Greil Marcus Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.

Greil Marcus
It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.

Greil Marcus
We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.

Greil Marcus
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.

Greil Marcus
... as I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U. K." – a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets–I AM AN ANTICHRIST–Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today–listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang–my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat.

Greil Marcus
Complete freedom meant — no one knew. It was most readily defined in the negative: not this gap between the heaven promised in the new advertisements and the everyday satisfactions I can buy. Not the sense that when I leave my work for my family, and bring my family to a Sunday in the park, my leisure feels like work. Not this mad conviction that I'm a stranger in my own home town, that at work I feel like a machine, that in the park I feel like an advertisement, that at home I feel like a tourist.

Greil Marcus
Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.

Greil Marcus
Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.

Greil Marcus
Rock 'n' roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.

Greil Marcus
Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.

Greil Marcus
No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.

Greil Marcus
The moments of perfect pleasure in Johnson's songs, and the beauty of those songs, remind one that it is not the simple presence of evil that is unbearable; what is unbearable is the impossibility of reconciling the facts of evil with the beauty of the world.

Greil Marcus
Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that.

Greil Marcus
The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.

Greil Marcus
We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Greil Marcus