Greil Marcus Knihy

Žijící legenda americké hudební a kulturní publicistiky Greil Marcus vypráví příběh Boba Dylana prostřednictvím jeho šesti autorských písní a jedné převzaté lidovky. Představuje umělcovu šedesátiletou tvorbu a její kořeny v americké lidové hudbě a historii a zkoumá i Dylanův obrovský vliv na světovou uměleckou scénu. A činí to natolik zevrubně a fundovaně, že nic podobného v běžné biografii nenajdeme.

Utajené skutečnosti, které se staly ve dvacátém století, o nichž se v rámci běžných „dějin“ nehovoří. Vývoj uměleckých směrů od počátku století, přes světové války až do nedávné minulosti. Pohled na život dekadentních umělců. Dadaismus. Životní hodnoty a jejich posun po formujícím vlivu prožitých hrůz války. Kniha je doplněna množstvím fotografií.

Snare drum backbeat plus electric guitar: the simple formula that launched the rock star, and contemporary teen culture along with it. Today, rock 'n' roll seems to define postwar American culture, especially in its impact abroad. Though its inception is often imagined as sudden and seismic, it was, of course, a gradual and complex transition from boogie-woogie to the stardom of Elvis Presley and Bill Haley. A thorough survey of rock 'n' roll's bloodline would even reach back as far as 1939, a time when the electric guitar's role was mostly played by piano or saxophone. "Rock 'n' Roll 39-59" does this, with the assistance of some of the genre's finest photographers. Bruce Davidson, Wayne Miller, Robert W. Kelley, Esther Bubley, Eve Arnold and Ernest C. Withers are all here, amid a wealth of visual props, including priceless period posters, records, rare souvenirs, photographs and film stills, and indices of the movement's key venues, events, artists, producers and people. This book describes a lively mess of genres, from boogie-woogie to blues, gospel, big band jazz, country and, most of all, rhythm and blues--interbreeding against a backdrop of colossal social change, and culminating in the rock 'n' roll explosion of the mid-1950s.

Elvis Presley remains alive--in the cultural imagination of our place and time. His vitality has intensified in direct proportion to the obsession with his memory. Dead Elvis chronicles this obsession; it is a biography of Elvis's life since his death. Elvis has become a sort of ever-present ghost behind any given cultural event, adding an element of mystery, drama, squalor, grandeur--an anarchy of possibilities--to manifestations as diverse as the Statue of Liberty centennial and the third ignored single by an unknown punk band. Greil Marcus follows the trail of this new, posthumous Elvis as an imaginative force, a kind of necessity--"the necessity existing in every culture that leads it to produce a perfect, all-inclusive metaphor for itself." Dead Elvis makes plain how the meanings of that metaphor have multiplied since Elvis died; how themes of freedom, responsibility, authority, sex, repression, youth, age, tradition, novelty, guilt, and redemption have been expressed through a phenomenon of such magnitude it can only be seen in fragments. "This is a book about what Elvis Presley has been up to in the last fourteen years," Marcus writes; "a small history of something much too big for one body or one face. Elvis Presley made history; this is a book about how, when he died, many people found themselves caught up in the adventure of remaking his history, which is to say their own."

In her books and in a string of wide-ranging and inventive essays, Luc Sante has shown herself to be not only one of our pre-eminent stylists, but also a critic of uncommon power and range. She is “one of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience,” says the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl. Kill All Your Darlings is the first collection of Sante’s articles—many of which first appeared in the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice—and offers ample justification for such high praise. Sante is best known for her groundbreaking work in urban history (Low Life), and for a particularly penetrating form of autobiography (The Factory of Facts). These subjects are also reflected in several essays here, but it is the author’s intense and scrupulous writing about music, painting, photography, and poetry that takes center stage. Alongside meditations on cigarettes, factory work, and hipness, and her critical tour de force, “The Invention of the Blues,” Sante offers her incomparable take on icons from Arthur Rimbaud to Bob Dylan, René Magritte to Tintin, Buddy Bolden to Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg to Robert Mapplethorpe.

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, this book brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric--cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape--From publisher description

This book offers a heartfelt exploration of the complexities involved in writing about art, blending personal anecdotes with critical insights. The author, a celebrated critic, shares their journey through the artistic landscape, examining the challenges and joys of articulating the experience of art. With a focus on the interplay between creativity and criticism, it invites readers to consider the deeper connections between the two, making it a compelling read for anyone interested in the art world.

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 & Roll in Ten Songs, Real Life Rock reveals 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.

A cult classic in a new edition.This book is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called 'Anarchy in the UK' was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. The song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris intellectuals.In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus's classic book on punk, Dadaism, the situationists, medieval heretics and the Knights of the Round Table (amongst others), the greatest cultural critic of our times unravels the secret history of the twentieth century.