Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

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?