Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

"Today, so many years later, the shock of punk is that every good punk record can still sound like the greatest thing you've ever heard… the power in these bits of plastic, the tension between the desire that fuels them and the fatalism waiting to block each beat, the laughter and surprise in the voices, the confidence of the music, all these things are shocking now because, in its two or three minutes, each is absolute. You can't place one record above the other, not while you're listening; each one is the end of the world, the creation of the world, complete in itself."

He's like a five time Oscar winner looking for a project.

I would love to have him pitch me so that I could muster my sub-100 IQ and tell him I didn't have the space.

Salon.com deserves to leave us. My only hope is that they didn't still GM on the way out. Like some other writers I know, who got the privilege of waiting a long time for checks.

Why? I think they've done some great things. Eric Boehlert's Clear Channel series sticks out in my mind.

http://www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/index.html

No one reads Salon. Well, at least not many of us. It's too expensive, for one. It began as a great idea and then caterwauled into a predictably shrill shill for "progressives." Frankly, as soon as it become monochromatic it got boring. The problem is that no one will tell David Talbot that to his face, apparently. I mean, if his solution was to employ the predictable rantings of dudes like Andrew Sullivan--it's not really exclusive to publish a guy who already heavily blogs--I have to think that Talbot was not the man to be leading Salon to the promised land.

2-3 years ago I might have missed Salon. But what I've noticed was that I don't miss it much at all--ever since they introduced the high subscription price, people have been leaving in droves.

Ah. There's our difference. I just paid. Go ahead, call me a sucker.

Salon is seriously about to go under. They allegedly are having trouble paying rent and are in dire need of a wealthy suitor.

Hats off to you anyway. Nighty night.

I will report back (maybe on ILE/F).

Will I learn anything?

marcus isn't particularly rockist for a guy who likes rock, actually.

amt- yes, we get it, you don't like music writers.

my friend saw him a few weeks ago and said in an email that he was "arrogant"

i was just telling adam what to expect

Big news for me, maybe not for you: Scott Woods launched a new website yesterday that will collect a lot of Marcus’s writing going back to the beginning.

http://greilmarcus.net/

He’s got about 25 posts up so far. Scott has Marcus’s cooperation, so there should be no end to the amount of stuff that turns up there. There’s so much that I haven’t read in ages, or haven’t read at all: the "Real Life"s from the Voice, the Artforum columns, book reviews from Rolling Stone, stray pieces from wherever. There was a Marcus site a few years ago (forget the name—“Attic” was in there somewhere), but there wasn’t a great deal to it beyond a few links, and it eventually disappeared. I’m hoping--and knowing Scott, I think it will--this one becomes as necessary a reference tool as Christgau’s site.

*is, not it. I typed three annoyed paragraphs and then thought better of it. The only allegation of problematic behaviour between either Wilson or Marcus in this one-way-dialogue is Marcus's non-subtle intimations that Wilson is anti-Semitic in his dislike of Mailer

Alfred OTM.

i did not care for that passage of the kanye piece for the reasons j.d. stated but i also though marcus' response zoomed way past anything that was advocated in the essay into a zone of his own annoyed speculation, where he could not possibly be otm to anyone. what do i win

The Complete Greil Marcus library!

reading mystery train several times in a row during my college years is enough for me thanks

His Doors book is quite good - he is less personally invested than in most of his writing, and the attitude is lighter than usual, more like "let's study this unusual phenomenon".

i can't speak for marcus but i found it odd that wilson proposed a thought experiment in which he was a book critic in the mid-1970s asked to write about norman mailer and automatically assumed that he, wilson, would have had the Correct Stance, which includes awareness that mailer "wrote massively screwed-up things about race and feminism." maybe he would have; on the other hand, it's entirely likely that any white guy alive and writing for a major magazine in the mid-1970s would have had his own blindspots on those subjects.

Absolutely. It would be historical arrogance, but given what others here have posted, it's probably just sloppiness since it's doubtful Wilson would truly presume this would be his perspective in another time.

And Wilson does that.

