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Greil Marcus




Greil Marcus (born 1945) is an American Author , music Journalist and cultural Critic . He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.

Marcus was born in San Francisco . He earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies from the University Of California, Berkeley , where he also did graduate work in Political Science . He has been a rock critic and columnist for '' Rolling Stone '' (where he was the first reviews editor, at $30 a week) and other publications, including '' CREEM '', the '' Village Voice '' and '' Artforum ''.

His 1975 book ''Mystery Train'' re-defined the parameters of rock music criticism. The book places rock 'n'roll within the context of American cultural archetypes from '' Moby Dick '' to Jay Gatsby to Stagger Lee . Marcus's "recognition of the unities in the American imagination that already exist" inspired countless rock scribes.

His next book, '''' (1989, developed from an earlier essay), stretched his trademark riffing across a century of Western civilization. Positing Punk Rock as a transhistorical cultural phenomenon, Marcus examined philosophical connections between entities as diverse as the Sex Pistols , the Dadaists , and medieval heretics.

In 1991, Marcus published ''Dead Elvis'', a collection of writings about Elvis Presley , and in 1993 published ''Ranters and Crowd Pleasers'', an examination of post-punk political pop. In 1997, using old Dylan bootlegs as a starting point, Marcus dissected the American subconscious with ''Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes''.

From 1983 to 1989, Marcus was on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle . He writes the column "Elephant Dancing" for ''Interview''. His latest book, ''The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice'', was recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • ''Rock & Roll Will Stand'' (1969), edited anthology

  • ''Double Feature: Movies & Politics'' (1972), co-authored with Michael Goodwin

  • ''Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music'' (1975, fourth revision 1997)

  • ''Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island'' (1979, editor and contributor)

  • '''' (1989), a book on 20th Century Avant-garde art movements like Dadaism , Lettrist International and Situationist International and their influence on late 20th century Counterculture s and The Sex Pistols and Punk Movement.

  • ''Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession'' (1991), about the phenomenon of Elvis Presley in the years since his death

  • '''' (1993, published in the US as ''Ranters and Crowd Pleasers'')

  • ''The Dustbin of History'' (1995)

  • '' recordings

  • ''Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives'' (2001)

  • ''The Manchurian Candidate'' (2002)

  • ''The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad'' (2004, co-edited with Sean Wilentz)

  • ''Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads'' (2005), a "biography" of the Dylan song

  • ''The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice'' (2006)



EXTERNAL LINKS

  • " Obsessive Memories ", essay by Marcus on memory and on his father, Greil Gerstley, who died in World War II.