Greil Marcus Quotes & Sayings

If 'Mystery Train' is my Nixon book and 'Lipstick Traces' my Reagan book, 'Invisible Republic' is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he'd done in jeopardy, I supported him from beginning to end. — Greil Marcus

Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music. — Greil Marcus

What always attracted me to [Bob] Dylan, and what has sustained me as a Dylan listener, or has always continued to surprise me, is his voice, the way he sings, the way he wraps his voice around certain words, the way he backs off from melodic moments, the way he moves forward to grab something in a song that, were anybody else performing it, they would have no idea it was even there. — Greil Marcus

Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them. — Greil Marcus

Berkeley was a lookout and a hideout. — Greil Marcus

You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react. — Greil Marcus

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

I want another idea, another project, but you can't make them up. They show up. — Greil Marcus

Think about how rare it is for anyone to encounter a teacher who can open you up to the notion that there is an infinite amount of meaning and possibility and inspiration in the smallest thing before you. — Greil Marcus

What's the impulse behind art? It's saying in whatever language is the language of your work, "If I could move you as much as it moved me ... if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that's why I do what I do." — Greil Marcus

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits. — Greil Marcus

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

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours
it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it. — Greil Marcus

Banishing the love song, people discovered what else there was to sing about. — Greil Marcus

I never could understand - it was impossible for me to get my head around - what the furor was, what the sense of betrayal and anger and rage was about Bob Dylan's beginning to perform with a band, to play rock-and-roll, to get on the radio. — Greil Marcus

[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

Rock 'n' Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation. — Greil Marcus

I am a critic who is pulled toward history. But Bob Dylan himself is a great historian. He is an historian who acts out history. So it always has a personal stamp. It always has a particular timbre. It always has a particular howl, or a moan, in that voice. — Greil Marcus

Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled. — Greil Marcus

Every time Elvis sings, he makes a bargain with the devil -- just like Captain Ahab in MOBY DICK! — Greil Marcus

It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths. — Greil Marcus

Art doesn't explain itself. — Greil Marcus

Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether. — Greil Marcus

I'm a fan of Oliver Stone. I like his movies, I like his excess, and I think he has a great capacity for empathy and it comes out more powerfully in this movie than in any of his other films, even the formal 'I'm identifying with the underdog' movies like 'Born on the Fourth of July.' — Greil Marcus

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail. — Greil Marcus

Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing ... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice — Greil Marcus

D. H. Lawrence's "Never trust the teller. Trust the tale" is always right. — Greil Marcus

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

Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term 'still' seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure. — Greil Marcus

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

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

As I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U.K."-a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets-I AM AN ANTICHRIST-Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today-listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang-my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat. — Greil Marcus

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

I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world. — Greil Marcus

Someone was going to want to say, I'm fucked. — Greil Marcus

If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. There's always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him. — Greil Marcus

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him. — Greil Marcus

No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes. — Greil Marcus

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

I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow. — Greil Marcus

Curlicuing around the note allows a singer to mimic the sense of event in soul music, the sense that something is happening which has not happened before and cannot be repeated, by mimicking the apprehension of soul, those moments when singers dramatize their struggle to bring out of themselves what lies buried in them, inaccessible, until this moment, even to themselves. — Greil Marcus

Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place. — Greil Marcus

Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits. — Greil Marcus

I learned that when something just has to be said to move the discussion along, or broaden it or deepen it, if I can just keep my mouth shut for five minutes a student will say it. So for me a lot of teaching is about keeping my mouth shut. — Greil Marcus

I was the first records editor at Rolling Stone, and there were no rules. There was nothing to fall back on as to how do you write about this kind of music, so people were trying absolutely everything with a great sense of freedom and experimentation and success and failure, and a feeling of, My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let's pretend they aren't because we don't want to be intimidated by what somebody might think of what we're saying. — Greil Marcus

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted. — Greil Marcus

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness. — Greil Marcus

At a deeper level it is a fantasy of no-limits for a people who live within a labyrinth of limits every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves. — Greil Marcus

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that. — Greil Marcus

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