouched.

In a review of the autobiography of Keith Richards, Marcus felt the need to write this:

He (Richards) explains the mystery of a technique he learned from the guitarist Ry Cooder, and, though he doesn’t say so, understood in ways Cooder never has and never will

Yeah, that will show all those people who think Ry Cooder is better than the Rolling Stones!

my least favorite marcus moment is the bit in mystery train where he tries to explain why he likes randy newman by comparing him to ray davies (who he mostly doesn't like). he doesn't come right out and say it, but the argument he makes comes dangerously close to "randy newman is better because he writes about america, and america is cool and scary and mysterious, not dull and bland like england."

A few months ago, Scott posted Marcus's abstention from the '89 poll over Public Enemy. He added a footnote the other day, two letters to the editor, one attacking Marcus and one lauding him. The attack is from Armond White, and it's actually pretty good.

https://gmfootnotes.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/70/

don't feel like i'm really qualified to evaluate who's right and who's wrong there (probably no one tbh; armond doesn't really address the problems with PE, but then marcus didn't really spell out what the problems were either), but it is striking how much better a writer armond was back then.

from a decade ago, for april fools' day, one of greil's weirdest pieces ever:

http://greilmarcus.net/2015/04/01/former-president-george-w-bush-dead-at-72-110304/

it read strangely at the time, and seems downright bizarre today.

jesus that's really twisted, he kills off the entire Bush clan except for Barb and big George.

I remember his dueling President Gore/President Bush fantasias in 2000.

I liked it then, still do. It's so straightforward; to me, the mood seems more sad than angry.

x-post: yeah, the ones at the end of his clinton book? i remember one of them has clinton staging his disappearance post-impeachment, then living out his days disguised as a small-town lawyer, listening to 90s bob dylan.

"Jeb Bush died just two weeks after being mauled by gators at a Central Florida fund raiser"

This should be something:

http://greilmarcus.net/2015/04/05/coming-soon-rock-a-hula-clarified/

Looking forward.

the suspense builds...

Haven't had a chance to read it, but part I is up.

http://greilmarcus.net/2015/04/07/rock-a-hula-clarified-pt-1-0671/

Oh, this is where his Real Life Top 10 is...

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/delayed-reaction

In latest one, he disagrees with Caramanica of the NY Times re Lana Del Ray. Not sure he has analyzed Caramanica's approach, the way most would. He also mentions old faves Peru Ubu and Van Morrison and isn't as hard on that Seabrook book as I thought he might be.

Here are some more

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/tag/real-life-rock-top-10

I don't know if it's Caramanica's thing so much as a major newspaper thing.

Greil and his pet peeves

I'm on a personal boycott at the moment, but you can all vent your spleen directly now:

http://greilmarcus.net/2016/02/10/new-feature-ask-greil/

hmm, i am not sure what i'd ask greil
apparently his real life rock column is moving over to pitchfork!

Ask him if it's true his mother's really a dolphin. I guarantee he'll respond.

http://pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/9810-the-first-time/

you beat me by 2 seconds...

that "i hate the internet" book better be good because I am sold on it

also, this is great

The last scene in "45 Years" is exactly as he describes it. Incredible.

It's his best bit in some time, compensating for his poorly reasoned Hillary defense.

Not sure, but I think ILM's other J.D. might have an "Ask Greil" up about Spielberg's Lincoln film.

haha, yep, guilty as charged. i also liked greil's riff on the rolling stones ("they can't even imitate themselves.")

http://pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/9895-i-need-to-scream-what-it-means-to-be-a-fan/

Had not seen that Corvette ad with the caption "baby, that was much too fast. 1958-2016"

His take on Parquet Courts is entertaining

he's right about the track he singled out

yep

A common complaint about Marcus, probably all over this thread, is that his reactions to things sometimes have little connection to the things themselves. If you want to compare his famous description (in Mystery Train) of the Dick Cavett show with Little Richard and John Simon to the actual show, someone provided an online link to the whole episode in an "Ask Greil."

http://www.shoutfactorytv.com/the-dick-cavett-show/rock-icons-december-30-1970-little-richard/566a100b69702d083a210900

Marcus: "I'm much too afraid to watch it right now to see what I might have gotten wrong--or worse, made up."

https://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil/

His explanation is inexcusable, especially since he opened his freakin’ book with that anecdote. I guess no one back then thought a tape would ever come back to bite them in the ass.

Yeah, I watched that Cavett clip to compare it with Marcus' description in his book. Nowhere does Little Richard spew out the litany of song titles that Marcus quotes; it's hard to understand how Marcus could've gotten that out of what he saw in 1970. This brings to mind something I read at Geoffrey Pullum's blog Language Log about approximate quotation by journalists (Maureen Dowd gets caught changing and rearranging), here.

The Ask Greil column seems to be running on fumes.

09/07/16
Do you see any musician of the younger generation, about which in 40 years still will be written, similar as today about Bob Dylan, Elvis or The Beatles?
–
No way to know.

Posted Feb. 29, 2016; greeted with some ridicule the couple of times I quoted it during the election.

Anyone nominated by either the Democratic or Republican party has a chance to win. Each candidate would start with a floor of about 40%, which is to say that within the 20% the candidates have to play with, anything can happen. Trump, like any Republican, would be helped by the voter-suppression laws in place in many swing states run by Republicans. The Democratic nominee could self-combust, be deligitimized by endless and scurrilous attacks, or even, given some unpredictable health, personal, or legal surprise, be forced to leave the race. In a presidential election, Nate Silver will prepare careful and accurate guides to what should happen, what is most likely to happen, but not what will happen: anything can happen. Add to this the disbelief on both sides that Trump could actually win, which energizes his followers and confirms his claims to outsider status, and add to that the fact that in many circles, particularly among better educated and better-off people, and particularly on the coasts, there are plenty of people who are attracted to Trump, who are secretly thrilled by the current of nihilism he is riding and the specter of destruction he embodies, but are keeping their mouths shut.

The bit about the coasts very wrong. Otherwise, pretty close to dead-on.

i thought about that comment by greil a lot -- i wish none of it had turned out to be true, but most of it was.

agreed

yep.

Unrelated-

LA Review of Books interviewed Greil re Dylan's Nobel Prize

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bob-dylans-nobel-prize/#!

