Greil Marcus (b.1945) was an American music journalist and cultural critic. He is renowned for his scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in the much broader context of culture and politics than does conventional pop music reporting.
Born in San Francisco, Marcus graduated from Berkeley, got a job writing reviews for Rolling Stone, and became its editor. In the decades since, he has written various books of rock music criticism and general criticism. His A New Literary History of America (2009,) a 1,100-page collection of essays which he co-edited with Werner Sollors, covers Colonial days to President Barack Obama’s election.
Marcus’s other works include Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005,) The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (2011,) Conversations with Greil Marcus (2012,) and The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs (2014.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Greil Marcus
Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.
—Greil Marcus
Topics: Applause, Praise, Audiences
We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn’t just ours—it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can’t beat it.
—Greil Marcus
Topics: Music
No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.
—Greil Marcus
Topics: Failure
Rock ‘n Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.
—Greil Marcus
Topics: Music
It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.
—Greil Marcus
Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.
—Greil Marcus
Topics: Applause, Praise, Audiences
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.
—Greil Marcus
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