Greil Marcus > Quotes

“If you're lucky, at the right time you come across music that is not only "great," or interesting, or "incredible," or fun, but actually sustaining. Though some elusive but tangible process, a piece of music cuts through all defenses and makes sense of every fear and desire you bring to it. As it does so, it exposes all you've held back, and then makes sense of that, too. Though someone else is doing the talking, the experience is like a confession. Your emotions shoot out to crazy extremes; you feel both ennobled and unworthy, saved and damned. You hear that this is what life is all about, that this is what it is for. Yet it is this recognition itself that makes you understand that life can never be this good, this whole. With a clarity life denies for its own good reasons, you see places to which you can never get.”
― Greil Marcus, In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992

“Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.”
― Greil Marcus

“Every time Elvis sings, he makes a bargain with the devil -- just like Captain Ahab in MOBY DICK!”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“Renee's self-possession, her ability to possess other selves, is a measure of the weakness of her husband, his inability to stop his own self from splitting in half.”
― Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice

“It is only too clear that man is not at home in this universe, and yet he is not good enough to deserve a better.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“D. H. Lawrence’s “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale” is always right.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Art doesn’t explain itself.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“One thing that old blues records teach you, is that even people with very limited skills can play very personal, distinctive, and appealing music that has nothing to do with the extent of their technique. It was their artistry. It was their feeling.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“And because soul music is the limitless affirmation of the individual despite his or her past sins and all obstacles in his or her way,”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Berkeley was a lookout and a hideout.”
― Greil Marcus, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison

“Banishing the love song, people discovered what else there was to sing about.”
― Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

“critic Robert Ray once said, “What’s interesting about rock & roll is that the truly radical aspect occurs at the level of sound. ‘Tutti Frutti’ is far more radical than Lennon’s ‘Woman Is the Nigger of the World,’ and the sound of Bob Dylan’s voice changed more people’s ideas about the world than his political message did.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Blues grew out of the need to live in the brutal world that stood ready in ambush the moment one walked out of the church.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“For every new art form there's someone to come along and pronounce it dead, but rarely has an art form been born dead - as is the case with rock video, and its major outlet, MTV.”
― Greil Marcus

“Someone was going to want to say, I’m fucked.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“… rock ‘n’ roll may be more than anything a continuum of associations, a drama of direct and spectral connections between songs and performers It may be a story about the way a song will continue speaking in a radically different setting than the one that, it may have seemed, gave rise to it, a story in which someone may own the copyright but the voice of the song is under no one’s control. Rock ‘n’ roll may be most of all a language that, it declares can say anything: divine all truths, reveal all mysteries, escape all restrictions.”
― Greil Marcus

“Because I don't make the mistake that high-culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too,” the late filmmaker Dennis Potter once said, explaining why pop songs were so important in his work, from Pennies from Heaven to The Singing Detective to Lipstick on Your Collar, his paean to the 1950s, the time he shared with the Independent Group—and Potter was also defining a pop ethos, defining what I think is happening in Paolizzi's collage.
"When people say, 'Oh listen, they're playing our song,' they don't mean 'Our song, this little cheap, tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish, is what we felt when we met.' What they're saying is, 'That song reminds us of that tremendous feeling we had when we met.' Some of the songs I use are great anyway, but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David's Psalms. They're saying, 'Listen, the world isn't quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,' 'There's you and me in it,' or 'The sun is shining in it.' So-called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. Anyone who says different is a fascist.”
― Greil Marcus, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years

“Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger—which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“[Listening to a song] one could experience a freedom from one's physical body, and from one's social body - the mask you wore to go about in public among those who thought they knew you, an unchosen mask of nervousness and tradition, the mask that, when owrn too long, makes the face behind it shrivel up and rot away. For some, a spinning record opened up the possibility that one might say anything, in any voice, with any face, the singer's mask now a sign of mystery.”
― Greil Marcus

“Yet “nothing” is not quite Faulkner’s last word, only the next to the last. In the end, the negativist is no nihilist, for he affirms the void.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep-Mountain High,” his most ambitious record, with the biggest, most implacable sound and an arrangement that made it feel as if the record lasted a lifetime, not three and a half minutes (“That,” the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia said, “sounds like God hit the world and the world hit back”), failed to come anywhere near the radio; Spector closed his studio and began lecturing at colleges.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“For thirty years you couldn’t possibly make it unless you were white, sleek, nicely spoken, and phony to your toenails—suddenly now you could be black, purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased, or almost anything on earth, and you could still clean up.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“But it is the moment when something appears as if out of nowhere, when a work of art carries within itself the thrill of invention, of discovery, that is worth listening for. It’s that moment when a song or a performance is its own manifesto, issuing its own demands on life in its own, new language—which, though the charge of novelty is its essence, is immediately grasped by any number of people who will swear they never heard anything like it before—that speaks. In rock ’n’ roll, this is a moment that, in historical time, is repeated again and again, until, as culture, it defines the art itself.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Some forms of music spark the freedom of singers to say, in words or how words are sung, in pace, hesitation, timbre, shouts, or silences, what they most deeply and desperately want to say; other forms take it away.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“The official, standard history of rock 'n' roll is true, but it's not the whole truth. It's not the truth at all. It's a constructed story that has been disseminated so comprehensively that people believe it, but it's not true to their experience, and it may even deform or suppress their experience.”
― Greil Marcus, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“The only thing that rock & roll did not get from country and blues was a sense of consequences,” the writer Bill Flanagan said to Neil Young in 1986.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“It goes back to gospel, both the technique and the soul. As the singer must convince you that as he or she sings, he or she has, by a commitment God can recognize, called down a visitation,”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“It was the invention in the music that was so striking —the will to create what had never been heard before, through vocal tricks, rhythmic shifts, pieces of sound that didn’t logically follow one from the other, that didn’t make musical or even emotional sense when looked at as pieces, but as a whole spoke a new language.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Wonder made the old chicka-chicka-boom beat so potent it sounded like a syncopated version of Judgment Day.”
― Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll

“I think we all have this little theater on top of our shoulders where the past and present and our aspirations and memories are simply and inevitably mixed. What makes each of us unique is the potency of the individual mix.”
― Greil Marcus, What Nails It