Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

THE HISTORY OF ROCK & ROLL IN TEN SONGS

Greil Marcus

Unlike all previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points that everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008, then proceeds to dramatize how each embodies rock 'n' roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts outa new language, something new under the sun.

Transmission by Joy Division. All I Could Do Was Cry by Etta James and then Beyoncé. To Know Him Is to Love Him, first by the Teddy Bears and almost half a century later by Amy Winehouse. In Marcus's hands these and other songs tell the story of the music, which is, at bottom, the story of the desire for freedom in all its unruly and liberating glory. Slipping the constraints of chronology, Marcus braids together past and present, holding up to the light the ways that these striking songs fall through time and circumstance, gaining momentum and meaning, astonishing us by upending our presumptions and prejudices. This book, by a founder of contemporary rock criticismand its most gifted and incisive practitioneris destined to become an enduring classic.

DIE GESCHICHTE DES ROCK-N-ROLLS IN ZEHN SONGS
Deutsch von Fritz Schneider
[PB Reclam 02/16]

Available products
Book Published 2014-09-01 by Yale University Press

Comments

Like Leslie Fiedler, Greil Marcus is a critic for the ages. There aren't many writers I've learned more from, nor many whose word for word and sentence for sentence writing I enjoy more. The History of Rock n' Roll in Ten Songs is among his richest work, perhaps his most heartfelt. Like Mystery Train, it's something we will be learning from, that will give us new ways to think about the sounds that have filled the worlds around us and the worlds inside us, for years to come. - Mikal Gilmore

When I was 18 and leaving home for college, my brother put one thing in my hand: a copy of Greil Marcus's Mystery Train. It changed my life. More than 20 years have passed, and he's still the Don, still connecting caves. He's as good on Beyoncé in this new book as he was on Harmonica Frank back then, but the range of associations is wider, the mind making them deeper, and the deceptively jazzy precision of his prose sharper. He's a treasure. - John Jeremiah Sullivan

Greil Marcus writes about music as if his life depended on it. Maybe it does, and as you read The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, it may feel like yours does, too. Read more...

Spanish: Contra Ediciones; Chinese (simplified): Henan University Press;

Publishers Weekly Top Ten Music Books for Fall 2014

Greil Marcus lingers inside a song, following it from the first utterance to the last note, through performances across time, to give us the context, meaning, and interpretation not only of the song but of peoples and nations as well. His is an unconventional, fearless chronicle of the famous and the less well-known, the sacred and profane, of the limitations and full-blown possibilities. - Farah Jasmine Griffin

You could go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and take in the artifacts and roll call or you can read Greil Marcus' kinetic, pulsing, brilliant history of this deeply American art form, The History of Rock n' Roll in Ten Songs. From his choice of which ten songs to explore to his invention of a kind of a listener's lexicona new way of bending sound to languageMarcus captures why rock n' roll resonates down to our bones. - Walter Mosley

I first heard Elvis in early 1956 in a school corridor in Norfolk, England. I knew something profound had happened. Where was Greil Marcus back in those Dark Ages to explain to me what was going on? He knows everything and tells an electrifying story. - Stephen Frears

A great essay begins with a theme and then makes it fly. Greil Marcus can make it soar. In The History of Rock n'Roll in Ten Songs he does just that. He says of Amy Winehouse that she could unlock a song. Marcus unlocks rock n' roll history to find more than you ever thought might be there. - Jenny Diski

Kirkus and Buzzfeed and The Financial Times have named Greil Marcus' THE HISTORY OF ROCK N' ROLL as one of the Best Books of 2014!

Another allusive, entertaining inquiry by veteran musicologist Marcus. . . . [He] does what he does best: make us feel smarter about what we're putting into our ears. (starred review)