Real Life Rock

The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986-2014

Marcus Greil

From the author of "The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs" comes his "Basement Tapes": the complete "Real Life Rock Top 10" columns For nearly thirty years, Greil Marcus has written a remarkable column called "Real Life Rock Top Ten." It has been a laboratory where he has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements. Taken together, his musings, reflections, and sallies amount to a subtle and implicit theory of how cultural objects fall through time and circumstance and often deliver unintended consequences, both in the present and in the future. Real Life Rock reveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.

About the Author

Greil Marcus has written many books, including "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music", "Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century", and "The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs". He teaches at Berkeley and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

Reviews

"Probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson" – D. D. Guttenplan, London Review of Books

"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

"A great essay begins with a theme and then makes it fly. Greil Marcus can make it soar... Marcus unlocks rock 'n' roll history to find more than you ever thought might be there" – Jenny DIski

"For Marcus, every great song is a Rosetta Stone, an esoteric code. This approach gives him great imaginative, literary breadth" – Carl Wilson, Slate

"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

"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" – Mikal Gilmore

"No writer puts you inside the experience of music the way Greil Marcus does... 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

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