FEATURES
On the Lost Highway with Greil Marcus
/ Brian Howe
10.04.07
Greil Marcus Q & A
Conducted in the Manuscripts Dept.
of UNC’s Wilson Library
by Brian Howe
September 14, 2007
Music journalists who’ve been in the business for as little as a decade have seen the emphasis shift from insight to summarization, from text to image, in compliance with our culture’s ever-accelerating addiction to velocity. Word counts keep shrinking as advertisements and photos grow larger. In many mainstream print formats, writers are barely afforded enough space to substantiate their star ratings, which, like blurb-sized reviews and their accompanying images, can only boil down complex things into simple things. This is the enemy of good criticism, which enlarges and enhances works of art. Because of this forced crystallization, modern pop-criticism as a whole reads more like an investigation of capricious taste than of the value, meaning, and historical continuity of art. The disconnect between what a work can mean and what we can publicly say about it grows ever wider.
As the first reviews editor for Rolling Stone in the late-60’s, and as a writer for influential publications like CREEM, the Village Voice, and Artforum, Greil Marcus is among the architects of popular criticism as we know it, yet his voice is one that seems alien in the current landscape: Marcus takes nothing for granted. In his books Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, he expanded the purview of rock criticism beyond the usual blues musicians and 60’s countercultural affinities, casting a voluminous net across the history of Western civilization to make a case for rock music as a cultural “revolution” in the most literal sense of the word: an idea or spiritual posture that revolves in and out of popular consciousness, coming and going at great orbital intervals, dressed in the finery of a particular era but always fundamentally the same. Marcus shows us the culture as it is: densely swarming, intricately connected across time, and ultimately unfathomable at the microcosmic level. Only the macrocosm can illuminate the truth of an individual work.
Marcus’s latest book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, is another teeming macrocosm that illuminates, example by example, a sweeping reading of the nature of American identity. Marcus lays out his thesis in the earliest pages: the United States is a nation founded on promises so extravagant, so self-contradicting, that their betrayal was inevitable, and that the prophetic voice in America is the one that reminds us of this contract we made with ourselves (via a Puritanical God), calling us to self-judgment and warning of the grave consequences of the contract’s violation. Marcus spends the book tracing this voice’s trajectory through the culture, locating it first in the Old Testament prophets, then in political orations by Lincoln, King, and others, and finally, in the novels of Philip Roth, the films of David Lynch, the music of Pere Ubu, and a dazzling array of outlying points. The same inevitability that girds Marcus’s thesis is manifest in the book, each carefully elucidated example bolstering the implacable force of his argument.
Marcus came to the University of North Carolina with the band the Handsome Family to give a talk on murder ballads, but FANZINE caught up with him to talk about the book and the ideas that inform it. It’s difficult to imagine a better setting for interviewing the polymathic cultural critic than Wilson Library’s Manuscripts Department, amid stacks containing the sort of piecemeal cultural record that he enacts in his work. Marcus is the same in conversation as he is on the page: eloquent, intellectually audacious, and wildly discursive, extemporaneously refining his points via a maze of serial commas. Because the sections of The Shape of Things to Come that deal with film are among its most powerful - Marcus revels in sensory details, and his film analyses are as visually pleasurable as they are insightful - we wound up talking about directors that appear in the book, like David Lynch, as well as directors who don’t, like Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier. I also had the chance to pick his brain about book tours, the concept of authenticity, and the responsibilities of the critic. That almost every question I asked managed to circle back to the book’s central idea speaks to its amplitude, as if no grain of American thought can escape its ambit.
––Brian Howe
Conducted in the Manuscripts Dept.
of UNC’s Wilson Library
by Brian Howe
September 14, 2007
Music journalists who’ve been in the business for as little as a decade have seen the emphasis shift from insight to summarization, from text to image, in compliance with our culture’s ever-accelerating addiction to velocity. Word counts keep shrinking as advertisements and photos grow larger. In many mainstream print formats, writers are barely afforded enough space to substantiate their star ratings, which, like blurb-sized reviews and their accompanying images, can only boil down complex things into simple things. This is the enemy of good criticism, which enlarges and enhances works of art. Because of this forced crystallization, modern pop-criticism as a whole reads more like an investigation of capricious taste than of the value, meaning, and historical continuity of art. The disconnect between what a work can mean and what we can publicly say about it grows ever wider.
As the first reviews editor for Rolling Stone in the late-60’s, and as a writer for influential publications like CREEM, the Village Voice, and Artforum, Greil Marcus is among the architects of popular criticism as we know it, yet his voice is one that seems alien in the current landscape: Marcus takes nothing for granted. In his books Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, he expanded the purview of rock criticism beyond the usual blues musicians and 60’s countercultural affinities, casting a voluminous net across the history of Western civilization to make a case for rock music as a cultural “revolution” in the most literal sense of the word: an idea or spiritual posture that revolves in and out of popular consciousness, coming and going at great orbital intervals, dressed in the finery of a particular era but always fundamentally the same. Marcus shows us the culture as it is: densely swarming, intricately connected across time, and ultimately unfathomable at the microcosmic level. Only the macrocosm can illuminate the truth of an individual work.
Marcus’s latest book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, is another teeming macrocosm that illuminates, example by example, a sweeping reading of the nature of American identity. Marcus lays out his thesis in the earliest pages: the United States is a nation founded on promises so extravagant, so self-contradicting, that their betrayal was inevitable, and that the prophetic voice in America is the one that reminds us of this contract we made with ourselves (via a Puritanical God), calling us to self-judgment and warning of the grave consequences of the contract’s violation. Marcus spends the book tracing this voice’s trajectory through the culture, locating it first in the Old Testament prophets, then in political orations by Lincoln, King, and others, and finally, in the novels of Philip Roth, the films of David Lynch, the music of Pere Ubu, and a dazzling array of outlying points. The same inevitability that girds Marcus’s thesis is manifest in the book, each carefully elucidated example bolstering the implacable force of his argument.
Marcus came to the University of North Carolina with the band the Handsome Family to give a talk on murder ballads, but FANZINE caught up with him to talk about the book and the ideas that inform it. It’s difficult to imagine a better setting for interviewing the polymathic cultural critic than Wilson Library’s Manuscripts Department, amid stacks containing the sort of piecemeal cultural record that he enacts in his work. Marcus is the same in conversation as he is on the page: eloquent, intellectually audacious, and wildly discursive, extemporaneously refining his points via a maze of serial commas. Because the sections of The Shape of Things to Come that deal with film are among its most powerful - Marcus revels in sensory details, and his film analyses are as visually pleasurable as they are insightful - we wound up talking about directors that appear in the book, like David Lynch, as well as directors who don’t, like Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier. I also had the chance to pick his brain about book tours, the concept of authenticity, and the responsibilities of the critic. That almost every question I asked managed to circle back to the book’s central idea speaks to its amplitude, as if no grain of American thought can escape its ambit.
––Brian Howe
