REAL LIFE ROCK

The Washington Post hails Greil Marcus as “our greatest cultural critic.” Writing in the London Review of Books, D. D. Guttenplan calls him “probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson.” For nearly thirty years, he has written a remarkable column that has migrated from the Village Voice to Artforum, Salon, City Pages, Interview, and The Believer and currently appears in the Barnes & Noble Review. It has been a laboratory where Marcus has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements, teasing out from the welter of everyday objects what amounts to a de facto theory of cultural transmission.

Published to complement the paperback edition of The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, Real Life Rock eveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, astute, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.

Greil Marcus has written many books, including Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock & Roll Music and Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, and is the editor, with Werner Sollors, of A New Literary History of America. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.