Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

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

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.