More Greil on Dylan, guest op-ed from October

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/opinion/bob-dylan-master-of-change.html?_r=0

Plus in Pitchfork

http://pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/9965-masters-of-reality-how-bob-dylan-randy-newman-and-john-oliver-make-us-face-ourselves/

Post-election stuff in both "Ask Greil" and the new "Real Life."

http://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil/ (Third letter from the top.)

http://pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/9975-a-historical-shudder-special-election-edition/

Too soon. Right now I’m waiting for him to die before taking office.

looks like jill stein voter vic perry is unimpressed

6. From an academic conference at Yale: We’re used to Donald Trump punctuating his pronouncements with a quick “OK?” as if to simultaneously block any disagreement and reassure himself that he’s right. There’s a match in the habit of self-consciously hip younger academics presenting papers at a conference, reflexively hitting “right” at the end of declarative sentences, but in a manner that makes you hear a comma, not a question mark: a way of certifying the assumption that everyone present shares a certain set of opinions and terms of discourse. Right—it’s not an aggressive pronouncement but a congratulation of both the speaker and the audience for the truth that they already agree and that no fundamental preconceptions will be challenged. In other words, they and Trump are speaking the same language.

pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/10024-how-protesting-babies-can-say-what-they-mean/

He's not wrong. Anyway, as far as I can tell, the problem is confined to anglophone—especially American—academia.

Interesting. Haven't been to enough such conferences to confirm it.

While he's at it, I'm not sure why he didn't aim his ire at people who insert "like" every other word

While he's at it, I'm not sure why he didn't aim his ire at people who insert "like" every other word

That battle was fought on the other side of this century.

I was thrilled that GM wrote about this "right" thing, used constantly by snake oil salesmen like DeRay (shameless shill).

The bit about the kid with the sign was great, too.

That battle was fought on the other side of this century.

And lost. I'd say a third to a half of the people I teach with have like-like-like syndrome. I shouldn't care, but I hate it.

Another interesting "Ask Greil" about Trump (top of the page at the moment):

"Would Elvis have voted for Trump?"

https://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil-2/

"Ask Greil" from yesterday:

"Lipstick Traces...destroyed, for me, the appeal of the individual performer telling you (or pretending to) about his or her own life. I don’t care about you, I found myself answering to so many songs: tell me something interesting about the world, or, really be in the world."

Could not agree more, whether it's Bono in 1987, or Axl Rose in 1989, or Eminem in 2000, or Beyoncé in 2016, or anybody out there today.

Glenn Frey and Don Henley

Yeah, I really wish Beyonce would tell us something interesting about what's going on in the world.

https://68.media.tumblr.com/5f4862f1180f27861a297abb789dab73/tumblr_o2875v3tnh1qho0beo1_500.gif

I more or less agree with him, but it's hard to gauge introspection vs curiosity about larger world; there's lots of slippage. His bete noire Joni Mitchell to my ears tells me something interesting about the world, or her world, which to an artist comes to the same thing.

Isn't that a (one) novelistic technique - to reveal a truth about the world through interiority? Seems like a false designation.

https://greilmarcus.net/2014/08/15/girl-groups-how-the-other-half-lived-090875/

Made me laugh: there's about three minutes of Elvis Costello talking about Marcus ("Professor Marcus") in Frederick Wiseman's New York Public Library documentary.

His responses to the Clinton/Broaddrick discussion have not been edifying...

Thank you for your reply to my post regarding the whole Bill Clinton-sexual-misconduct-allegations issue—it was a much more measured and respectful response than my rant probably deserved. (Although I did seem to rattle you into making a rare grammatical error—something to brag to the grandkids about). I can’t argue with your main point—Juanita Broaddrick joining Donald Trump’s pre-debate parade of Clinton accusers does make her guilty of having a double standard. That fact, though, is rendered largely unimportant by either possible answer to the simple, enormous question central to all this: is Broaddrick being truthful when she says that Bill Clinton raped her?
If the answer to that question is yes, then Broaddrick aligned herself with an asshole who spoke in the abstract about sexually assaulting women in order to turn the heat up on the man who brutally raped her and then skated on it for forty years; a hypocrisy most could understand.
If the answer is no, then Broaddrick is a sociopath who spent twenty years trying to ruin a man’s life in the most malicious way possible, and hypocrisy is the least of her crimes.
Here’s a question you can answer, even if it’s a ridiculous hypothetical one: if the unimaginable happened, if Bill Clinton admitted to the rape of Juanita Broaddrick, copped to the whole mattress-pinning, lip-biting scenario… would you still fault Broaddrick for letting herself be used by Donald Trump?
– Jackie

Yes.

The full discussion: https://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil-2/

Probably as close to a year-end ballot as you'll find (last response):

http://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil-2/

explains so much:

Favourite news source of the year (any medium)
The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC

Somewhat cryptic, but if, as Sister Sarah Joan says, attention and love are the same thing, six viewings at least equals "really like."

And then there’s Vertigo. I’ve seen it half a dozen times. When I think back on it, it doesn’t pull me in, doesn’t hover. But as it unfolds, it’s so terrible, so confusing--his anticipating of David Lynch’s Lost Highway.

(General question on Hitchcock two or three from the top: http://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil-2/.)

So he's not a Mark E Smith and the Fall fan.

Like the Dylan Louie Louie link here:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/01/11/greil-marcuss-real-life-rock-top-10-eminem-and-neil-young-explore-trumps-country-mavis-staples-soldiers-on/

One thing that has always run through Marcus's writing--getting more pronounced as of late, I'd say--is where he brushes aside someone for what he perceives as smugness or condescension or some such transgression. Sometimes it's the performer's fans he disapproves of. From a recent "Ask Greil":

The Replacements never really got to me. Or vice versa. Maybe there was something just too right, too expert behind all the sloppy posturing and onstage drunks, too Big Star about them, or the intolerance and smugness of their fans.

Huh? How are Replacements' fans intolerant and smug? I can at least understand his complaints about the band--without agreeing--but I don't know where his sense of the group's fan base comes from. The only Replacements fans I actually know are friends of mine, and they're all fine.

Hmm sounds like Greil has a problem with people talking about the Replacements the way people used to talk about the Clash

Maybe if Westerberg wrote more about Nicaragua

the casual brush off of a completely different band here, in a tone that suggests GM can barely bring himself to mention them, is what gets to me: "too big star about them"

Yeah, the Big Star connection in the actual fact of how each band sounds--as opposed to the "Alex Chilton" connection (which I always thought was more Westerberg writing about himself anyway) and hired-producer connection--is a little tenuous. I had a FB exchange with Scott Woods after posting, and he tells me he really did encounter such Replacements fans when he was working at a record store in the mid-'90s. I haven't, and I was making more of a general point anyway. Marcus on the Mamas & Papas a few weeks ago: "There was a subcurrent of smugness, an assumption of hipper and richer than thou I couldn’t not hear..." He just seems to do that a lot. (In fairness, he went on to praise "notes, moments, and numbers that were just too piercing not to love.")

