“Visions and Versions of America”: Greil Marcus’s Rock Journalism as Cultural Criticism

Abstract

This article seeks to elucidate to what degree Greil Marcus’s rock journalism can be considered an American cultural criticism. Is it legitimate to advance the idea that his rock journalism is more than rock writing? And what role does America play in this context? When both early American rock journalism and the field of American studies try to answer the question “What is America?” it becomes obvious that the latter would profit from analyzing rock writing. This promising dialogue, however, exists only in rudimentary form. By discussing Marcus’s texts (especially Mystery Train and his writings on punk rock), this article offers one possibility of establishing this dialogue.

Notes

1. In this context, see Marcus’s “Introduction” to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.

2. Regarding Marcus’s curriculum vitae, see Joe Bonomo’s “Introduction” and the “Chronology” in Conversations with Greil Marcus (ix–xx).

3. In this context, see Marcus and Sollors.

4. Confronting the widespread resistance to theory, it is of course Fredric Jameson who has tirelessly sought to reactivate theory, the notion of ideology critique, as well as the conceptual tools of reification and totality (two of the bêtes noires of many humanities scholars). For his latest attempts, see Jameson’s The Modernist Papers and, above all, Valences of the Dialectic.

5. For the latest discussion of pop as the “symbol factory,” see Diederichsen.

6. In one of their numerous programmatic statements, the situationists underscore that their kind of opposition: “requires the real abolition of all class societies, of commodity production and of wage labor; the supersession of art and all cultural accomplishments by their reentry into play through free creation in everyday life—and thus their true fulfillment; and the direct fusion of revolutionary theory and practice in an experimental activity that precludes any petrification into ‘ideologies,’ which reflect the authority of specialists and which always serve the specialization of authority” (Situationist International 430).

7. For a good collection of the texts of the Situationist International, see Knabb.

8. In this context, see Attali.

9. However, see Marcus’s fascinating discussion of the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” in Double Trouble, 30–33.

10. As far as the notion of authenticity is concerned, see Marcus’s discussion of Nirvana in his piece “A Look Back” in Double Trouble (211–16). There are numerous passages in his books where he problematizes the idea that rock music can be regarded as part of an authentic counter culture. At least until Dylan burst on the scene, authenticity had played a big role for folk music. In the first chapter of The Old, Weird America, Marcus, even speaking of “a version of socialist realism” (27), describes the traditional attitude toward folk music thus: “A complete dissolution of art into life is present in such a point of view; the poor are art because they sing their lives without mediation and without reflection, without the false consciousness of capitalism and the false desires of advertising. As they live in an organic community—buttressed, almost to this present day, from the corrupt outside world—any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular. Thus, it is not the singer who sings the song but the song that sings the singer, and therefore in performance it is the singer, not the song, that is the aesthetic artifact, the work of art. In a perfect world, in the future, everyone will live this way” (27). On the next page, Marcus comments on this view as follows: “When art is confused with life, it is not merely art that is lost. When art equals life there is no art, but when life equals art there are no people” (28). Hence, the question of whether Marcus as a cultural critic still has use for the idea of authenticity demands a more detailed analysis. In the context of the attempt to clarify the significance of the idea of authenticity for contemporary rock music, the argument developed in Simon Reynolds’s much-discussed Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (2011) must also play a role (see Frese in this volume). One should also consider one of the strangest and most provocative books on popular culture written in the last few years, Paul Morley’s Words and Music, which creatively undermines the notion of authenticity, or maybe it does not, and culminates in the truly unforgettable sentence: “The words are in the shape of a city and Kylie Minogue is the same shape as the city” (355). Whether Morley needs professional help or plays in the same league as Richard Huelsenbeck is for the reader to decide.