Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

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.