Synopsis
"How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?" Robert Palmer wondered in Deep Blues. Greil Marcus answers here: more than we will ever know. It is the history in the riff, in the movie or novel or photograph, in the actor's pose or critic's posturing—in short, the history in cultural happenstance—that Marcus reveals here, exposing along the way the distortions and denials that keep us oblivious if not immune to its lessons.
Whether writing about the Beat Generation or Umberto Eco, Picasso's Guernica or the massacre in Tiananmen Square, The Manchurian Candidate or John Wayne's acting, Eric Ambler's antifascist thrillers or Camille Paglia, Marcus uncovers the histories embedded in our cultural moments and acts, and shows how, through our reading of the truths our culture tells and those it twists and conceals, we situate ourselves in that history and in the world. Rarely has a history lesson been so exhilarating. With the startling insights and electric style that have made him our foremost writer on American music, Marcus brings back to life the cultural events that have defined us and our time, the social milieu in which they took place, and the individuals engaged in them. As he does so, we see that these cultural instances—as lofty as The Book of J, as humble as a TV movie about Jan and Dean, as fleeting as a few words spoken at the height of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, as enduring as a Paleolithic painting—often have more to tell us than the master-narratives so often passed off as faultless representations of the past.
Again and again Marcus skewers the widespread assumption that history exists only in the past, that it is behind us, relegated to the dustbin. Here we see instead that history is very much with us, being made and unmade every day, and unless we recognize it our future will be as cramped and impoverished as our present sense of the past.
Publishers Weekly
This is a collection of disparate essays, most of them previously published in "small" journals, by the esteemed author of the oft-reprinted and expanded Mystery Train (LJ 4/1/75). Here Marcus ponders the blues, John Wayne, genocide, French intellectual anomie, Cro-Magnons, and a few dozen other phenomena he declines to connect editorially. The closer he stays to rock, the better he does: the best, freshest pieces are on Jan and Dean and R&B songwriter Deborah Chussler (also the subject of a large section of his book Lipstick Traces, LJ 4/15/89). His Robert Johnson meditation will bore the initiated and scare off the blues-challenged, and the moral derivative for his complaints about some recent writers on Nazism seems to be outrage for its own sake. Marcus is so bright and covers so much ground that the book does offer intermittent pleasures, but he expresses nothing of particular import. Not recommended.-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.