Or maybe I just notice when he does it with bands I love. If he said the same thing about the Cure or the Arcade Fire, I probably wouldn't give it a second thought.

Huh? How are Replacements' fans intolerant and smug?

Move to Minnesota

I learned that dreadful truth last spring when I posted my list of Replacements tune and got more nasty tweets and comments than any post to date.

the replacements don't strike me as the kind of band GM would dig at all. in his rod stewart essay, he casually dismisses the albums rod made with the faces (a band i always thought of as having a lot in common with the replacements) as a bunch of "let's-go-get-drunk LPs," lacking in the depth of rod's early solo work. (at least i always took that as a dismissal, though it's not always easy to tell with greil.)

I imagine he's a massive Guided By Voices fan then.

I'm reading the Replacements bio, and the Faces figure prominently in the band's imagination when they're first getting together (Every Picture Tells a Story, too, but more so seeing a Faces show in Minnesota). I'd have to check back to his Stewart piece in The Illustrated History to see what he thought of them, but you're probably right.

Okay, you're referencing that exact piece, so I don't need to check.

all the west coast mats/husker du fans I knew in high school had an air of "ahh...this is the good, serious music, not that lightweight shit that's such a plague on the scene" about them. it was like ground-level rockism; they'd be lambasting olds who loved KMET too much outta one side of their mouths while insisting on the New Canon outta the other. REM was also on the "actual smart people love this band" list. talking heads too. it took New Order a couple of years to join the canon but they made it, congrats fellas

I suspect Greil is mainly saying "this is Robert Hilburn music" w/o invoking the spectre, anyway

JCLC and chris otm, speaking as someone who also had to live through insufferable Mats fanatics back in the day

You guys should read that Jim Walsh book.

Judging an artist by (some segment of) their fans never holds water for me.

greil picks his 10 worst rock critics:

https://greilmarcus.net/2018/03/21/the-10-worst-rock-critics-1982/

not hard to guess who tops his list, but apart from that one, 5, and 10 i haven't heard of any of these ppl

Not familiar with most of those names either, but I'm with him on John Leonard.

Greil prefers Bad Company to Free. The man is obviously a lunatic.

3/2/18
What do you think of Dead and Company?
– Adam Taslitz
I went to grade school with Bill Kreutzman, who I knew, and high school with Bob Weir, who I didn’t. We can leave it at that.

Note that the list was compiled in 1982. Before Albert Goldman wrote The Lives of John Lennon.

Where he redeemed himself completely.

you would think he could find something nice to say about workingman's dead/american beauty. they are so american songbook-y.

xpost LOL. Saying Goldman's the #1 all time worst rock critic thing must be because of his Elvis book. The Lennon book is like Goldman letting him know he was OTM.

The insanity of the Lennon book is something. And the loathing of everyone and everything.

greil says that goldman is "at work" on an elvis book, so his hate for the guy goes back even before that. i guess he must've really hated the lenny bruce book or something.

i gotta say, greil's attack on alexandria ocasio-cortez (whose name he didn't bother to spell correctly) in his latest ask-me response infuriated me. he comes across as even more of a centrist crank than usual, insisting that AOC ("and her like," not a great choice of words) won't accomplish anything except encouraging democrats to either "stay home or vote for republicans, to, you know, heighten the contradictions." sad to see the guy who wrote lipstick traces (and who still writes strong, disturbing stuff about the changes DJT has wrought in US politics) sound like this, but i guess that's what we get from someone who still refuses to hear a negative word about bill clinton.

i realize this is an ilm thread but this seems like the main thread for greil talk, so.

The 20th Century Women question right before that one is mine--I'm undercover over there.

A friend pointed out the most bizarre assertion in there: "Just remember that Bernie Sanders is no more a member of the Democratic Party than Donald Trump is." There are also things I agree with. I've got a full-time job defending Bill James these days, though--Marcus will have to fend for himself.

Sanders insists he’s not a Democrat, so that seems accurate enough on its face (without seeing the larger context).

I took his comment to mean philosophically, but yeah, "a member of" might have been intended more literally.

Obvious home for "Real Life," only took 35 years.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/greil-marcus-real-life-top-10-column-727342/

wild that the swearin' record is on there, way to go greil

The Hopper quote doesn't nearly live up to his claims, the NPR packhorse librarian quote does, but then I've heard that before I read this. Makes me wonder about all the songs and shows he doesn't quote.

His writing is “better” than Xgau’s; but it shares an abstract, passive, unengaged quality that feels like he’s not really interested in writing about this stuff (and so why I am reading what he has to say)?

I mean, a sentence like this — “But on this penultimate episode, the lack of focus was acute.”

I like that, suggests that lack of focus---intense diffusion?---so intense/striking that effectively it is the focal point, whatever the showrunner's conscious intention. Which goes with the rest of his
description, as he casts about, tracking the songs in different corners of diff scenes. Makes me want to watch it. Another thing he shares w xgau, one of the things they can do well, making a good-faith effort at
descriptive reportage, whatever the opinion/grade. Not that they always do it well, or at all.

I give 'em points for bravely putting a quotation in there that might undercut their descriptive claims of quality (xgau does a lot of that these days, spotlighting so-so lyrics, not mentioning sonic context so much).

Yeah, that happens a lot in a book I just read (Music: What Happened?, by Scott Miller). Quoting lyrics can be tricky; if it doesn’t convey how good they sound to you in the context of the song (and often it doesn’t), the reader just goes, “Huh? Guess I’d have to hear it...”

Ask Greil:

4/24/2019
As I’m sure you’ve heard, some people are arguing that Billie Eilish is the new queen of alternative pop, overthrowing Lana Del Rey. I was wondering what your thoughts on Billie Eilish are? What new thing (or things) is she bringing to the table?
– Reede

“Queen of Alternative Pop.” How would you like that on your tombstone?

Myself, personally, no. I guess it'd be okay to be the King of Alternative Pop--I'd have to give it some thought.

