Review by Choice Review
In The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, longtime rock critic Greil Marcus seeks nothing less than an upending of conventional histories. Rather than looking at traditional chronologies, evolution, and influences, Marcus focuses on blips on the radar: songs that constitute "a field of expression ... a web of affinities." Asserting that traditional rock history is a "constructed story that has been disseminated so comprehensively that people believe it," the author dismantles cultural memory and the commercial history of popular music touted by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He takes idiosyncratic, individual songs--e.g., Flamin' Groovies's "Shake Some Action" (1976), Joy Division's "Transmission" (1979)--and posits them as just that: singular and remote, with little relationship to a historical paradigm. He interrogates these songs, these moments, for their metaphysical potential, with all of the suggestiveness of Cormac McCarthy. Marcus also weaves together disparate insights from the musical and the literary (William Faulkner and cultural critic Leslie Fiedler, the latter a frequent keynote for Marcus). This book offers the freshest of angles across what has become too-familiar terrain: Marcus is unorthodox and wildly associative while remaining readable, insightful, and eloquent. The relationship of this razor-sharp book to conventional history is like that of Sonic Youth feedback to an Eric Clapton solo. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Erik Hage, SUNY Cobleskill
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
EVERY GREAT, ENDURING rock song is like a cell in our cultural memory. A molecule of our shared experience containing not just an incredible performance but also a shared desire for something - love, money, sex, peace, rebellion, power, freedom - some intensely held desire. But is a great, enduring rock song powered most by the song or the performance? Are we swooning because the song is so perfectly written that we can't help singing along? Or is it the rendition that etches it into our minds? Or is it both - and more - since every song is a Proustian madeleine that evokes all our memories of the song and of the people we celebrated it with? Greil Marcus gets to the heart of these questions in "The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs," which explores songs that have been interpreted multiple times by artists in different generations. He takes us through Phil Spector's "To Know Him Is to Love Him," a No. 1 hit for the Teddy Bears in 1958 even though it "stood simpering, dripping treacle, almost crossing the line from sentimental homily to prayer, a dirge at its most lifelike. It was music far behind rock 'n' roll, music for weddings without dancing, too square for proms." But in 2006, Amy Winehouse picked it up and something magical happened. "With the slightly acrid scratch that sometimes crept into her harder songs dissolved in a creamy vortex, the feeling was scary, and delicious; in those three seconds, then moving on through the first lines with hesitations between words and syllables so rich with the specter of someone facing the Spector tombstone and reading the words off of it out loud, to know him was to love him, each word as she sang it demanding the right to be the last word, or merely wishing for it, the song expanded as if, all those years it had been waiting for this particular singer to be bom, and was only now letting out its breath." In this way, Marcus looks at various versions of "Money (That's What I Want)," "This Magic Moment" and "In the Still of the Night" to see what each iteration says about the song, the singer and society at large. Marcus, of course, is one of the epic figures in rock writing. He's influenced legions of young writers with his distinctive poetic approach. (As a young writer, I curled up with "Mystery Train" and "Lipstick Traces," trying to learn how to write the sort of rhymic poetry he excels at.) Like so many of Marcus's previous books, "The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs" often feels like a tone poem or perhaps a written embodiment of the cultural memory. He flows through the songs and musicians he loves as if creating a waking dream crowded with the stars of rock history. He runs through Phil Spector and the Beatles and Etta James and Robert Johnson and Buddy Holly and more, but this is not a complete rock history, and it's not a "10 most important songs in rock" history treatise. Marcus dissects each song to see what each artist has brought to it - sometimes slaughtering sacred cows in the process, as in a chapter on "All I Could Do Was Cry" that compares Etta James and Beyoncé, an unfair battle if ever there was one. But that's not the most eyebrow-raising comparison therein. Marcus quotes the political historian Rick Perlstein on Mitt Romney (stay with me) saying: "Romney's fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not a bug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of hearts - but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on 'American Idol' is supposed to sound." That