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. He lives in Oakland, CA.
"This could be Marcus’ most inviting book: Emotion paces erudition,
and the present gets to ride shotgun with the past, real and
imagined."—Will Hermes, Rolling Stone
"Marcus is our greatest cultural critic, not only because of what
he says but also, as with rock-and-roll itself, how he says
it."—David Kirby, The Washington Post
"In his new book, which is surely one of his best and most
beautifully written, Marcus revisits ten songs, recorded during the
last sixty years, some of them long forgotten, in order to capture
the pulsating and powerful language of rock 'n' roll. . . . The
book, I am certain, will compel readers to return to the songs
Marcus has anointed, and to others. Even if they have heard them
before, they will listen to them as if for the first time."—Glenn
C. Altschuler, The Huffington Post
"Marcus, of course, is one of the epic figures in rock writing. . .
. Like so many of Marcus’s previous books, The History of Rock ‘n’
Roll in Ten Songs often feels like a tone poem or perhaps a written
embodiment of the cultural memory. He flows through the songs
and musicians he loves as if creating a waking dream crowded with
the stars of rock history."—Touré, The New York Times Book
Review
"Revolutionary."—Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
"For Marcus, every great song is a Rosetta Stone, an esoteric code.
This approach gives him great imaginative, literary breadth. . . .
Out of Marcus’ dozen or so books, Ten Songs is the purest
distillation of his ideas. . . . The chapters on Joy Division, on
Buddy Holly, and on the two ‘Money' songs are tours de
force."—Carl Wilson, Slate
"True musos need little introduction to Marcus, whose meditations
on the rock and pop canon have delighted many. . . . Here, he is at
his most ambitious and obtuse, defying the obvious choices to map
an alternative history of popular music."—Louis Wise, The Sunday
Times
"No writer puts you inside the experience of music the way Greil
Marcus does. His descriptions of songs, especially, unfold like
thrillers or romantic rhapsodies, sucking you in and revealing
aspects of each beat or vocal trill that you'd never have noticed
on your own. As the most esteemed music writer of his generation,
Marcus has made a career of challenging conventional wisdom on
everything from Elvis to punk to Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. . . .
It's so much fun to let him drag your brain onto the dance
floor."—Ann Powers, NPR.com
"Try telling a teenager who’s just heard ‘Black Dog’ for the first
time that rock ’n’ roll is dead. Marcus knows it’s not. He maps
recordings, re-recordings, and performances as if they’re veins
belonging to the same body, warm and breathing and very much
alive."—Lara Zarum, Bookforum.com
"Marcus rambles the back roads of rock history in this inventive
and entertaining collection of short biographies of 10 songs
spanning the entire breadth of rock-and-roll, from doo-wop to
post-punk, demonstrating how rock's impulse to combine (and
recombine) its influences made each possible and entirely
original."—Jon Foro, from Amazon’s Big Fall Books Preview, an
Editor’s Pick
"Marcus ingeniously retells the tale of rock and roll as the
undulating movement of one song through the decades, speaking anew
in different settings. . . . Marcus brilliantly illustrates what
many rock music fans suspected all along but what many rock critics
have failed to say: rock ’n’ roll is a universal language that
transcends time and space and reveals all mysteries and
truths."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"The book is really a series of essays, cunningly chiselled,
lovingly woven, bold, tough and illuminating, the intention being
‘to feel one’s way through music as a field of expression and as a
web of affinities.’"—Mark Ellen, New Statesman
"Overall, it's a stunning, virtuosic performance, as good as any
and better than most of what Greil Marcus has written since 1975's
genre-redefining Mystery Train. It's a hectic, wild and
occasionally bumpy ride, loaded with trapdoors and wormholes
leading to unexpected places where you never quite know who you'll
confront next, and where you'll immediately yearn to hear every
record to which he alludes."—Charles Shaar Murray, Literary
Review
"He is . . . a serious writer, dedicated to unlocking the hidden
truths and secret meanings in popular music, making those cultural
connections to literature, film, and art and by doing so elevating
rock and pop music to a discipline that demands to be taken
seriously."—Andy Childs, Caught by the River blog
"Marcus is a man in brainy love with the music. I don’t know of
anyone else who writes as beautifully, and deeply, about songs and
singing."—Roddy Doyle, The Irish Times
"The title of the US critic’s latest playful, erudite and
passionate work, The History of Rock n Roll in Ten Songs, should
come with lurid neon inverts around each constituent part: 'The
History' of 'Rock ‘n’ Roll' in Ten 'Songs.' It’s a
magnificently subjective history, in which significant chunks are
set outside the realm of rock, in pop or soul."—Kitty Empire, The
Observer
"His accounts of listening to these songs, of being transported in
unearthly directions by them, show him to be as bewitched by this
music as he ever was . . . The Mystery of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten
Songs might have been a truer name for his latest inspired,
wonder-struck book."—Paul Genders, TLS
"Outside of these areas, Marcus tells many a good story as he
plucks up some delightful music moments that will delight any music
fan."—Tony Jasper, The Methodist Recorder
"As emotional and intoxicatingly rich a troll’s nest of rabbit
holes as anything Greil Marcus has written since Invisible Republic
or even Lipstick Traces, this a book that deepens or refracts or
turns on their heads a lot more than the ten songs (and the one
history of the title)."—Mark Sinker, The Wire
". . .Marcus’ prose demands attention. At least he’s saying
something. And, when he nails it . . . he infuses the pages with
all the energy, verve and urgency that is the rock’n’roll he’s so
desperate to deconstruct."—Paul McGuinness, Record Collector
"Marcus’s enthusiasm is on display, as is his tendency for eloquent
hyperbole."—Chris Bourke, New Zealand Listener
Winner of the 2015 Deems Taylor Virgil Thomson Award in Music
Criticism, given by the American Society of Composers, Authors &
Publishers
"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
lexicon—a new way of bending sound to language—Marcus captures why
Rock and Roll resonates down to our bones."—Walter Mosley
"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
"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
"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
"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
"This could be Marcus’ most inviting book: Emotion paces erudition,
and the present gets to ride shotgun with the past, real and
imagined."—Will Hermes, Rolling Stone
*Rolling Stone*
"Marcus is our greatest cultural critic, not only because of what
he says but also, as with rock-and-roll itself, how he says
it."—David Kirby, The Washington Post
*The Washington Post*
"In his new book, which is surely one of his best and most
beautifully written, Marcus revisits ten songs, recorded during the
last sixty years, some of them long forgotten, in order to capture
the pulsating and powerful language of rock 'n' roll. . . . The
book, I am certain, will compel readers to return to the songs
Marcus has anointed, and to others. Even if they have heard them
before, they will listen to them as if for the first time."—Glenn
C. Altschuler, The Huffington Post
*The Huffington Post*
"Marcus, of course, is one of the epic figures in rock writing. . .
. Like so many of Marcus’s previous books, The History of Rock ‘n’
Roll in Ten Songs often feels like a tone poem or perhaps a written
embodiment of the cultural memory. He flows through the songs
and musicians he loves as if creating a waking dream crowded with
the stars of rock history."—Touré, The New York Times Book
Review
*The New York Times Book Review*
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