Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

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.