Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

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.