Greil Marcus Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Art doesn't explain itself.

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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