Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

"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.

the replacements don't strike me as the kind of band GM would dig at all. in his rod stewart essay, he casually dismisses the albums rod made with the faces (a band i always thought of as having a lot in common with the replacements) as a bunch of "let's-go-get-drunk LPs," lacking in the depth of rod's early solo work. (at least i always took that as a dismissal, though it's not always easy to tell with greil.)

I imagine he's a massive Guided By Voices fan then.

I'm reading the Replacements bio, and the Faces figure prominently in the band's imagination when they're first getting together (Every Picture Tells a Story, too, but more so seeing a Faces show in Minnesota). I'd have to check back to his Stewart piece in The Illustrated History to see what he thought of them, but you're probably right.

Okay, you're referencing that exact piece, so I don't need to check.

all the west coast mats/husker du fans I knew in high school had an air of "ahh...this is the good, serious music, not that lightweight shit that's such a plague on the scene" about them. it was like ground-level rockism; they'd be lambasting olds who loved KMET too much outta one side of their mouths while insisting on the New Canon outta the other. REM was also on the "actual smart people love this band" list. talking heads too. it took New Order a couple of years to join the canon but they made it, congrats fellas

I suspect Greil is mainly saying "this is Robert Hilburn music" w/o invoking the spectre, anyway

JCLC and chris otm, speaking as someone who also had to live through insufferable Mats fanatics back in the day

You guys should read that Jim Walsh book.

Judging an artist by (some segment of) their fans never holds water for me.

greil picks his 10 worst rock critics:

https://greilmarcus.net/2018/03/21/the-10-worst-rock-critics-1982/

not hard to guess who tops his list, but apart from that one, 5, and 10 i haven't heard of any of these ppl

Not familiar with most of those names either, but I'm with him on John Leonard.

Greil prefers Bad Company to Free. The man is obviously a lunatic.

3/2/18
What do you think of Dead and Company?
– Adam Taslitz
I went to grade school with Bill Kreutzman, who I knew, and high school with Bob Weir, who I didn’t. We can leave it at that.

Note that the list was compiled in 1982. Before Albert Goldman wrote The Lives of John Lennon.

Where he redeemed himself completely.

you would think he could find something nice to say about workingman's dead/american beauty. they are so american songbook-y.

xpost LOL. Saying Goldman's the #1 all time worst rock critic thing must be because of his Elvis book. The Lennon book is like Goldman letting him know he was OTM.

The insanity of the Lennon book is something. And the loathing of everyone and everything.

greil says that goldman is "at work" on an elvis book, so his hate for the guy goes back even before that. i guess he must've really hated the lenny bruce book or something.

i gotta say, greil's attack on alexandria ocasio-cortez (whose name he didn't bother to spell correctly) in his latest ask-me response infuriated me. he comes across as even more of a centrist crank than usual, insisting that AOC ("and her like," not a great choice of words) won't accomplish anything except encouraging democrats to either "stay home or vote for republicans, to, you know, heighten the contradictions." sad to see the guy who wrote lipstick traces (and who still writes strong, disturbing stuff about the changes DJT has wrought in US politics) sound like this, but i guess that's what we get from someone who still refuses to hear a negative word about bill clinton.

i realize this is an ilm thread but this seems like the main thread for greil talk, so.

The 20th Century Women question right before that one is mine--I'm undercover over there.

A friend pointed out the most bizarre assertion in there: "Just remember that Bernie Sanders is no more a member of the Democratic Party than Donald Trump is." There are also things I agree with. I've got a full-time job defending Bill James these days, though--Marcus will have to fend for himself.

Sanders insists he’s not a Democrat, so that seems accurate enough on its face (without seeing the larger context).

I took his comment to mean philosophically, but yeah, "a member of" might have been intended more literally.

Obvious home for "Real Life," only took 35 years.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/greil-marcus-real-life-top-10-column-727342/

wild that the swearin' record is on there, way to go greil

The Hopper quote doesn't nearly live up to his claims, the NPR packhorse librarian quote does, but then I've heard that before I read this. Makes me wonder about all the songs and shows he doesn't quote.

His writing is “better” than Xgau’s; but it shares an abstract, passive, unengaged quality that feels like he’s not really interested in writing about this stuff (and so why I am reading what he has to say)?

I mean, a sentence like this — “But on this penultimate episode, the lack of focus was acute.”

I like that, suggests that lack of focus---intense diffusion?---so intense/striking that effectively it is the focal point, whatever the showrunner's conscious intention. Which goes with the rest of his
description, as he casts about, tracking the songs in different corners of diff scenes. Makes me want to watch it. Another thing he shares w xgau, one of the things they can do well, making a good-faith effort at
descriptive reportage, whatever the opinion/grade. Not that they always do it well, or at all.

I give 'em points for bravely putting a quotation in there that might undercut their descriptive claims of quality (xgau does a lot of that these days, spotlighting so-so lyrics, not mentioning sonic context so much).

Yeah, that happens a lot in a book I just read (Music: What Happened?, by Scott Miller). Quoting lyrics can be tricky; if it doesn’t convey how good they sound to you in the context of the song (and often it doesn’t), the reader just goes, “Huh? Guess I’d have to hear it...”

Ask Greil:

4/24/2019
As I’m sure you’ve heard, some people are arguing that Billie Eilish is the new queen of alternative pop, overthrowing Lana Del Rey. I was wondering what your thoughts on Billie Eilish are? What new thing (or things) is she bringing to the table?
– Reede

“Queen of Alternative Pop.” How would you like that on your tombstone?

Myself, personally, no. I guess it'd be okay to be the King of Alternative Pop--I'd have to give it some thought.