About the Author

Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, Mystery Train, and other books.

Reviews

A coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out.
*New York Times Book Review*

That Marcus can kick off and end his exhaustive, but always clear-headed, cross-epochal trek with the Sex Pistols—and make it all cohere—is but one indication of how fully he meshes the academy and the gutter.
*Village Voice Literary Supplement*

Lipstick Traces has the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status.
*New York Times*

In 1989, Harvard University Press published Lipstick Traces, the second book by the American writer and critic Greil Marcus. It was a dazzling creation, mapping out an untold 'secret history' which connected the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, the Parisian événements of 1968, that legendary subversive clique the Situationist International and an Anabaptist revolt in 16th-century Germany, led by a notorious libertine named John of Leyden. Among the book's most ardent fans, it sparked real epiphanies… It stands as a singularly idiosyncratic product of a genre-cum-tradition rooted in the business of writing about musicians and the whirl of ideas that once surrounded them… [Marcus] manages some of the finest music writing ever to make it on to the page… My 20-year-old copy of Lipstick Traces is the one book I would save from my proverbial burning house.
*The Guardian*

For anybody who wants to go deeper into the ontology of an idea that animates a kind of music, or is illuminated by that music, read Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, just reissued in an expanded edition for the book's twentieth anniversary. I often say that Traces is the best book ever written about music, even though it's not actually about music: it is about the life of an idea.
*New Yorker online*

I first read Lipstick Traces as a penniless traveler, hiding in the bathroom of a late-night express train from Cologne to Berlin. My paranoia was considerably eased as I delved into the lives of various misfits and aesthetic revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century. As dawn broke and the train pulled into the station, I disembarked, feeling not shell-shocked from the conductor's repeated passes to my stall, but decidedly refreshed.
*East Bay Express*

The 'secret' of Marcus's history is its poetry…widely separated persons and events call out to each other and 'connect' precisely because so many of ordinary history's causal and syntactic arrangements have been positively negated.
*London Review of Books*

Greil Marcus has developed an ability to discern an art movement, or an entire country, lurking inside a song.
*New Yorker*

Probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson.
*London Review of Books*

Marcus ( Mystery Train ) believes that rock songs of groups like the Sex Pistols filter into mass consciousness and subtly influence everyday speech and thought. His underlying premise is that pop culture, like radical protest, is capable of altering history. He traces a common thread presumed to link the rebelliousness of punk rockers, medieval religious heretics, the Dada antics of Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball, the films of the anarchist group Situationist International and the anti-bourgeois ravings and graffiti of the lettrist movement in post-war Paris. Marcus contrasts what he sees as the spurious pop revolt of Michael Jackson with Elvis Presley and the Beatles, ``who raised the possibility of living in a new way.'' This deliberately meandering tour of countercultural high and low roads is illustrated with rock posters and handbills, news clippings, photographs, protest art. In this version of history, Little Richard's glossolalia has direct ties to the pre-Christian Essenes. Rock critic Marcus is consistently entertaining even if he doesn't prove his thesis. (Apr.)

A coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out. -- Terry Eagleton * New York Times Book Review *
That Marcus can kick off and end his exhaustive, but always clear-headed, cross-epochal trek with the Sex Pistols-and make it all cohere-is but one indication of how fully he meshes the academy and the gutter. -- Katherine Dieckmann * Village Voice Literary Supplement *
Lipstick Traces has the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status. -- Ben Brantley * New York Times *
In 1989, Harvard University Press published Lipstick Traces, the second book by the American writer and critic Greil Marcus. It was a dazzling creation, mapping out an untold 'secret history' which connected the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, the Parisian evenements of 1968, that legendary subversive clique the Situationist International and an Anabaptist revolt in 16th-century Germany, led by a notorious libertine named John of Leyden. Among the book's most ardent fans, it sparked real epiphanies... It stands as a singularly idiosyncratic product of a genre-cum-tradition rooted in the business of writing about musicians and the whirl of ideas that once surrounded them... [Marcus] manages some of the finest music writing ever to make it on to the page... My 20-year-old copy of Lipstick Traces is the one book I would save from my proverbial burning house. -- John Harris * The Guardian *
For anybody who wants to go deeper into the ontology of an idea that animates a kind of music, or is illuminated by that music, read Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, just reissued in an expanded edition for the book's twentieth anniversary. I often say that Traces is the best book ever written about music, even though it's not actually about music: it is about the life of an idea. -- Sasha Frere-Jones * New Yorker online *
I first read Lipstick Traces as a penniless traveler, hiding in the bathroom of a late-night express train from Cologne to Berlin. My paranoia was considerably eased as I delved into the lives of various misfits and aesthetic revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century. As dawn broke and the train pulled into the station, I disembarked, feeling not shell-shocked from the conductor's repeated passes to my stall, but decidedly refreshed. -- J. Scott Burgeson * East Bay Express *
The 'secret' of Marcus's history is its poetry...widely separated persons and events call out to each other and 'connect' precisely because so many of ordinary history's causal and syntactic arrangements have been positively negated. -- Jerome McGann * London Review of Books *
Greil Marcus has developed an ability to discern an art movement, or an entire country, lurking inside a song. * New Yorker *
Probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson. -- D. D. Guttenplan * London Review of Books *