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Greil Marcus (2006)

Greil Marcus (born 1945) is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.

Marcus was born in San Francisco. He earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also did graduate work in political science. He has been a rock critic and columnist for Rolling Stone (where he was the first reviews editor, at $30 a week) and other publications, including Creem, the Village Voice and Artforum.

His 1975 book Mystery Train re-defined the parameters of rock music criticism. The book places rock 'n'roll within the context of American cultural archetypes from Moby Dick to Jay Gatsby to Stagger Lee. Marcus's "recognition of the unities in the American imagination that already exist" inspired countless rock scribes.

His next book, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989, developed from an earlier essay), stretched his trademark riffing across a millennium of Western civilization. Positing punk rock as a transhistorical cultural phenomenon, Marcus examined hidden connections between entities as diverse as the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, and medieval heretics.

In 1991, Marcus published Dead Elvis, a 1991 collection of writings about Elvis Presley, and in 1993 published Ranters and Crowd Pleasers, an examination of post-punk political pop. In 1997, using old Dylan bootlegs as a starting point, Marcus dissected the American subconscious with Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes.

From 1983 to 1989, Marcus was on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle. He writes the column "Elephant Dancing" for Interview. His latest book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice, was recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Rock & Roll Will Stand (1969), edited anthology
• Double Feature: Movies & Politics (1972), co-authored with Michael Goodwin
• Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (1975, fourth revision 1997)
• Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (1979, editor and contributor)
• Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), a book on 20th century avant-garde art movements like Dadaism, Lettrist International and Situationist International and their influence on late 20th century countercultures and The Sex Pistols and Punk Movement.
• Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991), about the phenomenon of Elvis Presley in the years since his death
• In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992 (1993, published in the US as Ranters and Crowd Pleasers)
• The Dustbin of History (1995)
• Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1998; also released as The Old, Weird America: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, 2001), a treatise on America as seen through Dylan's famous Basement Tapes recordings
• Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2001)
• The Manchurian Candidate (2002)
• The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (2004, co-edited with Sean Wilentz)
• Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005), a "biography" of the Dylan song
• The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice (2006)

• "Obsessive Memories", essay by Marcus on memory and on his father, Greil Gerstley, who died in World War II.