curlicuing, Marcus says, is related to a critical part of the soul music tradition, and in his mind, Beyoncé ain't doin' it right. "The tradition in which Beyoncé works is not merely bad music, but a form of blasphemy - though, unlike the outrage among devout African-Americans when Ray Charles or Sam Cooke or even Aretha Franklin used the gospel sound to sing about not God's love but that of men and women on earth, no one is offended. The opposite is true: As with Rick Perlstein's Romney, the falsity itself, felt and embraced, delivers its own kind of gratification, its own thrill." Beyoncé's brand of soul music, Marcus says, is a lie the same way Romney's conservatism was. When I told a black friend what Marcus had written he said, "Oooh, the Beygency gonna get him." (The Beygency is a "Saturday Night Live" creation, a sort of secret police that catches and jails people who dare say anything even slightly negative about her music or simply decline to dance to her music at a wedding when tired.) Marcus should be concerned, but his larger point about the soullessness of modern rock is real. He writes of musicians who possessed a rare power and charisma; who created a milieu that allowed miscreants to thrive, in which people who refused to grow up could be feted and even celebrated. But these figures inhabited rock decades ago. They seem to have left the building. In Marcus's portraits of songs performed in varying eras, we see how rock has changed. As the critic Nik Cohn has said, once upon a time in rock, "you could be black, purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased, or almost anything on earth, and you could still clean up." In the stories of Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash on the way to a gig, and Amy Winehouse, who died of alcohol poisoning, as well as those of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Tupac and others, you see rock's imperative to live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Of course we don't want rock stars to die tragically young, but when the music was great and enduring it was, in part, because the people making it lived with abandon. Sometimes, tragically, some of those people died. Today a vast majority of performers seem heavily focus-grouped and fully aware of their corporate potential. Jay Z was lauded for saying, "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man," noting that he is both the corporation and the commodity. His entrepreneurial zeal is part of his appeal: There is no longer any concept of selling out. Cashing in is respected. No one wants artists taken advantage of, but what happens when the cashing-in imperative means shying away from music that challenges expectations, that shocks, that creates a confrontation between performer and listener? How, then, can you live up to the spirit of rock that Marcus has been writing about for decades? He quotes the novelist Jonathan Lethem, who called pop "a perverse revenge against the banality of daily life dreamed up collectively by 10 or 15 Delta bluesmen and a million or a hundred million screaming 12-year-old girls." But if music becomes as banal as daily life, then what do we have to save us from daily life? And we need to be saved from banality. We need people who want to save us. And they can come from anyplace. My favorite quote in "The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs" is from the producer T Bone Burnett. "Listen, the story of the United States is this: One kid, without anything, walks out of his house, down the road, with nothing but a guitar and conquers the world." I love that image, but I would quibble with it a bit. The kid in that story didn't really have nothing. He had a spirit. The expression of that spirit is often called character or personality, and for him the performance of personality as filtered through a song has won him a permanent place in the collective memory because that personality has shown itself to be more magnetic than even the catchiest riff. TOURÉ is a co-host of "The Cycle" on MSNBC and the author of "I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 30, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
For veteran rock journalist Marcus (Mystery Train, 1975), the appeal of rock 'n' roll is its unique ability to constantly reinvent itself; how a pop song, which originates as novelty, a disposable art form, can take on a life of its own and generate meaning and significance well beyond its originators' intent. Marcus here examines 10 songs from the Flamin' Groovies' Shake Some Action to Joy Division's Transmission to Barrett Strong's Money (That's What I Want) to Phil Spector and the Teddy Bears' (and, later, Amy Winehouse's) To Know Him Is to Love Him and shows how they came to be, their influences and their impact, using each as a launching pad for his typically idiosyncratic exploration into culture, history, and myth. Rock 'n' roll may be more than anything a continuum of associations, a drama of direct and spectral connections between songs and performers, he writes. Self-consciously pretentious, Marcus allows himself to get carried away in the manner only he can. In an aside, Marcus imagines a scenario where the bluesman Robert Johnson lives to be 101, appearing on NPR's Fresh Air in the 2000s. Marcus' column Real Life Rock Top Ten can be found in the pages of The Believer.