Greil Marcus

There is a terrific article over at Popmatters about the impact of Greil Marcus.

I can't plug this article enough because Marcus is the most important music critic America has ever seen. Period. He towers over all of the big names in the field: Sasha Frere Jones (who is trash, by the way), Lester Bangs, Matthew Perpetua, Simon Reynolds, Henry Owings, Ann Powers, Rob Sheffield, Toure, Tricia Rose, David Fricke, Joan Morgan, Chuck Klosterman, Hua Hsu, Alan Light. Marcus is more important (not better) than all of them. There are other critics who are better at describing why a song sounds good/bad (Mark Richardson and Matthew Perpetua are particularly good at this). But what makes Marcus such an incredible critic is his ability to survey music on the grandest scales imaginable. Lipstick Traces, his mammoth treatise on the meaning of punk rock, becomes this alternative history of a scene that didn't even realize that it was following in the footsteps of intellectual heavyweights like Guy Debord and Asger Jorn. And in his unstoppably brilliant The Shape of Things to Come he manages to bring in a compelling history and analysis of the Riot Grrl scene in the Northwest to aid in his deconstruction of Laura Palmer's face in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. And his analysis of the chaotic closing minutes of The Modern Lovers' "Road Runner" is among the best pieces of criticism I have ever read: "Every phrase is reduced to single words, each word shuffled out of its phrase, verse and chorus broken into a shamanistic incantation, the chorus, left whole, fighting to keep up with the versifier's incomprehensible rhythm and somehow succeeding, even though by now the words are barely words at all." But he concludes what we all have known forever: life is more fulfilling/bearable/livable/meaningful/democratic with rock n roll out there.

You can buy a 20th Anniversary reissue of Lipstick Traces here.