GREIL MARCUS
Greil Marcus (born June 19, 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. (More from Wikipedia)
By 1971, the term “punk rock” had already been applied retrospectively by Greg Shaw as well as Greil Marcus to American bands such as Question Mark and the Mysterians, the Standells, the Seeds, the Shadows of Knight, and the Kingsmen who managed to score some hit songs during the height of the British Invasion.
(April 2010)
* * *
Writing for Time magazine in July 2001 for their salute to the best in America in the new millennium, rock critic Greil Marcus named Sleater-Kinney the nation’s best rock band.
(January 2014)
* * *
Some of the criticism of Dylan’s Christian albums is quite harsh. Wikipedia mentions: “Critic Greil Marcus wrote, ‘[Bob] Dylan’s received truths never threaten the unbeliever, they only chill the soul’ and accused Dylan of ‘sell[ing] a prepackaged doctrine he’s received from someone else’.”
(August 2014)
* * *
Greil Marcus wrote the glowing and lyrical liner notes for The American in Me; they start off: “In 1977, ‘The American in Me’ was the torn flag flown by the Avengers. Singer and writer Penelope Houston, guitarist Greg Ingraham, bassist James Wilsey, and drummer Danny Furious made up the best punk band in San Francisco, at moments the best in the country – and what they were claiming in ‘The American in Me’ was the country itself: the country that the Avengers’ songs said didn’t want them, didn’t recognize them, didn’t hear them, wouldn’t listen. They left themselves no room for irony.
“‘We Are the One’, they announced; ‘What is “the One”?’ the song makes you ask. ‘I am the one who brings you the future,’ [Penelope] Houston chants to end it. ‘I am the one who buries the past’. Everything about the thing sounds ridiculous, especially the glee you can hear in the band’s voices, the Oh-my-God-we-are-actually-pulling-this-off thrill of saying what you want to say right out loud, where everyone can hear you, free speech like the Batman signal in the sky, or a rock through the window that separates the true from the false. Everything sounds ridiculous – except what the song actually sounds like, and the frightening conviction backing up every word. No matter how sarcastic Houston was on stage, taunting the crowd between numbers, the songs said the Avengers meant exactly what they said or they meant nothing. ‘The American in Me’ could not be a joke.”
(March 2017)