Ha

Great answer (to a question about Marcus dismissing influence):

I think there’s a fundamental difference between influence, which is of little or no interest to me and which I think is at best a diversion from more interesting questions and at worst a cover-up of what makes a person interesting, unique, unclassifiable, and inspiration. Bob Dylan was influenced by Woody Guthrie—an influence he soon enough sloughed off—but he was inspired by Robert Johnson. He wrote like Guthrie, and imitated his phrasing. He didn’t write like Johnson or sing like him, but Johnson showed him what it meant to make art. Even when, early or late in his career, he takes up an old folk song and tweaks it just slightly (“As I Went A-Ridin'” early, “Red River Shore” later) he is inspired by it, but not influenced by it. It’s a fact, not an ideology, like a chair. You are not influenced by a chair when you sit in it, but given what it might do to your momentary sense of comfort or discomfort, it might inspire you to give voice to a thought you would never otherwise have had. It used to be that when I felt my writing going stale, I’d re-read Hemingway’s short stories or favorite pieces by Lester Bangs. I wouldn’t come away writing like either, but I’d find myself inspired by the sense of clarity in Hemingway (“A clean, well-lighted place” has become a tiresome cliche, and people are influenced by the phrase as a moral imperative, but there is clean light between his sentences) or the daring and love of words in Lester. Fitzgerald wasn’t influenced by Hemingway or Zelda but he was inspired by them. That’s what I mean.

That makes total sense. When I re-read something I love, it makes me want to write more.

that was a wonderful answer

i've often had trouble explaining why i like hemingway (despite not caring about bullfighting or fishing or hunting or many of the things he wrote about), and "there is clean light between his sentences" is a fantastic way to put it

That makes total sense. When I re-read something I love, it makes me want to write more.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Saturday, May 25, 2019

Yes. Also: "I want to do better than you."

http://greilmarcus.net/2019/08/02/announcement-real-life-rock-top-10-moves-to-l-a/

Your move, Christgau. We're definitely in Nosferatu territory now, and probably have been for quite a while. I don't begrudge him this at all, though. If you're still engaged, and you still have things you want to say, even if you're not always in sync with the way the rest of the world wants you to say them, keep going.

Found this amusing, a photo Marcus mentions in some new "Ask Greil" answers: a Life photo of Dean Martin in the '50s, with Marcus's grandmother to his left.

http://i.pinimg.com/564x/b9/86/7a/b9867afd4321c0d8dec95a1cf1de80ed.jpg

From Glenn Kenny's Goodfellas book, in connection to a detail from The Godfather Marcus gets slightly wrong in Mystery Train: "forgiven, since he was writing without benefit of home video, and because he can often be some kind of genius even when he's wrong."

Lol

Thought it was a pretty good one-line summary of Marcus, especially with regards to the Little Richard/Dick Cavett anecdote he gets all wrong.

That’s exactly what I was thinking of as well

In a bio note somewhere, he mentioned some of his ancestors RIP near the grave of Hank Williams, in Montgomery's Oakwood Cemetery. It's in the Capitol Heights area, over the Alabama River, woodsy and picturesque mostly, although some of it's gotten decrepit as Covid and other medical factors took a toll on the groundskeepers, also City personnel who might be called in from elsewhere. Said the City, when they recently got a groundswell of bad publicity (the Hank-Greil family etc. section, the most popular part, didn't get decrepit, but City says this not preferential). Volunteers and more City resources now brought in.
The patriarch was Captain Jacob Greil, a grocer originally from Bohemia, who served in Confed Army and then became leading citizen of Montgomery; he may be namesake of Greil Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, now closed (think it was founded elsewhere, before being moved to Montgy. area). His wife and 6 other relatives are also buried there.

findagrave.com notes Eternal Rest Cemetery was once an independent burial place, but is now a Jewish sub-section of Oakwood Cemetery. Dunno if this is the area where they're buried---I've been to Hank's grave, but not since I read Marcus's mention, so I haven't looked for the Greils. Didn't look around much when I was over there before. If I had, and noticed the uncommon name, I would have remembered, and thought of him.

Marcus's RS list:

http://greilmarcus.net/2020/09/27/greils-top-40-lps-circa-september-2020/

Bill Clinton Jam Session -- The Pres Blows

lol, never change dude

Beach Boys, Shut Down Vol. 2

this is definitely a very greil thing to pick; he's been consistent in his disdain for pet sounds, "the cult of brian wilson," etc., for as long as i can recall. (looking it up, i'm just surprised it doesn't include "be true to your school," which he's long insisted is their greatest moment.)

It feels like a relatively conventional list next to the one he contributed to Paul Gambaccini's second Top 200 book in 1987:

1. X-Ray Spex – Germfree Adolescents
2. Wire – Chairs Missing
3. Buzzcocks – Twelve Reasons (Bootleg: Spiral Scratch sessions)
4. Slits – Once Upon a Time in a Living Room1
5. Costello, Elvis – This Year’s Model (US version)
6. Mekons – Story 1977-82
7. Public Image Ltd – Paris au Printemps (band listed as Image Publique S.A.)
8. Gang of Four – Entertainment!
9. Adverts – Crossing the Red Sea with the…
10. Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth

Three of them remain; the Raincoats took the place of X-Ray Spex.

He should have made room for both, but otherwise reet, even w/o pre-Pet Boys.

I remember Marcus saying somewhere that his 1987 list was an explicit turning away from American music in the time of Reagan.

Very much a Lipstick Traces list, yeah. I found it thrilling at the time--all that stuff was almost a decade old, but many of the people who were voting alongside him still hadn't caught up.

it sometimes feels as if different greils are answering each question on his site, but never moreso than this week, when he hands down this verdict in one answer:

Rubber Soul, the American version, is their best album, but it’s not fair to compare other Beatle albums to it—it would be anyone’s best album.

and, the same day, peevishly responds to another questioner's assertion that zuma is neil young's best album with this:

Well, sure. It’s never done it for me, and with someone who’s been making records with his own name on them since, what, 1968, 1969, unless he’s been buying them himself, best is meaningless. It’s your his best album. I’d take the Dead Man soundtrack any day. And go out with Way Down in the Rust Bucket. But what about “I’m the Ocean”? The second and third solos in “Cowgirl in the Sand”? The first five tracks of Americana? Who says you have to choose and rank?

...uh, you did?

I find Marcus's Neil Young opinions very, uh, shaky. I know I've got all sorts of quirks of my own, but it's hard for me to get my head around the idea of a Neil Young fan having such little regard for Zuma. Dead Man's good, I guess, but it I remember it as basically fuzzy noodling around that worked in the context of the film but that I'm not sure I'd listen to at home.

