I was reminded of this great book by Greil Marcus’s brilliant essay in Yale Review (link directly below), describing the events that brought him to the vocation of cultural criticism, and explaining why he thinks it’s still worth doing.
https://yalereview.org/article/greil-marcus-why-i-write?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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Once upon a time, on March 26, 1991, at around 9:00 PM—I remember this well because I quit smoking the next day, after 28 years of feeding the habit—I was engaged in an intense discussion of Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train (1973), a book I had taught many times and used many more as raw material for lectures on popular music, and, more importantly, for thinking about American culture. Or, more specifically and to the point, a book I had used as a model for writing as a critic of that culture, which requires loving it enough to care more about feeling its wonders than revealing its terrors—or, if I may try yet again to say what I mean, a book that had taught me why I couldn’t love its wonders without acknowledging its terrors.
The scene was a reading group of faculty members and graduate students from the Rutgers History department, convened with no higher purpose than explaining to ourselves what we were doing there as students of American culture, which boiled down to understanding and arguing about what we meant by “America.” I had picked the reading at the request of the participants, and so was more or less responsible for steering the discussion. It was not going well, I guessed because Elvis—the subject of the book’s last chapter, with the subtitle “Presliad”—had not yet risen from the dead to preside over a kingdom larger than kitsch. Or maybe because Robert Johnson wasn’t yet a household name.
I struggled to impress upon my colleagues that long before it was fashionable, Marcus had deployed the methods that had become commonplace under the rubric of cultural studies, showing how something as degraded, commodified, and reified as pop music could be appreciated as—not necessarily “elevated” to—significant artwork by applying the techniques of close reading that had created a British and an American literary canon. I even read some passages out loud, hoping to engage the audience.
To no avail. At the lowest point of the conversation, a fellow faculty member said, quite belligerently—we were all pretty loaded by then—”So why are we reading this book, anyway?” Everybody looked down at their copies of the book as if old Greil would answer. Finally I blurted, “How about the sheer ambition at work here?” I stumbled on from there, saying something like, “After you read Mystery Train, nothing sounds the same anymore! You hear things you wouldn’t have before you noticed the difference between Junior Parker’s rendition of ‘Mystery Train’—I mean, he wrote the damn song!—and Elvis’s, and it’s a difference Marcus lets you notice. You hear everything differently because he’s teaching you to listen better, to listen to voices that aren’t even musical!” The exclamation points kept piling up as I went on, and on.
Marcus had moved me—and I mean this literally, he changed the way my sensorium allowed me to apprehend the world—exactly as an effective critic is supposed to. He has always understood that as his writerly purpose, and, without any pretense of accomplishing it as well as he has, I’ve understood it as mine, too. Here’s the job description as he posted it in the conclusion of the new Yale Review essay:
“What is the impulse behind art? ‘I have to be moved in some way,’ the guitarist Michael Bloomfield said in 1968, explaining why he didn’t like the San Francisco bands of the time. ‘They just don’t move me enough. The Who moves me, their madness moves me. I like to be moved, be it by spectacle, be it by kineticism, be it by some throbbing on ‘Papa ooh mau mau’ as a chorus, a million times over.’ And that, he said, was why he played.
“Bloomfield was saying, in his way, what I am trying to say: whatever language is the language of your work, if I can move anyone else as that work moved me—as ‘Gimme Shelter,’ Al Pacino’s voice in The Godfather, that painting by Titian, moved me from one place to another, from this place on earth to one three steps away, where the world looks not the same—if I can move anyone even a fraction as much as that, if I can spark the same sense of mystery, and awe, and surprise, as that, then I’m not wasting my time.”
https://yalereview.org/article/greil-marcus-why-i-write This should work, Jim. Let's talk soon.