I don't think he does that very well, and he doesn't in the passage that was presented in the original question.

we keep circling back to this (and I'm done after this post), but the act of writing this expansively about that album -- more than most of us get at other gigs -- undercuts any claims about his wanting to 'cancel' Kanye or not taking his duty as critic seriously.

in an earlier time there were many fewer publications where one could assume the readership was entirely of the left, and where ridiculous tics -- like the cataloging of an artist's moral failings as throat-clearing exercise to drive home the writer's own bona fides -- could develop.

we keep circling back to this (and I'm done after this post), but the act of writing this expansively about that album -- more than most of us get at other gigs -- undercuts any claims about his wanting to 'cancel' Kanye or not taking his duty as critic seriously

I think we keep circling back to this because as already explained, Marcus was responding only to that one excerpt sent to him, which doesn't include anything written about West or his new album - it's distorting his response to say he's suggesting Wilson is calling for West's cancellation. As for Wilson taking his duty as a critic seriously, I don't think there was ever any question about that - it was how well he was performing those duties.

considering how much televised energy norman mailer put into getting himself called sexist and tiresome by contemporaries i'm unsure he's the right poster boy for the phenomenon of ideological rearprojection marcus describes

haha yeah my opinion should also have a footnote that says "i wasn't born until a few months before the film adaptation of tough guys don't dance came out"

gore vidal implied he was an intellectual charlie manson iirc?

(i am one of mailer's three remaining superfans, but)

When did Wilson say he wanted Mailer canceled?

Again, I don't much care about whether the word "cancel" is used or not. But seeing as we're splitting hairs, I reread Marcus's final line.

Asking if it’s cool to cancel a man who is not around to speak for himself--as he surely would--is something else.

Marcus doesn't actually say that Wilson says Mailer should be cancelled; he says Wilson asks if he ought to be. Surely that's accurate.

And maybe I find that even more irritating than if he'd flat-out said Mailer is a horrible person and I can't read him anymore. I read Marcus's response and I feel something, genuine anger maybe. All I get out of Wilson is all this carefully calibrated hedging--quite the opposite of anguish. "The constant calculations," as a friend put it.

carl and the (lack of) passion(s)

So Cancelled

Cher says that to one of her classmates in Clueless, no?

Already can’t remember whose blog was called some play on Classes Are Canceled.

(wilson's pious reference to the opinion of joan didion, as if she was someone we all somehow agreed on, was so unbearable it almost made me wish i didn't like her writing.)

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

Great from J.D. !

Ha, yes.

and how so much of popular art today is interpreted and even marketed like it was autobiographical

Total tangent here, but surely it's always been marketed that way? The teen idol is just the kind of nice young man that his song lyrics make him out to be, the Hollywood actress is as glamorous as her film roles, etc. Because marketing departments have always known ppl crave authenticity.

The change is that critical interpretation used to call bullshit on that more regularly imo.

I think the access we have to artists and their lives through instagram, tik tok, twitter, gossip sites, etc etc etc makes people even more wedded to the autobiographical concept then they were before (but yes it always existed)

Otm

I thought Michelle Goldberg's recent NYTimes column was astute on the "cancel culture" backlash from certain quarters:

"Many people I know over 40 - maybe 35 - resent new social mores that demand outsized sensitivity to causing harm. It has been jarring to go from an intellectual culture that prizes transgression to one that polices it. The shame of turning into the sort of old person repelled by the sensibilities of the young is a cause of real psychic pain."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/opinion/generation-cancel-culture.html

I think there's a bit of that at play here. Pre-internet, the national media was like a massive stone fortress with imposing metal gates controlled by stuffy bien pensant moderates. In those days it was fun for peasants on the outside to laugh at the overcautious reactions of the gatekeepers to anything controversial or edgy. Then the fortress was razed to the ground by bloodthirsty barbarians and the peasants had to run for their lives. Laughing at the gatekeepers isn't so funny any more. The traumatized peasants have become more vigilant at policing the boundaries of polite discourse than the old corporate busybodies ever were.

Anyone down on Marcus will like the second question here:

https://greilmarcus.net/current_2021/

Agree with this, though: "And appeals to experience ('witnessing atrocities firsthand') are worthless. It’s not where an artist has been, it’s what he or she can bring back."

Lord, he was born a ramblin' man.

Marcus's new Substack has been up and running for a couple of weeks now. (Ex-ILX'or Scott Woods edits the site--he wouldn't let me put up a Facebook post, but he'll never see this.) I took out a yearly subscription, even though you probably have a few months to read it for free.

The best thing is--a requirement of being on Substack, I think--there's new content. greilmarcus.net was great, but, except for "Ask Greil," it was close to 100% archival. Just in the first two weeks, he's had a piece on Peter Jackson's Beatles film, and today a review of Dylan's new book. ("The Beatles and Dylan" some of you are exclaiming in unison. "The excitement is palpable.") And in one of the intros he wrote for the new site, he identifies the two greatest sentences he thinks he ever wrote. I think they're from Mystery Train.

https://greilmarcus.substack.com/

Thanks for the news, esp. about Scott. Will read the review after finishing the book, which I mentioned on Is Bob Dylan overrated? I'm still enjoying most of it, although the "Witcheh Woman" comments are as dumb as the song and don't mention its use in the Seinfeld ep.