(Not really your point, which I agree with.)

Also, it's hilarious that an artist as unorthodox as Neil Young gets Marcus unduly prissy about what are his best. At this point if someone defended American Stars 'n' Bars or Life as his best, what difference does it make?

Neil's score for Dead Man is glorious, but it's much less successful as an album, or rather the album he put out (with the anachronistic car noises thrown in and the bits of dialogue that also need the film as context just as much as the music).

At this point if someone defended American Stars 'n' Bars or Life as his best, what difference does it make?

stars 'n' bars is maybe my least favorite album of his that i could see someone defending as his very best. i always used to think of it as the one with Will to Love and Like a Hurricane + a hodgepodge, but over the years i've gained an appreciation for several of the other tracks (the Homegrown tracks especially).

re: greil's take on zuma, i think it's a pretty minor diss. to me it reads just as much like the words of someone who has loved the shit out of Zuma in multiple times in his life, but also some of the others, multiple times, who thinks that it is possible that Zuma will once again reign supreme. in the end, he's right that it just doesn't matter - at this point neil young has dozens of masterpiece songs, at least a handful of masterpiece albums, and the other stuff is also merely really good, usually. ranking him is an exercise of where you are in your own neil young listening career

To be fair, ranking is inherently unavoidable - there's going to be stuff better or worse than others - but it's easy to see why Greil and others (he's from alone) have grown sick over how much criticism has focused on it. Even before the ridiculous glut of magazines and newspaper articles ranking everything under the sun, it devolved into a nit-picking exercise of elevating something by knocking down something else.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but the critic Bill Wyman did a handful of ranking features for NYMag/Vulture because they proved to be so popular, but he knew how ridiculous they were and pointed that out in the opening paragraph of at least one of them - he tried to make them worthwhile by weaving in the stories he WANTED to write about, like how the HOF operates, how it reflected faults within the industry and critical establishment, etc.

I wonder if Marcus has trouble with people misreading the tone of his writing. Like he thinks he's saying, Let's all chill with our preferred Neil records, but it comes across as, Prof. Marcus has laid down the law.

personally, i love lists and rankings, and i enjoy seeing other people's too. rankings only become annoying when people take them way the fuck too seriously (you are, like a turricane)

I'm usually the guy who jumps in and defends Marcus...I think the disconnect J.D. points out it is valid.

"To me it reads just as much like the words of someone who has loved the shit out of Zuma in multiple times in his life..." I don't read it that way: "It’s never done it for me" seems to make it clear he never thought much of Zuma. Which is fine--just hard for me to personally get my head around, like if you loved Altman but Nashville never did it for you.

yeah, that makes sense! i haven't read much of his writing, so i'm probably not recognizing something that's noticeably out of character for him

and on that, if he doesn't appreciate Zuma, get the heck out of here.

the worst thing i can say about Zuma is that the lyrics of Stupid Girl are stupid. it's too bad, because i love the guitars on that song

just hard for me to personally get my head around, like if you loved Altman but Nashville never did it for you

Nashville and MASH have both taken a critical beating in recent years, but the reasons aren't new - Paul Schrader originally called out the former for being shallow and Dave Kehr criticized the latter (not to mention most of Altman's work) for being mean and misogynist from the very start. Add Kent Jones, Jim Hoberman, Michael Atkinson, and to a lesser extent Jonathan Rosenbaum who have all voiced similar criticisms after both were revived or reissued after Altman's death.

personally, i love lists and rankings, and i enjoy seeing other people's too. rankings only become annoying when people take them way the fuck too seriously

Absolutely. There's a lot that's wrong with the concept, but for someone just picking up music or film history, it's an easy way to pick up stuff you should see, as long as you don't obsess over whether #100 is really that much worse than #60, etc. I remember that happening to me when I came across an ancient issue of Entertainment Weekly at the doctor's office. There was a page in there for a contest that had the top 100 CD's of all time, and I was like "I don't know like 90 of these titles." So the receptionist (who I knew pretty well, I was going to that the office as long as I can remember) was kind of enough to Xerox me that page and I spent the summer going through that list every time I stopped by the library.

Even now, it's great to pick things up that way - when Sight & Sound publishes it's last poll, I zipped through the top 100, and everything looked familiar except "The Mother and the Whore." Sure enough it wound up being a great discovery, not to mention the other stuff made by the same filmmaker (who sadly made very few films, all of which haven't been commercially available in years because his son is obstinate to a fault - I caught "The Mother and the Whore" at a 35mm screening at BAM, not realizing how scarce those screenings could be).

and Dave Kehr criticized the latter (not to mention most of Altman's work)

Which doesn't surprise me at all. Nashville is pretty much everything you're going to love or hate about Altman; someone who identifies as an Altman fan but doesn't like Nashville, that's the kind of thing I would find confusing. So I don't know about Hoberman and the rest, but are they also simultaneously praising other Altman films? Whatever's in Nashville is also all over The Long Goodbye and California Split.

I would say you're focusing too much on Altman's technical approach to his films. In a lot of ways Nashville takes a lot of his technical innovations to the furthest point, and a lot of those skeptics, Schrader included, always recognized that. But it's also a much more ambitious work that thinks it has a lot more to say, and what it comes up with is usually the problem. Read Hoberman's Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, it comes up in the very first chapter where he covers the historical reaction to that film.

No, what I most love about Nashville are the characters and the performances.

In that case, here's what Kent Jones says about that:

"The entire film is dotted with brilliant inventions - Gwen Welles' striptease, Lily Tomlin's sad marriage to Allen Garfield (Goorwitz) and beautiful relationship with her kids, Ronee Blakeley's neurotic superstar (to my ears, she sings the one credible song in the movie outside of the gospel number), Michael Murphy's political operative - and blanketed with terrible melodramatic cliches (Keenan Wynn and Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine as the super-stud singer with his stable of girlfriends, the absolutely improbable ending) and really terrible caricatures, the worst of which, hands-down, is Geraldine Chaplin's reporter, although Jeff Goldblum's magician isn't far from the bottom."

But again, beyond that, it's a more ambitious film, and some people don't believe it's as astute or insightful as it would like to be. I personally like it, but I can't say they're entirely wrong either.

I looked up Rosenbaum's 1,000 Essential Films, and he had two Altman films from the '70s (McCabe and The Long Goodbye), none from the '80s, one from the '90s (a documentary I didn't know). So he seems, at best, an occasional fan. So him having issues with Nashville would make perfect sense.

