Lipstick Traces : A Secret History of the Twentieth Century - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571212883 ISBN 13: 9780571212880

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Synopsis

This title is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called "Anarchy in the UK" was issued in London, an event which launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. The song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris intellectuals. In Greil Marcus's classic book on punk, Dadaism, the situationists, medieval heretics and the Knights of the Round Table (amongst others), the greatest cultural critic of our times unravels the secret history of the 20th century.

About this title

About the Author

Greil Marcus was born in San Francisco in 1945. He is the author of Mystery Train, Invisible Republic, Lipstick Traces and Double Trouble, and the editor of Lester Bangs's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. In 1998 he curated the exhibition '1948' at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Marcus writes a bi-weekly column for salon.com and a monthly column for Interview. He was described by John Rockwell in the New York Times as 'a writer of rare perception and a genuinely innovative thinker'. Greil Marcus lives in Berkeley, California.

From Publishers Weekly

Marcus ( Mystery Train ) believes that rock songs of groups like the Sex Pistols filter into mass consciousness and subtly influence everyday speech and thought. His underlying premise is that pop culture, like radical protest, is capable of altering history. He traces a common thread presumed to link the rebelliousness of punk rockers, medieval religious heretics, the Dada antics of Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball, the films of the anarchist group Situationist International and the anti-bourgeois ravings and graffiti of the lettrist movement in post-war Paris. Marcus contrasts what he sees as the spurious pop revolt of Michael Jackson with Elvis Presley and the Beatles, "who raised the possibility of living in a new way." This deliberately meandering tour of countercultural high and low roads is illustrated with rock posters and handbills, news clippings, photographs, protest art. In this version of history, Little Richard's glossolalia has direct ties to the pre-Christian Essenes. Rock critic Marcus is consistently entertaining even if he doesn't prove his thesis.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571212883
• ISBN 13: 9780571212880
• Binding: Paperback