Any cultural critic worth their cough syrup addiction eventually poses the all-important question, “What is the meaning of America?” However, Greil Marcus, the West-coast dean of rock criticism, stands alone in actually answering it.
Marcus has a long-standing tradition of teasing the meaning from American music as canonical as Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes” (in his 1975 book Mystery Train) and as vapid as The Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” (1989’s Lipstick Traces) throughout his writing career. Like any seminal critic, he is entirely undiscriminating, clever and a fan above all, as he delivers a viable framework for investigating why a given artist is culturally significant, and what bizarre intricacies of society produced them.
Personally, I never really understood the supposed connections between Robert Johnson and The White Stripes before I read Mystery Train. Marcus teaches us that the relationships between the products of U.S. culture can be as tightly knit yet also as frayed as the relationships within a family.
Better than any before it, Marcus’s new book The Shape of Things to Come showcases the vital contributions of the writer’s curious mind. In the book, partially culled from his seminar at Princeton university, Marcus is a veritable magician of pop culture, uncovering ideology in all sorts of unexpected places-such as Bill Pullman’s enigmatic performance in the sorely underrated Lost Highway and the kickass musicianship of Corinne Tucker’s Heavens To Betsy (too valuable to be labeled a “girl group”)-like multiplying rabbits inside a black velvet hat.
Book review
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy
and the American Voice
By Greil Marcus
Faber, Strauss and Giroux
Rating: VVVv / VVVVV
While his critical tastes are admittedly a little obtuse, and the contextual background lengthy, Marcus makes us want to love America. Blessedly, he also manages to shed light on why America doesn’t always love us back.
Glimpses of meaning, we soon find out, can only be viewed in fleeting flashes. We find it briefly in the way Audrey Horne sock-hops to Angelo Badalamenti’s music in the middle of a greasy spoon diner in the cult series Twin Peaks, or the growling of an Olympia-based “riot grrl,” sweat-slicked and heated onstage. Marcus teaches us that popular culture can’t exist only in the confines of entertainment-it has to reach reality to ring true. This idea is all-pervasive in The Shape of Things To Come. It revels equally in Philip Roth’s narrative sleaze and the mysterious recesses of Pullman’s face. Oh, and that pesky answer to that all-important question? Jot this down, students: “authentic” America is both everywhere and nowhere. But then leave your notebooks at home and see for yourself. If Marcus is to be trusted, then by participating in pop culture, we participate in life.