Again, I'm not saying there's anything wrong or unusual in not thinking much of Nashville (or Zuma); just that there's a disconnect, in my opinion, between saying you're a big fan of the artist but not those two particular works. There was something I wrote ages ago where I addressed the same disconnect with something a friend wrote, and characterized it as such (paraphrase from memory): "I think Orson Welles is brilliant--not so much Citizen Kane, and I don't think much of The Magnificent Ambersons, but the wine commercials are terrific."

I kind of hate that Kent Jones quote. I'll give him Shelly Duvall, but for me Keenan Wynn, Carradine, and the ending--which couldn't be more perfect--are as integral to the film as anything else.

I get what you were saying now, but tbh it makes the idea of fandom all the more dubious, like blindly rooting for a sports team.

I feel like a fight.

Not at all--I tend to be hyper-critical when it comes to directors who've made some of my favourite films. I've been all over Scorsese and the two Andersons in numerous threads. But most, if not all, great artists have works that definitively sum them up, for better or worse. My guess is--and you can set me straight if you know otherwise--is that the critics you mention probably have issues with Altman in general, and that Nashville crystallizes those issues. Not that they're major Altman fans who don't care for Nashville.

I actually think the smartest appreciation of Nashville I've ever read after Kael's was Rick Perlstein in Nixonland (or it might have been The Invisible Bridge).

Anyway, for what it's worth, I'm not sure how true something you started with applies to Nashville, not if the TSPDT list has any value as a barometer: "Nashville and MASH have both taken a critical beating in recent years."

M*A*S*H, yes: its ranking has slipped quite a bit the past decade. Starting in 2010: 576 - 573 - 580 - 584 - 840 - 827 - 915 - 827 - 951 - 894 - 891 - 887 - 911.

Nashville has fallen a bit, but really not that much, especially for a film so tied to its moment. Starting in 2006, the year the list was launched: 58 - 61 - 68 - 67 - 74 - 76 - 76 - 83 - 81 - 82 - 80 - 84 - 87 - 85 - 87 - 88. So while I don't doubt that some writers, like the ones you cite, have gone after it, there seems to be solid core of support there that keeps it in the Top 100.

Relatively, they’ve both fallen almost identically then, especially if you take out the last MASH rank (911)

58 to 88 is ten times less than
576 to 887

Maybe his critical standing has fallen 50% across the board? I dunno

I was thinking about that--how would you measure that? I suppose you could say that 58 to 88 means that Nashville has experienced a 52% decline (30/58). But I don't know how useful that is: if Citizen Kane had dropped from #1 to #2 over the same time frame, like in the Sight & Sound poll--it hasn't, but for the sake of argument, say it had--that would be a 100% decline using the same logic.

More sensibly, to me, seeing as it's a Top 1000 list, is to say Nashville's gone from 58/1000 to 88/1000, which is a decline of 30/1000, or 3%; M*A*S*H, on the other hand, has fallen 335 spots, or 33.5%.

That 58 to 88 / 576 to 887 parallel, though, is pretty amazing--almost exactly a factor of 10 for both, if you round off.

I think the most likely Altman career narrative that a Nashville hater might spin is that it was the start of the era of his decadence and growth of self-importance. Robin Wood, who was highly ambivalent about him, echoes Jones in that he saw Nashville as a combination of his best and the worst tendencies (the latter of which he sees as a combination of self-satisfied jokiness and easy cynicism).
Certainly, in the book I read about Altman, the period immediately following Nashville was characterized as one where independent-minded crew and collaborators were abandoned for those who would be less challenging to Altman's ideas and working processes.

There's a long Greil Marcus answer in "Ask Greil" concerning something Carl Wilson wrote about Norman Mailer (connected to a couple of recent ILX threads). Just loved it.

https://greilmarcus.net/current_2021/

(Second from the top.)

Couldn't be more OTM.

From my interpretation of the review, Wilson did not ask for the 'cancelation' -- a word I would never use on my own but Greil did -- of Mailer.

And Wilson does write in the last paragraph: "I guess at least enough evidence to say that hip-hop’s own Norman Mailer still has some of his old magic after all. And enough other jackglobglogabassery to make me wish he’d hurry the hell up and just lose it for good."

What do you guys find OTM about Marcus' response, which I found quite good as rhetoric?

For reasons I wouldn't post about here, I don't even want to get into that.

More generally, though, one of the best things about being young is tearing down people like Marcus and Mailer. One of the best things about being old is defending them.

yeah, i thought greil wrote an excellent response to a really dishonest, irritating argument. (wilson's pious reference to the opinion of joan didion, as if she was someone we all somehow agreed on, was so unbearable it almost made me wish i didn't like her writing.)

I think you guys are missing this point: Wilson wrote as anguished and ambivalent a review of Kanye as Marcus did of Norman Mailer. So long as he's got a gig, Wilson will keep writing 2000-word pieces about Kanye: about the songs, what goes on in them, the pathologies raging in them.

Marcus doesn't engage the Kanye part at all.

"Anguished"? Really? A record review?...Marcus is responding to a question about Mailer, not Kanye West.

From my reading of the piece Wilson tries to sort out -- as Marcus does in his own terrific reading of Mailer -- what makes the curdling of Kanye's music so irritating.

It's disappointing Marcus uses "cancel" in that cynical rightist way.

I mean, I just reviewed a Lindsey Buckingham album where he's LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU about accusations hurled at him, and his blissfully, obstinately hermetic approach has been good and worrisome about his music. I didn't once suggest 'canceling' him.

This is the truest part of Marcus' response: "I’m not going near another Woody Allen movie, haven’t for years, but I don’t think it’s my or anyone’s business, or intellectually interesting, to tell other people to do the same." And Wilson would agree. Marcus would know that because they've known each other many years.

The final line of Marcus's thing is excellent. Couldn't care less about the word "cancel." Translated into a Dylan lyric: "Cursing the dead that can't answer him back."

carl wilson recently complained on twitter about cornelius being cut from his olympics gig (without e.g. thinking about any compensation his victim could have received) so seeing him being cast as some kind grand canceller is funny

It's a good line. As Randy Newman said, good lines don't have to be true. When did Wilson say he wanted Mailer canceled?

I'll take Marcus' challenge seriously, clem and birdistheword. Is there a trend in criticism you want redressed? If so, what? If so, what examples?

Marcus doesn't engage the Kanye part at all.