Long interview up on Letter in the Ether:

https://greilmarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-world-in-a-song

From his substack: Ask Greil

I wasn’t exactly sure in what way Swift’s Midnights was the musical equivalent of Dylan’s “autopen” scam. Could you please expand on that? —ANDREW MACDONALD

It sounds to me as if it were made by a machine, and I don’t mean Taylor Swift herself is a machine.

I think he meant the recent Billboard chart where Swift had the entire Top 10 on Billboard. Stuff like that always makes me wonder if it actually means anything.

Hey, I said (in the Midnights thread): this kind of sounds like if you asked an AI to make a Taylor Swift pop album. Move over, Marcus!!

Greil Marcus's daughter, Emily, passed away yesterday (1/31) more than two years after her diagnosis of appendiceal cancer. Per request, Greil has posted her obituary, and Robert Christgau posted a tribute to her. Her playlist for her funeral has also been posted.

If you want a free month of Marcus's Substack, let me know via ILX mail--I've got two to give away. It gives you access to a few things that are behind the paywall.

Also, his Real Life column this month leads off with a 100% vintage-Marcus entry on Biden's SOTU. If you're a fan, you'll probably love it, if you're not, you'll almost definitely cringe.

Oh boy.

https://greilmarcus.substack.com/p/ask-greil-may-10-2024

Yep, 2 things can both be bad but he won't recognize that.

This article by Bret Stephens from's today's New Y

tapped out here

When I saw the thread revived I knew exactly what it was going to be about.

The cranky old rock critic turns 80 today. To commemorate this, I'm going to get it the car, turn on the radio, and then keep driving until I hear something so astounding I have to pull over to the side of the road.

(Also, according to a FB friend, would have been Robert Palmer's 80th today--the Robert Palmer who fits naturally onto this thread.)

I was surprised to find there wasn't a thread specifically devoted to Mystery Train, arguably one of the most famous books of rock criticism.
I just finished reading the 50th anniversary edition, published last enough last year that it discussed the death of Sly Stone, among other current events. I can't imagine there'll be another update, even as the notes and discographies at the back of the book have swelled to overtake the original text (which I sense is not entirely from 1975, though there weren't any obvious anachronisms). Both the notes and the thanks-yous page are full of people who have now died, each noted by their birth and death dates in parentheses. Randy Newman is the only subject of the book still around, and Marcus still follows each soundtrack album and standalone song he releases to the internet with the hope or expectation it will have something to say about the Way We Live Now.
It's also fascinating how so many of the "mysteries" that were detailed in earlier editions have now been solved - like the identity of the singer of the demo received by Sam Phillips that led him to contact Elvis in an attempt to duplicate that singer's style. There's such a cornucopia of information and conjecture in the book that corresponds so strangely to the simultaneous sense that death (of Marcus, of the USA, more?) is around the corner.
Anyway I strongly recommend this latest edition even to those who have read the earlier ones, and certainly to anyone who has any interest in the subject.
Addendum: I have to express my disappointment at whoever compiled the book index that the Trudeau who brought in the army to deal with the 1970 FLQ crisis is listed as Justin.

He posted in his last "Real Life" column about a third open-heart surgery.

(xpost) Seriously? That's hilarious.

1–3 Stanford Hospital, 500 Pasteur Drive, Palo Alto (April 21). A few days after a third open-heart surgery—the last two in 2022—I needed to feel more than I could manage on my own hooked up in a bed: to feel more alive and more in touch with morbidity. I needed to hear Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” but not his and the Wailers’ original—I wasn’t up to that. Not Joe Strummer’s; for all my affection for him, whenever I tried to play it, I could only feel him falling short of the song. So that left Johnny Cash. Three people who didn’t live much past singing the same song. I looked for it on my phone, and what came up was a Cash-Strummer mashup, and this time Joe made it through the song. They were pitted against each other, trading lines, and it wasn’t exactly a conversation. I saw two people in a small room on either side of a desk: an interrogation room, though I couldn’t tell who was the cop and who was the suspect. They went back and forth, neither giving an inch, until there was some kind of stalemate: you have your version of what happened, I have mine. You’re free to go, but come back tomorrow. And then I could listen to Bob Marley, and get lost in that crystal palace video, a slave ship escaping history into a whole cosmology...

Wow. And Cash's solo version is excellent first choice in this situation, haven't heard the mash-up, if there is one outside his vision (no complaint; that was my "qualifier" re Mystery Train). Re interrogation room, does he know that P Joe's pre-Clash band the 101ers was supposedly named for the interrogation room in 1984? (Wait, I may have read that in Lipstick Traces.

Strike that lone "P." Sorry.

His band was literally named after the address of their squat they were living in at the time.