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. In his typically provocative and far-reaching style, music critic Marcus (Mystery Train) ingeniously retells the tale of rock and roll as the undulating movement of one song through the decades, speaking anew in different settings; it's a "continuum of associations, a drama of direct and spectral connections between songs and performers."¿ Selecting 10 songs recorded between 1956 and 2008, he ranges gracefully over various performances of the same song, probing deeply into the nuances of each singer's style as well as the ways that the recorded version of the song reflects its time. Thus, for example, Marcus follows the career of Barrett Strong's 1963 Motown hit, "Money (That's What I Want),"¿ and Strong's harsh and violent rendition to The Beatles' 1964 version in which John Lennon is "appalled, hateful, and ravenous all at once, and so powerfully the music seems to fall away from him, letting him claim every molecule in the air."¿ Marcus cannily shifts to a song that deals squarely with the power of money, Tom Gray's "Money Changes Everything,"¿ and traces the ways the power of the song shifts and transforms in Cyndi Lauper's 1983 version (she turns it from a "man's lament into a woman's manifesto"¿); her 2005 version (the "only language it speaks is mourning, pain, desperation, and defeat"¿); and Gray's 2007 version, which dried up quickly. Marcus brilliantly illustrates what many rock music fans suspected all along but what many rock critics have failed to say: rock 'n' roll is a universal language that transcends time and space and reveals all mysteries and truths. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
While Marcus (The Doors; Lipstick Traces) holds near-unrivalled credentials as a rock and cultural critic, this title overreaches, beginning with the definitive article "the" in the title. The author argues that instead of understanding rock's history as a chronological narrative, we should view it as a series of associations, in which songs take on their own meanings across different periods and performers. This is an unconvincing thesis, but it does allow Marcus to delve into the background of each piece he analyzes, which plays to his strengths as a writer. Chapters on "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" (by Buddy Holly) and "Guitar Drag" (by Christian Marclay) are particularly notable in tracing how the songs have existed within different musical and social contexts. Marcus is erudite but remains accessible, and his selected compositions are available mostly online as accompaniment. Consider this book a qualified success, then, despite the failure of its overall intention. VERDICT Students of rock history and popular music fans in general will come across rewarding material here.-Chris Martin, North Dakota State Univ. Libs., Fargo (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Another allusive, entertaining inquiry by veteran musicologist Marcus (The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, 2011, etc.).The opening is an accidental tour de force: a list that runs on for a full six pages of the inductees to date into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one that, though full of lacunae, is still wildly suggestive of just how influential and deep-rooted the sound is in our culture. He takes Neil Youngs observation that rock roll is reckless abandon and runs with it, looking into 10 songs that are particularly emblematic. Even though any other 10, 100 or 1,000 songs might have done just as well, one cannot fault Marcus taste. It is just right, on the reckless abandon front, that his survey should begin with the Flamin Groovies jittery, diamondlike anthem Shake Some Action, released to the world in 1976 and heard, if not widely, by at least the right people. I never heard Youngs words translated with more urgency, with more joy, Marcus avers, than in the goofily named Groovies (a name so stupid it cant transcend its own irony) song. Yet there are other candidates for best paean to reckless abandon, or perhaps best inspirer thereof, including the prolegomenon to all other songs about filthy lucre and lolly, Barrett Strongs Money; the lovely but portentous Buddy Holly ballad Crying, Waiting, Hoping; and the Teddy Bears 1958 hit To Know Him Is to Love Him, which, though tender, became something hauntingly lost in the hands of Amy Winehouse. Its no accident that the originals of many of these tunes lay at the heart of the early Beatles repertoire, nor that Phil Spector played his part in the uproarious proceedings, nor that from every measure of music, thousands of tangled storylines flowmany of which Marcus follows wherever they will lead, to our edification.Essayistic, occasionally disconnected, but Marcus does what he does best: makes us feel smarter about what were putting into our ears. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