Late to this, but I thought it was pretty clear he was only engaging the excerpt sent to him, which makes no mention of West, and that seemed reasonable given the way the question was framed - in response to just that, Marcus's answer seemed completely OTM.

This seems like a total misreading on the part of Marcus. I don't think there's anything in Wilson's article saying "the present is always more advanced". Wilson clearly says that the book critic in the 70s and the music critic in the 20s have the same dilemma: is this art going to be worthwhile enough to justify overcoming the distaste for the problematic artist? Wilson is saying the book critic, at that time in the 70s , could have had that negative prejudice against Mailer. He's not saying, "If I were a book critic then, I would have had the guts not to read Norman Mailer".
Marcus does this a lot on his "ask me a question" page: jumps to an unsupported conclusion and gives a nasty response. It's why I'd never submit a question there.

in response to just that, Marcus's answer seemed completely OTM.

― birdistheword

But what is otm about it?

Marcus does this a lot on his "ask me a question" page: jumps to an unsupported conclusion and gives a nasty response. It's why I'd never submit a question there.

You may feel he's being rude or unfair to Wilson, but he is rarely less than polite to questioners. I've followed the "Ask Greil" section pretty closely since it started four or five years ago, and you could probably count on two hands instances where his response was curt, impatient, or worse. (Which was a surprise based on interviews I've seen and the once I did myself 35 years ago.) People have written in with questions where I was positive he was going be all over them--"What's your favourite Spin Doctors song, Greil" (I made that up)--and he took a pass.

If you want to see a really capricious and sometimes volatile version of "Ask Greil," take a look at its blueprint, the "Hey Bill" section of baseball writer Bill James's site. You really needn't worry about submitting questions, though.

in retrospect the thing mailer could most be faulted for -- didion too -- is their participation in "new journalism" which (per wikipedia) emphasizes "truth" over "facts" ("clarification needed" -- you can say *that* again) and was the first step down the long rocky road to today.

If we could just collectively admit as grown adults that sometimes problematic people make great art, the discourse would 1000x more sufferable, but then Wilson et al wouldn't be able to hit those wordcounts.

I feel like Wilson just kind of wandered into Marcus's crosshairs by stating clearly and concisely an imperative of polite discourse in today's world, which is that the duty of any critic (whether of art, literature, music, etc) is to first assess how well the subject of the critic comports with contemporary mores of thought and behavior and to get the necessary caveats/trigger-warnings/moral judgments etc out of the way first before turning towards the "art", which it can never be assumed are separable from their recalcitrant political views.

But what is otm about it?

If we could just collectively admit as grown adults that sometimes problematic people make great art, the discourse would 1000x more sufferable, but then Wilson et al wouldn't be able to hit those wordcounts.

I feel like Wilson just kind of wandered into Marcus's crosshairs by stating clearly and concisely an imperative of polite discourse in today's world, which is that the "duty" [my quotation marks] of any critic (whether of art, literature, music, etc) is to first assess how well the subject of the critic comports with contemporary mores of thought and behavior and to get the necessary caveats/trigger-warnings/moral judgments etc out of the way first before turning towards the "art", which it can never be assumed are separable from their recalcitrant political views.

Another topic Marcus has talked about is art as fiction, and how so much of popular art today is interpreted and even marketed like it was autobiographical - it can be those things, but I get the feeling more and more people in the audience confuse personal with autobiographical. I bring this up because it feels related to what Marcus criticizes in his response to that excerpt, and what o. nate expresses above. Judgment of an individual isn't synonymous with art theory and criticism, and it's asinine to propose a scenario where a book critic in the '70s doesn't want to review a publication by an author of literary merit because of their personal failings. Others here have made the case that Wilson is only laying out the guidelines that defines today's discourse rather than arguing for it himself - I don't think that negates Marcus's response, only that it shouldn't be directed at Wilson personally.

And while critiquing an artist's work and scrutinized/analyzing their personal failings shouldn't be confused as the same thing, that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't write about both, and Marcus gets to that as well:

There’s a passage on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy when Mailer at once says that when he heard about it he was with “a witch" which hit me as criminally sexist and self-absolving then, a real window into a sick soul—and that he would have cut off his arm to save Kennedy’s life, and made me believe it. To dive into why both those things could be true is criticism.

And Wilson does that.

I get the feeling that Marcus, as a writer himself, is very hesitant to discuss the personal issues of the people he writes about. It's notable that the Sly Stone chapter of Mystery Train focusses on the Stagger Lee archetype but never mentions drug abuse/addiction.

i can't speak for marcus but i found it odd that wilson proposed a thought experiment in which he was a book critic in the mid-1970s asked to write about norman mailer and automatically assumed that he, wilson, would have had the Correct Stance, which includes awareness that mailer "wrote massively screwed-up things about race and feminism." maybe he would have; on the other hand, it's entirely likely that any white guy alive and writing for a major magazine in the mid-1970s would have had his own blindspots on those subjects.

marcus has said many times that he's not interested in musicians' personal lives, doesn't care if -- for example -- van morrison is a jerk, but i suspect he cares more than he lets on: his review of albert goldman's elvis book is probably the single angriest thing he's ever written.

Marcus's response here it total garbage, frankly!

*is, not it. I typed three annoyed paragraphs and then thought better of it. The only allegation of problematic behaviour between either Wilson or Marcus in this one-way-dialogue is Marcus's non-subtle intimations that Wilson is anti-Semitic in his dislike of Mailer

Alfred OTM.

i did not care for that passage of the kanye piece for the reasons j.d. stated but i also though marcus' response zoomed way past anything that was advocated in the essay into a zone of his own annoyed speculation, where he could not possibly be otm to anyone. what do i win

The Complete Greil Marcus library!

reading mystery train several times in a row during my college years is enough for me thanks

His Doors book is quite good - he is less personally invested than in most of his writing, and the attitude is lighter than usual, more like "let's study this unusual phenomenon".

i can't speak for marcus but i found it odd that wilson proposed a thought experiment in which he was a book critic in the mid-1970s asked to write about norman mailer and automatically assumed that he, wilson, would have had the Correct Stance, which includes awareness that mailer "wrote massively screwed-up things about race and feminism." maybe he would have; on the other hand, it's entirely likely that any white guy alive and writing for a major magazine in the mid-1970s would have had his own blindspots on those subjects.

Absolutely. It would be historical arrogance, but given what others here have posted, it's probably just sloppiness since it's doubtful Wilson would truly presume this would be his perspective in another time.

And Wilson does that.

I don't think he does that very well, and he doesn't in the passage that was presented in the original question.

we keep circling back to this (and I'm done after this post), but the act of writing this expansively about that album -- more than most of us get at other gigs -- undercuts any claims about his wanting to 'cancel' Kanye or not taking his duty as critic seriously.

in an earlier time there were many fewer publications where one could assume the readership was entirely of the left, and where ridiculous tics -- like the cataloging of an artist's moral failings as throat-clearing exercise to drive home the writer's own bona fides -- could develop.

we keep circling back to this (and I'm done after this post), but the act of writing this expansively about that album -- more than most of us get at other gigs -- undercuts any claims about his wanting to 'cancel' Kanye or not taking his duty as critic seriously

I think we keep circling back to this because as already explained, Marcus was responding only to that one excerpt sent to him, which doesn't include anything written about West or his new album - it's distorting his response to say he's suggesting Wilson is calling for West's cancellation. As for Wilson taking his duty as a critic seriously, I don't think there was ever any question about that - it was how well he was performing those duties.

considering how much televised energy norman mailer put into getting himself called sexist and tiresome by contemporaries i'm unsure he's the right poster boy for the phenomenon of ideological rearprojection marcus describes

haha yeah my opinion should also have a footnote that says "i wasn't born until a few months before the film adaptation of tough guys don't dance came out"

gore vidal implied he was an intellectual charlie manson iirc?

(i am one of mailer's three remaining superfans, but)

When did Wilson say he wanted Mailer canceled?

Again, I don't much care about whether the word "cancel" is used or not. But seeing as we're splitting hairs, I reread Marcus's final line.

Asking if it’s cool to cancel a man who is not around to speak for himself--as he surely would--is something else.

Marcus doesn't actually say that Wilson says Mailer should be cancelled; he says Wilson asks if he ought to be. Surely that's accurate.

And maybe I find that even more irritating than if he'd flat-out said Mailer is a horrible person and I can't read him anymore. I read Marcus's response and I feel something, genuine anger maybe. All I get out of Wilson is all this carefully calibrated hedging--quite the opposite of anguish. "The constant calculations," as a friend put it.

carl and the (lack of) passion(s)

So Cancelled

Cher says that to one of her classmates in Clueless, no?

Already can’t remember whose blog was called some play on Classes Are Canceled.

(wilson's pious reference to the opinion of joan didion, as if she was someone we all somehow agreed on, was so unbearable it almost made me wish i didn't like her writing.)

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

Great from J.D. !

Ha, yes.

and how so much of popular art today is interpreted and even marketed like it was autobiographical

Total tangent here, but surely it's always been marketed that way? The teen idol is just the kind of nice young man that his song lyrics make him out to be, the Hollywood actress is as glamorous as her film roles, etc. Because marketing departments have always known ppl crave authenticity.

The change is that critical interpretation used to call bullshit on that more regularly imo.

I think the access we have to artists and their lives through instagram, tik tok, twitter, gossip sites, etc etc etc makes people even more wedded to the autobiographical concept then they were before (but yes it always existed)

Otm

I thought Michelle Goldberg's recent NYTimes column was astute on the "cancel culture" backlash from certain quarters:

"Many people I know over 40 - maybe 35 - resent new social mores that demand outsized sensitivity to causing harm. It has been jarring to go from an intellectual culture that prizes transgression to one that polices it. The shame of turning into the sort of old person repelled by the sensibilities of the young is a cause of real psychic pain."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/opinion/generation-cancel-culture.html

I think there's a bit of that at play here. Pre-internet, the national media was like a massive stone fortress with imposing metal gates controlled by stuffy bien pensant moderates. In those days it was fun for peasants on the outside to laugh at the overcautious reactions of the gatekeepers to anything controversial or edgy. Then the fortress was razed to the ground by bloodthirsty barbarians and the peasants had to run for their lives. Laughing at the gatekeepers isn't so funny any more. The traumatized peasants have become more vigilant at policing the boundaries of polite discourse than the old corporate busybodies ever were.

Anyone down on Marcus will like the second question here:

https://greilmarcus.net/current_2021/

Agree with this, though: "And appeals to experience ('witnessing atrocities firsthand') are worthless. It’s not where an artist has been, it’s what he or she can bring back."

Lord, he was born a ramblin' man.

Marcus's new Substack has been up and running for a couple of weeks now. (Ex-ILX'or Scott Woods edits the site--he wouldn't let me put up a Facebook post, but he'll never see this.) I took out a yearly subscription, even though you probably have a few months to read it for free.

The best thing is--a requirement of being on Substack, I think--there's new content. greilmarcus.net was great, but, except for "Ask Greil," it was close to 100% archival. Just in the first two weeks, he's had a piece on Peter Jackson's Beatles film, and today a review of Dylan's new book. ("The Beatles and Dylan" some of you are exclaiming in unison. "The excitement is palpable.") And in one of the intros he wrote for the new site, he identifies the two greatest sentences he thinks he ever wrote. I think they're from Mystery Train.

https://greilmarcus.substack.com/

Thanks for the news, esp. about Scott. Will read the review after finishing the book, which I mentioned on Is Bob Dylan overrated? I'm still enjoying most of it, although the "Witcheh Woman" comments are as dumb as the song and don't mention its use in the Seinfeld ep.

Long interview up on Letter in the Ether:

https://greilmarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-world-in-a-song

From his substack: Ask Greil

I wasn’t exactly sure in what way Swift’s Midnights was the musical equivalent of Dylan’s “autopen” scam. Could you please expand on that? —ANDREW MACDONALD

It sounds to me as if it were made by a machine, and I don’t mean Taylor Swift herself is a machine.

I think he meant the recent Billboard chart where Swift had the entire Top 10 on Billboard. Stuff like that always makes me wonder if it actually means anything.

Hey, I said (in the Midnights thread): this kind of sounds like if you asked an AI to make a Taylor Swift pop album. Move over, Marcus!!

Greil Marcus's daughter, Emily, passed away yesterday (1/31) more than two years after her diagnosis of appendiceal cancer. Per request, Greil has posted her obituary, and Robert Christgau posted a tribute to her. Her playlist for her funeral has also been posted.

If you want a free month of Marcus's Substack, let me know via ILX mail--I've got two to give away. It gives you access to a few things that are behind the paywall.

Also, his Real Life column this month leads off with a 100% vintage-Marcus entry on Biden's SOTU. If you're a fan, you'll probably love it, if you're not, you'll almost definitely cringe.